The McBride sisters are gone, but the family heart beats on – Nuala McCann

My mother’s sister died last week. It felt like the end of an era.

She had a long life – she was 98 – and she was the last of her family. There was surely a party in heaven that night – “What took you so long?” the others might ask.

But it felt like a watershed for my sisters and my cousins. These were the women that laughed with us and loved us and held us as we grew… all gone now.

After a recent funeral, my friend said: “We’re next with out heads up over the trenches.”

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“They’re picking from our pen now,” said someone else. I don’t like that thought.

Time slips like sand through our fingers.

My little sister and her best friend know the score. “We’re not the young ones any more,” they joke. “We’re the ould aunts they place at the back table of the wedding, not the girls in the wee dresses dancing up front.”

Ma was one of four sisters – the glamorous McBride girls – and Aunt Eileen was the most glamorous.

She was tanned and dark-skinned. She was so beautiful that someone stopped her in the street and said her eyes were put in with a smoky finger. She got chocolates from an admirer who signed simply: “Your slave.”

Long before any of us went further than Fanad, she and her husband holidayed in Miami, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. I see my mother at her sewing machine stitching up sun dresses and skirts and canary yellow bikini tops with matching shorts for her sister’s adventures.

Aunt Eileen smelled exotic… of Ambre Solaire. From those adventures, she brought us back dolls in bucket hats and silk harem pants; soft leather purses; bracelets with small silver coins that jangled as we walked. The glamour.

Aunt Eileen was tanned and dark-skinned. She was so beautiful that someone stopped her in the street and said her eyes were put in with a smoky finger. She got chocolates from an admirer who signed simply: “Your slave”

She’d often come to look after us while my parents got a break.

Ma was always saving things for special occasions; Eileen never did. “Let’s see where your mother has hidden the chocolates,” she’d say and we’d have Cadbury’s Contrast after breakfast.

She’d take us shopping; ask the price of something and, when the shop assistant quoted an exorbitant sum, she’d say “Wrap up two!” and burst out laughing.

I see her sitting at our old blue formica table, wearing my mother’s pink dressing gown; a Silk Cut between her fingers, sipping tea from a china cup. It had to be a china cup, with the trademark stain of her bright red lipstick. She’d fill Ma in on all the bars from their Derry home.

There was always a moment when the conversation turned too juicy for small ears. “Go on you waithuns, off you go,” said Aunt Eileen.

Once she took the six of us to Woolworths – one in the pram, one on the pram, two holding on to the pram and two more heading up the back. Unluckily, she lost my brother.

Imagine my father’s face when she arrived at his office to break the news. But the lost lamb was found and we survived to laugh again.

All down the years, when the McBride sisters got together, there was good food on the table and plenty of hearty laughs.

I couldn’t be at the funeral, but watched as my sisters and my much-loved cousins lined up by her coffin and escorted her from the chapel that shaped the family’s lives – christenings and communions, weddings and funerals.

As she left for that last time, I saw again my mother bent over the old Singer machine. She was sewing a yellow headscarf for Eileen, chatting away, when the thread suddenly broke and the machine stalled and ground to a halt.

But it was only for a moment. For you can rethread a machine and you can take up where you left off.

I see the family face in our generation and the next – the eyes put in with a smoky finger; a certain soft tilt of the head.

The McBride sisters are gone, but I know that the family heart beats on in all of us.