My family are O'Briens from north Clare, and I grew up half-embarrassed by my father's absolute, matter-of-fact position that the bean sídhe follows our name. He spoke about it the way you'd mention a distant relative: not often, without drama, with a kind of respect.
In November my grandmother was in hospital in Galway, forty kilometers away, stable after a fall. We weren't on deathwatch; the doctors were talking about discharge plans. I was staying at the home place outside Ennistymon with my father and my aunt.
At ten past midnight all three of us heard it. I want to be precise, because 'wailing' undersells the strangeness. It moved. It started somewhere off toward the road and passed over the roof of the house — a long, rising and falling cry, closer to singing than to grief, and closer to grief than to anything else, and it circled. Twice. My aunt's dog pressed itself flat to the kitchen floor and would not lift its head.
My father, who is not a dramatic man, stood up, turned off the television, and said, 'That'll be for Mam.' Then he put on the kettle. I will remember him putting on the kettle for the rest of my life.
The hospital rang at 1:20 a.m. My grandmother had gone in her sleep, peacefully, 'a little after midnight' — they could not be more exact than that, and I have never wanted them to be.
I've since learned our townland has three other families who tell versions of the same night-cry story going back generations. I'm not filing this as a mystery. In our house it isn't one. I'm filing it because the archive keeps records, and this is one: she was heard, and she was right, and she went over the roof like something keeping an old appointment.