Sinead briefly woke and asked if she was going to die... ‘I’m not afraid,’ she said and with that, our child took her last breath in my arms
WHEN Sinéad was born, a few months after our arrival [in Co. Westmeath], we had a small gathering for the christening in Turin church a few miles away, with our good friends Nell McCafferty and Nuala O’Faolain – the godmother – along with John McCrossan from Marian’s old Bolton Street debating group and his wife, Patricia, a teacher and educator.
No one was more surprised than John when Marian phoned him out of the blue and asked him to be godfather.
The last the McCrossans had heard, Marian and Larry were still married, if precariously. I was an unknown quantity to them.
Marian was knocking around with a bounder living a sort of crazy life, and I suppose she knew that at some level there had to be a still point of sanity. I believe she reached into the past and picked John as the responsible one who would do what a committed humanist godparent should do should the need arise.
This would have been a significant consideration for a couple in our circumstances at the time. To many people, especially card-carrying Catholics, our living arrangements were an affront. Sinéad was still a tiny baby when Eileen Flynn, a teacher in a County Wexford convent school, was summarily sacked from her job for living ‘openly’ with a married man in the town where she worked. If that sounds remarkable from this distance, it’s worth noting that it did not constitute unfair dismissal according to a High Court ruling.
When I first met him, Marian’s brother Noel used to say, ‘Whatever the pair of you are doing it must be great, but you’ll never get your feet under my mother’s table.’ Marian had broken ‘every rule in the book knocking around with a married f****er like you’, he said. And he was speaking as an adoring brother. Marian often said it herself.
It was hardly surprising, then, that their mother, Maura, kept a wide berth from this black-hearted scoundrel. But when that continued for two or three years after Sinéad’s arrival, I lost patience and rang her. ‘Look, I know you don’t approve of me, but your daughter and I are getting on terribly well. You have a grandchild now, and it would be a pity that for some sense of pride or some sense you have of me you wouldn’t see her. We can agree to differ on how people live their lives’ – now that was chancing it, I knew – ‘but let’s meet. Come to lunch and see your grandchild anyhow.’ Maura arrived armed with her other daughters, Dorothy and Therese – who remain close to me to this day – and there was acceptance over time. She even grew fond of me, I like to think.
Ballydesmond also took a stand, apparently. As a modest continuity announcer, Marian had been elevated to ‘television personality’ down home in Limerick. Invitations to host the quiz for the big parish fundraiser arrived for several years, and all went well until word eased out that she was living with a married man. The invitations ceased.
In short, we were a walking scandal who had broken up two marriages and had an illegitimate child to prove it.
Separation in those days was a sensation. Divorce didn’t exist. Cohabitation was living in sin. To paraphrase Noel, we had a fatal attraction of some sort, and both of us in our own way felt a ton of guilt.
We tried to put our experience to good use. We had learned something about how bruising and pain are caused in marriage, and we believed we could avoid the obvious pitfalls that open up when the gloss fades and a real marriage begins. We might even have devised a list of things we would not do in a marriage. We agreed we would never argue. If a subject was getting a little hot and heavy, we would suspend proceedings and resume the following morning. If one or other party didn’t want to do something, then let’s not insist on doing it: let’s find a third way. We did that all our lives.
SINÉAD’S INSPIRATIONAL BRAVERY NO MATTER WHAT
In the hospital ward, some incidents are branded in my brain.... I remember the children’s terror of the lumbar punctures and the terrible silence on the ward that preceded them. All I could do was hold Sinéad’s hand and promise a McDonald’s and Coke next day.
On the day after one such lumbar puncture, Neal had just arrived home from America and Timothy was with him. Sinéad had lost her hair and a wig carefully chosen by Marian had vanished – probably decorating a lamb in Kilteel. I declared it a celebration day and said we were going for lunch.
‘Is the lumbar puncture bad?’ Neal asked her chattily as we drove around Stephen’s Green towards McDonald’s.
‘It means two Cokes and a Big Mac,’ she said cheerfully. She was a get-on-with-it-get-overit kind of girl. To her, everything about life was fascinating and there was always an upside. Too busy to cry.
What we learned from Harcourt Street hospital was that they found it easier to talk to the children about their illness than the adults, and so the children were given all the information. They treated the
children as adults and the adults as children, and that made sense to us. The kids were totally familiar with all the procedures and their purpose. Sinéad knew exactly what she had. ‘I have myeloid leukaemia,’ she would say to anyone who enquired.
As time grew short, we moved a little bed into our room so that she was beside us and someone was always with her as she faded gently away from us.
Near the end, we brought her down to the sitting room, and Marian lay on a daybed with her child cradled over her heart. Rex the dog was in and out and everyone took time to sit with her. She was almost comatose by then, though she briefly woke to ask Jocelyn if she was going to die, and he said yes. ‘I’m not afraid,’ she said. Nell and Nuala made dinner. Marian was persuaded to take a break for a few minutes while I held Sinéad. And with that, our child took her last breath in my arms.
Professor Temperley’s prediction was just a week out.
Neal carried her up the long, wide stairway to her bedroom and laid her on her bed, and family, friends and neighbours kept vigil through the night.
As we said a last goodbye before she was placed in the coffin, people lined the stairs all the way to her room. There was the sound of muffled weeping and men removed their caps as the little coffin was borne downstairs and placed in our Vauxhall estate for Sinéad’s last drive to the village. She was ours. She would not be going in a hearse with strangers.
Inside the church, Jack ran up to the coffin and started banging one of the handles like a door knocker. ‘Sinéad! Sinéad! Are you in there? Can you hear me?
At the end, Neal, Jocelyn, Tadhg Hassett – Therese’s husband – and I carried Sinéad’s coffin out to the car and drove down the road to the old graveyard. Like creatures from another era, we carried her from the roadside across the grassy field past the cattle and the ancient ruins, through the gate in the old stone wall to her resting place.
‘What happens to Sinéad now?’ asked Jack, as he, the boys and a friend’s seven-year-old were being driven to the reception.
‘Jack, it’s so exciting,’ said the little girl breathlessly.
‘Sinéad gets into a lift and the lift goes all the way up and then it goes ping… and it opens, and she steps out and everywhere she looks there are mountains and mountains of sweets and all these other children and they’re all playing and running…’ As she listed all the sweets, the boys saw a notable shift in Jack. From the anger, confusion and frustration we had witnessed the night before, he seemed to settle. He knew where his sister was now, and it sounded pretty good. Thank God for Joanne O’Sullivan, that seven-year-old girl, and all the little girls like her.
Kathleen spun another story for him that Sinéad was going to heaven in a magic box and that she would have the special job of turning on the stars at night. He also saw the point of that.
Eventually the crowds abated, the house emptied out, and Marian and I settled up to one another, whiskeys in hand. I don’t remember many words being exchanged.
AFTER SINÉAD – SEEING THE WORLD WITH MARIAN
I decided that we should go to Ladakh in Nepal, high up in the Himalayas,
to witness a phenomenon that might or might not be rooted in reality. Levitating monks. I had a great desire to see them.
The bus we took to climb the Himalayas had never been serviced by the look of it but came festooned with reassuring images of the gods to protect the driver and passengers. The driver was an alarmingly contented man, chewing khat and singing away. Every time the bus rounded a bend on the gravel road, the back end leaned way out over the gorge, allowing us a panoramic view of the wrecks of buses, cars and trucks scattered way below.
Not ideal for someone with Marian’s fear of climbing heights.
We came to stretches where logs had been laid to replace the large chunks of road that had broken off and plummeted into the gorge. Approaching the first one, we watched keenly as a bus ahead of us negotiated the logs, and we noted that under the weight the logs all bent at an interesting angle towards the drop. So, I suggested to the bus driver that perhaps if all the passengers got out, it might reduce the weight and he would then drive across the logs and we would all get back on the bus alive and in one piece. No, he said, that would be bad luck. Marian and I held hands. At about two o’clock in the morning, we came to a halt at a station with three tin sheds.
It was black night. Across the road from us was a cave, and outside it, a huge brazier was burning brightly. We went inside and the driver gestured towards the women – ‘You sleep in here, the men sleep over there.’
Finucane, for once in her remarkably tolerant life, did not just nod quiescently. ‘It is the law in my country that I must sleep with my husband,’ she said firmly.
The driver relocated us to the empty restaurant. When we headed over to the brazier to get something to eat, twenty to thirty tribesmen had pitched up in the cave, all with long-barrel guns and knives hanging from their waists.
Finucane was intrigued and started chatting to one of them as you do when you haven’t a word of each other’s language. His friends were riveted. Too late, I noticed that against the firelight her body was revealed in detailed silhouette under her thin sari – you could see what she’d had for her breakfast.
I shot over to her. ‘Marian, shut it and come in here at once.
I could be at the bottom of that gorge while you’re being landed in God knows bloody where,’ I hissed. ‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because thirty men with big guns and knives are studying you very closely, and they like what they see.’
That might have been an unfair summation of the company, but I didn’t fancy our chances if it turned out to be true.
Next morning, the bus finally wheezed into our destination and we settled into the guesthouse. I requested a drink from the proprietor. There was none, he said. Oh dear.
I gave ten rupees to a boy and asked him to go down to the village and find me some drink. He returned to say the cobbler had some for sale. It was a bottle of French brandy, seal unbroken, left by a tourist. We bought the whole bottle and took it back to bed.
After a few brandies and smokes, we fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up a few hours later, I was paralysed.
I was quite sure I was dead and that the brandy was poisoned. A look at Marian confirmed it. ‘Can you move any muscles?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said.
Ambulances and hospitals seemed very far away from there. So, once more, we held hands – insofar as we could in that state – and waited to die.
Some hours later, movement mercifully returned.
At some point it finally occurred to us that by puffing cigarettes and pouring brandy down our throats high up in the rarefied mountain air, we were forcing our hearts to work at manic rates, with the inevitable result.
In terms of mission objective, it all went downhill from there. Did we ever see the great levitation? I can only say that if it happened, the pair of us were somewhere in the vicinity, recovering from oxygen deprivation, slumped against a wall. Another Clarke–Finucane fiasco.
THE END OF THE ROAD – INDIA, DECEMBER 2020
Finucane and I are sitting on a bench in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, India, holding hands, looking out across the Indian Ocean. It is a still, sunny evening and the sea is flat calm. The Angelus begins to ring. And then the bells are blending with the chant of the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer.
The sound ripples across the water to us. ‘They’re playing your song,’ says Finucane in that dry, amused tone.
I know.
I love the Angelus. I don’t pray, I don’t believe in God, but I like the Muslim call to prayer and I like the
Angelus. It’s a waypoint in my day, a 60-second nudge to stop what I’m doing when I hear it on the radio and press reset. Well, who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? Is there a point to this?
I use the pause to reorientate myself into the now, an area I’ve always had great difficulty with. It always annoyed Finucane that I go along with all this despite being a nonbeliever, yet here we are. I find it useful.
We are coming towards the end of our holiday, and I embark on a kind of speech I’ve prepared. ‘I seriously want to talk to you,’ I say firmly (for once). ‘I’ve been thinking about you and me for quite a while now in India.
I want to say I am incredibly grateful to you that you were in lockstep with me during my alcoholism, and that you stayed through the worst of it. Now I want to return the compliment to you. I want to be in lockstep with you because you are now, like it or not, going for serious heart treatment. Because you and I have planned a great sunset walk, we have all the books in the world, we have all the time in the world, we have all the travel in the world... You’ve just got to get better.’
She knows. Oh yes, she certainly knows. I’ve been carrying her for three weeks in India and can see she is falling apart. The cardioversion procedure she underwent shortly before the holiday clearly didn’t work, although she never said so in so many words.
‘You know and I know it hasn’t worked,’ I tell her. ‘This has got to stop. No more of this nonsense – we’re going to sort it. We’re going to do our sunset walk – agreed?’ ‘Agreed.’
We buried her less than two weeks later.
I wouldn’t say I was ‘able’ to speak at her funeral because ‘able’ is not the word that comes to mind. I had to speak. I wrote something and read it back and thought, This doesn’t make one ounce of sense as to how I feel. And when I was in the church, I realised I had forgotten my glasses. It was probably a good thing. I got up and said what I thought.
I said that I wanted to talk about Marian, my Marian, a woman who I had loved for 40 years, a woman who for me always made the colours brighter, the world a bit easier to live in.
I talked about how excited we had been about the next act. We would have more time, more space, more books to read, more places to see; how we were like two 15-year-olds who were addicted to each other and who forgot to grow up.
Finucane & Me, published by Gill Books, is out now priced €24.99.