We face a time of pain, but it will leave us better people
This is a public crisis which will create many private tragedies. But we will come through it, writes
IWROTE here last June of why we should be grateful to Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The article was written through the story of my family. At the time my mother, with dementia, had just been admitted to a nursing home. She died on December 14 last. She was a Fianna Fail voter all her life.
My father was unable to be at her deathbed. He is a Fine Gael man. After one day at the bedside, he was admitted to Tullamore General Hospital across the road with chest pains and a shortness of breath. Since then he has had a medical procedure, and two weeks ago was discharged from another hospital with a new heart valve and pacemaker.
After some discussion, my father was allowed by doctors to attend the funeral of his wife of 56 years, but was not allowed to be at her burial afterwards, which took place under yew trees with black crows overhead and the rain belting down, alongside the GAA field in Daingean, Co Offaly. At 1am the night before she was buried, he lay on a hospital trolley, awaiting a bed; his dead wife’s yellowing body across the road in Riada House, her sister, Mary, on respite care for a week in the same home, by her side reciting the Rosary. I remember meeting and telling my old school teacher this story as we entered the church. “Jesus,” he said.
My sons and I, my brothers, her brother Christy, and the undertaker lowered my mother into her grave. To be honest with you, I have not been right since. Or I have been a different man, in a way that I do not fully understand and can not describe. On Friday I rang my father. He is in the ‘‘at risk’’ category for the coronavirus. He said to me — great man that he is — ‘‘us Corcorans are made of sterner stuff.” He is 85, and was about to head out shopping.
His father, my grandfather, was 70 when he died, not 57 as I had said in the article last June; nor were his father’s family wiped out by tuberculosis, as I also said in that article. My brother Dermot was home from the UK for the funeral. He is something of a polymath, an amateur historian among his many interests. He told me that the paternal side of the family — bar my grandfather Matthew and his father Martin — died from the Spanish flu, the last pandemic to hit Ireland in or around 1918, which claimed the lives of between 20,000 and 25,000 people. In a way, we are potentially back there again now.
Since then, I have become obsessed with the Spanish flu. I will not write about it at length here — there is another article on it today — only to say that the flu then, like the virus now is feeding into political developments.
The volunteer and active Gaelic League member, Richard Coleman, from Swords in Dublin died of Spanish flu on December 9, 1918. A general election was to be held on December 14. Newspaper coverage of the circumstances of his death and Sinn Fein’s orchestration of his funeral procession through the streets of Dublin bought the party valuable publicity. Frank Gallagher, assistant in Sinn Fein’s propaganda department, maintained that it turned the tide of public opinion by influencing undecided voters to vote Sinn Fein. That was the original and true Sinn Fein, not the Sinn Fein of today.
The point is, I suppose, that the coronavirus outbreak will deliver us a Fianna Fail and Fine Gael government more quickly than anticipated. In a century to come, should somebody come to read this article, they should know the grit in the truth, behind the scenes: that there were many in Fianna Fail and Fine Gael who staunchly opposed the formation of this government, but that the leaderships fought hard for it at a time of crisis; that the political party that currently calls itself Sinn Fein secretly wanted such a government, preferring instead to go to the Opposition, where it intended to be merciless, and build towards something else in five years; that the Greens were so aware and its newer TDs, in particular, fretted that Sinn Fein in opposition would devour them in government; ditto the Social Democrats; Independent TDs did the deal rather than another election; and the new government risked being one of the most unpopular in the history of the State from the start, such was the economic and social turmoil on the horizon, thanks to the virus, the fight against which had already consumed whatever spare money there was going to correct the social ills which delivered us the election result in the first place.
But the real political dynamic between now and the next election — the day after they are elected, every politician thinks about the next election — will be between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael in government. Only one will thrive. Fine Gael has the stronger or more distinctive brand, but Fianna Fail is still Fianna Fail. Leo Varadkar, Simon Coveney and, yes, Simon Harris are handling the coronavirus outbreak well. In short, the weaker hearts in Fianna Fail fear an existential crisis to come.
But all of that is for another day and year. Right now, we are here to deal with the virus, Covid-19. It will lay waste to much, including the economy, and claim the lives of many, particularly the elderly. We may be unable to attend their deathbeds and funerals.
So let me tell you what it is like, briefly in the moments I have left, to sit and watch die somebody you love.
My mother was taken to what the nursing home calls the ‘‘passing room’’, where people are taken to die. The bed was electronic, and moved according to timings, shifting the dying body, sometimes hugely arching the back, to make it more comfortable or turning to one side and then the other. The staff members come and go, talking to her: “Hello Susan,” they say in exaggerated tones, “we have just come to change your bed.”
After a day and night, my brothers and I took it in turns to be at her side. My shift was from 4am to 10am. We are awkward sons with our emotions, and did not know what to say or how to say it. Her brother and sisters came and went, and my father’s side of the family too. My father’s side, for reasons above, are more familiar with death. They seem to be able to put their hands into the wounds of death. My cousin Carmel drew a huge reaction from my dying mother’s still body when she prayed into her ear and said a tearful goodbye. It shocked me to see it. Until then, I did not know that she could hear us.
My uncle Patsy told me a story in the room where my mother was dying. When his father died, aged 70, from cancer, there were none of the drips of liquids or morphine which were attached to my mother’s skeletal but beautiful, elegant, dying body. Instead, as they say, he died roaring, literally, his only pain relief an occasional nip of whiskey. His daughters, Maura and Patricia attended to him. Patsy recalled coming from school one day and hearing his father’s pain at the top of the avenue, the window of his bedroom open. These stories come out when you talk in the ‘‘dying room’’. Times are different now. For all the faults of our health service, death is still, generally, hopefully, handled with dignity. That was my experience anyway.
There are many, perhaps a great many people about to experience death in this country up close and personal, many for the first time. Let me assure you, if it is of any comfort at all, that death is not a frightening experience, but rather deeply moving, profoundly so, spiritual in its essence. There is no pain. In the end, two hours before she died, I found myself alone with my mother. I touched her dying body for the first time, lay my hand upon her forehead and stroked her still warm cheek. I feel sure — in fact I know — she heard me, as I told her that we loved her, that we were happy, that she was a great mother; but more than that, I was so terribly moved by her great personal dignity in death. It is why I am not right since. I feel I will never be able to live up to her, in life or in death.
So anyway, if we all pull together over the next few weeks and months, we will come through this trial too.
It will be difficult, and for many families so desperately painful and sad. But we will be a better people at the end of it. I have no doubt about that.
Good luck to you all.
‘Death is not a frightening experience, but deeply moving, profoundly so’