EMMA HANNIGAN
Our columnist’s poignant tribute to her friend, author Emma Hannigan
THERE has been a lot of talk about Emma on WhatsApp in the last few days. Barbara hoped that she got to see the snow. Emma Hannigan was the kind of person who’d love the snow without feeling the cold, who’d see playfulness and beauty instead of danger and hardship – a glass-half-full person, who lived much of the last 12 years of her life with that glass almost depleted.
I said I hoped she’d appreciate that the storm was named after her, but in truth, Emma wasn’t a stormy sort of person. She was a soft breeze, a breath of fresh air. We’re glad she made it to spring. A lamb, she went out like a lion.
We know she discovered a love of creative writing at St Gerard’s School in Bray, Co. Wicklow, even if she wouldn’t explore it until later in her short life.
In the meantime, there was the happy, hectic business of marriage to Cian McGrath, the son of her ballet teacher and two years behind her at St Gerard’s, although she didn’t meet the sports-mad triathlon competitor and owner of Base 2 Race sports shop until 1996, when he put his foot on her head while she was dancing and he was larking about on stage at a nightclub.
Ever the home birds, the couple moved into a house in the garden of Emma’s parents, Denise and Philip. Two years after their wedding in 1997, son Sacha was born, with daughter Kim following two years later.
Their household was enlarged by the arrival of a small menagerie of cats and dogs. They might have had more children, a life more ordinary.
You might never have heard of Emma Hannigan.
In August 2005, when genetic screening was still in its infancy, Emma discovered she was carrying the BrCa1 gene, which meant that she had an 85% chance of developing breast cancer and a 50% chance of getting ovarian cancer.
Her mother and her maternal aunt had previously had breast cancer, a genetic risk factor that had prompted her to be tested.
After much discussion with medics and with her family, Emma, fit, healthy and then just 33 years old, decided the safest option was to have a bilateral mastectomy (both breasts removed) and a bilateral oopherectomy (both ovaries removed), in order to prevent cancer developing.
She wrote of her decision: ‘I wasn’t actually sick at the time, but I felt like a ticking time bomb. Opting for surgery was not a shocking or scary decision, for me. Quite the opposite, I felt huge relief. I was glad there was something I could do to make my body safer. After breast reconstruction, I thought I had pipped cancer at the post and would happily sail off into the distance.’
It was while she was recuperating from her preventative surgery that Emma rediscovered her passion for creative writing, sketching out characters and scenarios that would eventually take the form of her first novel, Designer Genes, published in 2009 and partly based on her own medical history.
However, in the meantime, in a cruel real-life twist of fate that a reader might struggle to believe in a work of fiction, Emma got breast cancer.
What neither patient nor doctors anticipated was that cancer cells had already started to develop in Emma’s body before her surgery. In 2007, she was diagnosed with cancer in her neck, shoulder and under her arm. She was also found to be displaying symptoms of a rare auto-immune disease, dermatomyositis.
She wrote: ‘Not only was I shocked and more than a little peeved, but I really longed to have an auto-immune disease with a shorter name. It took me a week to be able to spell and pronounce dermatomyositis.’
With the help of Dr David Fennelly – ‘Saint David’, as she would later anoint him – and his team at the Blackrock Clinic, Emma beat the cancer. But a year later, it returned.
With remarkable pragmatism and positivity, she faced into surgery and another lengthy course of chemotherapy, and in December 2008, Emma was declared cancer-free for the second time.
But if she wouldn’t give up, then neither would her illness. It kept coming back, in different forms, with different names and different sites, requiring different treatments. She endured countless surgeries and cycles of drug and radiation therapy, some more successful than others, some excruciatingly painful.
A couple of years ago, when other women were falling over themselves to support breast cancer charities by posting ‘no make-up selfies’ (in which
they were clearly wearing discreet make-up), Emma, at the coal-face, posted a photo of herself smiling brightly through an arduous radiation therapy session.
I’m not sure she was trying to make a point, but she did anyway. For what it’s worth, that was the no make-up selfie that made me donate.
She once described her many battles with cancer thus: ‘To sum it all up – I lost my hair and it grew back. I was very ill at one stage, weak as a kitten and limp as a dead daisy, but I am still here and willing to fight. I’ve had dark days (and dark hair before I could colour it again) and long sleepless nights, but the sun always comes out and shines brightly in my life. I am still here, still living life and loving it! I can’t change whether or not I get cancer again, but I promise you one thing – I can damn well chose how I deal with it. So wig on, chin up and remember, nothing can banish a smile from your face unless you allow it.’
After fighting and beating the disease on an incredible nine occasions, last year, cancer returned for the 10th time. On February 16 of this year, in a moving blog post titled All Good Things Must Come To An End, Emma revealed all medical avenues had been exhausted in her fight against the disease, and that the time had come for her to ‘take a bow’.
‘Faced with very little time,’ she wrote, ‘can I tell you what screams out at me? Love. Nothing else has much meaning anymore. Just the love I feel for the people I hold dear. My two babies (OK they both tower over me, but I’m still allowed call them my babies), my husband, my parents, my family, my friends and readers.’
She often described herself as a ‘cancer vixen’, but if the energy and positivity with which she continued to fight her illness were both relentless and remarkable, then so too was the industry she poured into her writing.
In the past eight years, she has published ten best-selling novels as well as collections of short stories and two memoirs chronicling her fight against cancer: Talk To The Headscarf and All To Live For.
Of the latter, she wrote: ‘It’s a tell-all with no holds barred. But it’s no misery memoir. In fact I laughed out loud many times while writing it and lots of lovely folks have written to me saying they did the same.
‘When I was first diagnosed, I longed to pick up a book written by a “normal” person who could tell me things were going to be okay. I hope All To Live For does just that.’
I didn’t know Emma before she had cancer, so I can’t vouch for how positive and optimistic she was before life and luck dealt her such a rotten hand. Her dad, Philip, has said that as a child, she ‘always knew her own mind’ and could ‘always talk her way out of anything’ – and that certainly chimes with the focused, generous woman I worked with on both Midday and the Elaine show on TV3. While other panellists on those shows – this one included – sometimes seemed to have packed up their troubles just to deposit them on the floor of the make-up room in the Ballymount studios, Emma always arrived in a sunny humour, even when she was undergoing cancer treatment.
Where the rest of us complained about the weather, traffic, husbands, partners, kids, jobs and whatever you were having yourself, I honestly can’t ever remember Emma saying a single bad word about anyone in her life.
Most days, she even brought buns she had made herself to share with everyone. Nobody else did that.
When you received the email the day before telling you what would be discussed on the show, you always knew that if Emma’s name was on the CC line, you would be leaving that studio in better form than when you’d arrived.
And not in a ‘there but for the grace of God’ way either: Emma Hannigan had all the reason in the world to drown in self-pity and she was probably the least indulgent person I ever met.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was diagnosed with the BrCa1 gene. Like Emma, she opted for preventative surgery. Unlike Emma, her drastic and invasive procedures achieved their goals. Ahead of her surgery, my friend was confused about the options for breast reconstruction, and so I asked Emma.
Not only did she take the time to carefully talk me through the options, inviting me to examine her own reconstructed breasts, but she insisted I pass her phone number onto my friend, even though the two women had never met.
I thought, and still think, that was an incredibly generous gesture on Emma’s part. Even though she had been failed by the same procedures my friend was undergoing, she was willing to ease this stranger through the daunting process ahead of her.
Emma’s final book, Letters To My Daughters, was published just a few weeks before her death.
She had written in her blog that she wouldn’t be able to promote it, and so a number of her fellow authors, amongst them Anna McPartlin, Cathy Kelly and Marian Keyes, took up the promotional cudgel on her behalf, helping the book to reach number one on the Irish bestsellers’ list, and raising much-needed funds towards Breast Cancer Ireland – of which Emma was an ambassador and staunch supporter – in the process.
A separate fundraising campaign for BCI generated more than €100,000 in the fortnight after Emma announced she was in her final days. The author acknowledged the achievement on Twitter, writing: ‘It’s never too late to dream big, keep dreaming.’
And she also had this parting advice for her friends, her colleagues, and her many readers and admirers.
‘Gravitate towards the light and laughter,’ wrote Emma Hannigan, brave, beautiful, inspirational author, mother, wife, daughter, friend, colleague, cancer vixen, ‘like a moth to a flame, remembering not to get your pretty wings burnt. You’ll like it better there, I promise.’
‘Gravitate towards the light and laughter’