The poor man thought that if he could only leave the bed he would be all right but even that much was beyond him. My son was dead for the previous year his father had been keeping to the bed and when he heard the news the terrifying scream of sorrow he uttered will remain branded in my hear forever. As far as I was concerned, no pen can describe what I suffered and endured.
Fear and awe seized the heart of everyone for this was something that had never before happened on the Island and this multiplied everyone's terror. God save us, my life was then completely shattered. I knew nothing whatsoever about his being on the hill that day I thought he was rambling around the neighbourhood with the other lads-until news of his death reached me. He fell on his back pitching from rock to rock, each rock hundreds of feet above the sea until he crashed down at the bottom of the ravine. The poor fellow was pulling a bush of heather when it gave way with him and he fell over the cliff top.
It appears that when he left me that time in the morning he met other lads on their way to the hill to gather heather and he went off with them. When next I saw him he was calm and dead, laid out on a bier before me and the gentle bright hand he had stretched out so proudly to me in the morning was broken, bruised and lifeless. He bounced out the door and that was the last time I saw him alive. "The heather is too wet and we have enough inside for today," I said. "I won't go to the hill today," he said as he stood between the two door-jambs. Tomás stood in the middle of the floor he appeared to be pondering on some subject, for he examined every inch of the house carefully. "I know that, but the hand is still soft and young," I said.īy the time we had the breakfast eaten the other members of the family were getting up. "Don't be a bit in dread that this hand won't be able to put a bite of food into your mouth!" "Afraid you'll be hungry, mother?" he asked. A light shone in his grey eyes then he stretched out his right hand. "Ye're too young to handle a currach and as the proverb has it, 'One year matures a child greatly,'" "It's a pity he won't stay with ye for another year," I said. While we were eating I told Tomás that Pádraig intended going to America. We had the tea ready and no one else in the house had as yet risen. We had no turf on the Island that year the fuel we used was heather from the hill, and that was the fuel I bought dearly! On the morning of Friday the 20th day of April, Tomás and myself were up early. When a person thinks his life is going smoothly then it changes as if he were a cat's-paw of fate that's true saying for it's exactly what happened to me, alas, in the year 1920. Tomás dies accidentally – Pádraig and Cáit go to America – My husband dies – Muiris, Eibhlín and Micheál leave me one after the other – Micheál's poetry SEE ALSO Arts: Modern Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature and the Arts since 1800 Blasket Island Writers Literature: Twentieth-Century Women Writers
He eventually returned to Ireland, the last of the Blasket Island poets. Her son, Micheál Ó Guithín, leaves her a poem as a souvenir before departing for the United States. Coming from Peig Sayers's famous autobiography, first published in 1936 in Irish, this passage deals with the deaths or emigration to America of most of her remaining loved ones.
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