As an autumnophile, I particularly like the concept of Samhain

The thinning of reality between the living and dead embraces the spirit world, fables and faeries, and underlines the huge importance in our heritage of story

Sharon Guard

Sat Oct 31 2026 - 06:00 • 5 MIN READ

The dead were always alive in our house. My mother made it so. Her father as real to me as my father’s father, who lived with us until he died aged 95, weeks before my fifth birthday.

I have actual memories of him, Mattie, near the end, frail and stooped over his walking frame, cooing over my newborn sister. A memory of him being delivered to the front door by kindly people who found him almost a mile from home during a senior moment adventure. Earlier, him washing his bald head under a tap in the yard, a dinner plate heaped with mashed potato sparkly with salt, a story of how my mother left him minding toddler-me only to come home to find me and my white dress being swung about in a coal scuttle.

Mattie had a lot of mischief in him. Dark things too. I remember him hiding behind the sofa during war movies, believing the gunfire was real. He served in the trenches during the first World War.

My mother’s father, Henry, had soldiered too. He was English by birth and had lost a foot to a landmine. My memories of him are second-hand; he died several years before my parents married, before I was born.

We had a photograph of him in uniform on the sittingroom wall, little more than a boy. So many stories of his wooden foot. I could see the straps, hear the ominous thud of it on the stairs. More stories of his horses, which he used to drive in a vis-à-vis carriage on Bray strand during the summer and deliver coal in the winter, how he used a belt to control his sons, lurked in the shadows of the barn waiting for my mother to come home from dances. His death from stomach cancer, painful and witnessed up close by his family. One of his horses crying an actual tear as his coffin was removed from the house.

I have no clear recollection of when these memories were shared with me, and memories are never guaranteed to be accurate, but they became part of my fabric as if inherited in my mitochondria.

My sisters are five and six-and-a-half years younger. I was my mother’s primary companion and there was an unhealthy level of enmeshment. I saw the world through adult eyes, learned about things which could hurt before I was old enough to experience them.

Hers were experiences she had not in any way understood or processed herself, not in a way we believe is possible or necessary today. She was a twin, second (or third) youngest of 10. Her mother had lost a four-year-old daughter, Lily, to diphtheria when she was seven months pregnant, and my mother’s twin subsequently died too, when they were only three months old.

It was too much heartbreak for my grandmother. My mother was taken into care. When she was returned to the family, she had learned a song in whatever institution held her – “A tisket, a tasket, my brown and yellow basket” – her early years forever now unknowable. She sang that song often. Those children lived in our house. My mother’s twin especially, a mirror-mother, who might or might not have been identical. Similar, but not the same.

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I fantasised about having a twin myself. A partner in crime, somebody to share the load. I occupied a strange interstitial space in the family, not an adult and not a child, a quiet bookish creature who caused little trouble.

It was a happy childhood, if somewhat thwarted by knowledge beyond my years. Secrets sat lonely in my stomach with other secrets, convoluted family dynamics and whispered fears of shame, the eyes of neighbours enforcing rigid expectations for respectability. A feeling that has never quite gone away.

I picture a soft, translucent sphere streaked with colours, emotions I own, but have nowhere yet to put. It is a live thing, it shrinks and grows depending on what the day throws at me, and the aim is always to sort or contain it. Some people call it anxiety. I like my visual better. It’s pretty. Most days it is manageable, and some days it is overfull with joy and love.

Child-me wasn’t all Wednesday Adams vibes. There were girls my age in the houses either side and we played enthusiastically. Happily. At least in my memory. I suspect I always had an elevated sense of story, was bossy in games. Early authorial pretensions. Oddly, I never had much time for ritual community celebrations. Parades still bring me out in a rash. Embracing my inner curmudgeonly grump, I often contrive to be out of the house on Halloween.

In 1970s and ’80s south Dublin I remember festivities being limited to witches’ hats and plastic masks and my father’s coats, and us being dragged by an equally unwilling mother to utter the excruciating “Any apples or nuts?” to semi-compliant neighbours. Mummery wasn’t for me. Other houses had parties and apple bobbing and toffee apples tied from string you were supposed to go after blindfolded. For fun.

I feel the advent of pumpkins and fairy lights was much later, when tradition had been hijacked by the United States, and of course went another sort of nuts during the Celtic Tiger.

I believe deeply in the importance of ritual. But the storyteller in me is looking for layers. I’m so proud of the way we are reclaiming our pagan myths, authenticating, updating them.

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As an autumnophile, I particularly like the concept of Samhain. Halloween is the end of the harvest, which extends to All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, Catholic traditions I am familiar with, have multiple memories of from living with my mother and her ghosts. Endless masses for the faithful departed.

Samhain is shorter, October 31st to November 1st, and less prescriptive on the concept of soul. The thinning of reality between the living and dead is more inclusive, embraces the spirit world, fables and faeries, underlines, to my mind, the huge importance in our heritage of story.

It is a formal sign for us to stop, to commune. To acknowledge the multivarious colours of our emotions, accept and assimilate them. Call them normal. To celebrate. The two grandfathers I knew, in person and by proxy, many of those who have joined them before or since, still live in story’s shadow twin, memory. For believers and pagans alike, this matters.

The Silence of October by Sharon Guard is published by Poolbeg

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