Sha-Shee Sha-Shee

My Aunt Noreen wasn't born into our family - she married into it, which meant she chose this madness, marrying into a family of 11 brothers. While many of my actual blood relatives were a chaotic jumble of missed birthdays. Noreen operated with the precision of an atomic clock. She never missed a single life milestone for any of us. And every Saturday night for forty years, she came in the back door of Avondale - predictable as the Angelus bells on RTE.

''I'll just pop up for a minute,'' she'd say to Vincy, and then stay for three hours. These weren't visits so much as installations, comfortable stretches of time where the world settled into place like a perfect jigsaw. Her and Marion would gossip, and if anything particularly juicy was unfolding, I'd position myself in the hallway, ears practically growing stems as we strained to catch the melodic coo of ''sha-shee sha-shee.'' But beneath the village news and harmless chatter, they shared things I'm certain few others ever heard-the raw, devestating moments that made hearts crack. I knew the tones of those sha-shee sha-shees like my own private morse code; the slight drop in pitch when tears were close; the quickened rhythm when worry took hold. Through the good and the bad Noreen sat at the end of our kitchen table with her cup of tea like a lighthouse of reliability, steady and unwavering.

The first time Noreen saved me from academic humiliatio nwas in 1994, when Mrs Conway assigned our class to knit a bunny. My mother's attempt at teaching me resulted in what looked like a ball of wool that had survived a blender, ''Jesus, Mary and holy Saint Joseph,'' she'd said in an accusative tone, holding up my tangled mess. ''What do you need a bloody bunny for anyway?!''.

But Noreen, appearing for her Saturday visit, took one look at my lump of wool and said, ''don't worry gem, we can sort this out.'' She didn't just knit the bunny for me - she taught me how to take credit for it convincingly. ''Now,'' she'd said, needle clicking away at the speed of sound while I watch in awe, ''when she asks you about the pattern, you say it's peril''.

The following week, Mrs Conway used my rabbits ears as an example for the rest of the class. ''Look at the even tension,'' she'd praised, while I sat ever the narcissist delighted with my moment of glory, too young then to give a toss about tension of a different sort - the kind that exists between truth and kindness, between what we can do and what we need help with.

This pattern continued through my teenage years. Ever Home Economics project became a covert operation, with Noreen as my silent partner. She was the ghost writer of my teenage domesticity, the unseen hand behind my B+ in Junior Cert Home Ec. My mother relieved and becoming increasingly aware I had better marry Rich was grateful for the help - ''Thank God for Noreen,'' she'd say.

The thing about Noreen was that she never made you feel inadequate for needing help. She approached every disaster - be it a dropped stich or a dropped relationship - with the same calm kindness. ''It will be ok gem'' and somehow, it mostly was. She was there for every milestone: the Communions, the Confirmations, the Debs, the unrequited loves, the breakup that seemed like the end of the world. My mam used to say ''Noreen has a heart of gold''. And she was right. Noreen's real talent wasn't in the knitting done to such standard she could have sold it in avoca. It was in showing up, again and again, with the kind of reliability that makes a child feel secure in an insecure world. She was the human equivalent of muscle memory - the person you knew would be there before you even had to think about it.

I never learned to knit or sew and I frauded my B in Junior Cert economics. But the rhythmic ''sha-shee sha-shee'' of whispered secrets still echoes in my memory. I may have forgotten how to cast on, but I've never forgotten how to show up.

The greatest gift Noreen taught me and all my siblings, was the art of being there for those we love, the comfort of sha-shee sha-shee in life's unraveled moments.