This isn’t my story, it is my mother’s story.
When my mother was about four or five, as she acutely remembers, she was ushered through a living room only to stop to see a very very poorly and thin woman being sick into a wastepaper basket. Later on, she remembers seeing her mother crying in the kitchen. This was the death of her mother’s only sister. She wasn’t even thirty.
A few years later, still very young, my mother was asked by her also very young cousin; “when will the angels bring my mammy back?”