How we dealt with my wife’s death sentence
Bernard and Denise Traynor found the strength to face her last days in their shared love of music...
IT WAS universally agreed, says Bernard Traynor, that his late wife Denise had a particularly memorable trait: you’d always hear her before you saw her.
Vivacious and full of joy, her voice was beautiful and endearing — and, given that she adored music and studied as an opera singer, that was only fitting.
Equally fitting is the fact that, a year after her death from ovarian cancer, it is through her voice that Denise has lived on. Bernard has worked tirelessly to finish recording a song she had started while she was sick — to raise awareness about ovarian cancer — but she never got a chance to complete. That song
— Flowers From Heaven — has been released and is now available to buy. Bernard hopes it will not only keep his wife’s memory alive but also help prevent other women from suffering the same fate due to ovarian cancer, which is the fourth most common cancer among Irish women.
Denise came up with the idea of writing and recording the song with a group of women, following her 2010 diagnosis. Then classical guitarist Bernard — her partner in marriage and music for more than 30 years — took up the mantle when she passed away last year.
Living with cancer had been a tragic but constant thread in the couple’s lives for almost their entire marriage.
THE couple met in the late 1980s while they were both studying music in their native Dublin; Denise was studying opera and Bernard classical guitar. They met in a corridor and got chatting about music. Bernard was instantly smitten.
‘She’d a lovely face; she really radiated joy and happiness,’ he says. ‘As people would say about her, you always heard her before you saw her. She was really bubbly and loud.’
They were engaged after a year and married another year later, in 1989. Denise and Bernard — whom she always affectionately called Barney or Mr B — stayed in Dublin teaching music but, within a few years, the happy young couple received some unwelcome news. Bernard hadn’t been feeling well and had a persistent cough; the GP referred him f or a chest X-ray, but Bernard kept putting it off, ‘like most men,’ he says.
I t was Denise who finally goaded him into having the X-ray done at St James’s Hospital in 1993. ‘I al ways remember that X-ray because, when we went i n, our whole life changed,’ he says.
‘When we came out of the X-ray, we were told it looks like cancer. Both of us j umped i nto a t axi, shocked. I was coughing like mad, and the taxi man turned around and said to me, “Are you dying back there?” Both of us just looked at each other, shocked.’
Diagnosed with non- Hodgkin lymphoma, Bernard underwent an aggressive form of chemotherapy every week for 12 weeks which sometimes involved hospital stays. During it all, Denise was a rock of support.
‘Denise was tremendous with me when I was unwell,’ he says. ‘She’d say, “You can do this, we’re going to get through this.”’
The couple did get through it and Bernard was eventually given the all-clear. They then continued teaching for a few years in Dublin but, in 2000, decided to up sticks and move to Wexford, where they set up another music school.
However, once again, cancer reared its ugly head. In 2007, Bernard was again diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and, this time, he needed a full bone marrow transplant.
Once again, Denise was by his side and, thankfully, Bernard recovered. After Bernard beat the cancer a second time, the couple decided to devote themselves to their own music, instead of running a music school, and they worked together in their home studio, writing and recording music. But that blissful time was tragically cut short.
This time, it was Denise who would unexpectedly be diagnosed with cancer. She had been feeling unwell, but for months doctors thought she had a urinary tract infection.
Her diagnosis would turn out to be far more sinister, however, as ovarian cancer often masks itself as a urinary tract infection (UTI) or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). By the time her cancer was discovered in December 2010, it had progressed quite far.
‘That was a dreadful Christmas; it was the Christmas of the big snow,’ Bernard says. ‘They had six surgeries planned for Denis; they cancelled four of them, because the weather was so bad.’ After eventually having the surgeries to remove the cancer, in January 2011, Denise underwent chemotherapy ‘as a precaution’.
‘Everything was going fine, up until the summer [of 2011],’ Bernard says. ‘Then, in August, the cancer had come back. At that stage, I think we realised it was going to be incurable. Denise was such a fighter; she did some trial drugs... She seemed to be doing well, she was coping with things.’
And as they grappled with the realisation that Denise’s cancer was terminal, the determined and devoted couple continued to focus on their music and live their daily lives as normal as possible.
It was in the summer of 2013 that they started working on Flowers From Heaven — after Denise came up with the idea to record it to raise awareness about ovarian cancer.
‘Everything was rosy; that September 2013, she was great,’ Bernard says. ‘We were going to launch it in 2014, then suddenly everything changed.’
I n November 2013, during an appointment at St James’s, the doctor commented that it was the first time she had seen Denise without hearing her first.
‘She said, “You’re not well, Denise,”’ Bernard remembers. ‘They did a brain MRI and realised it had travelled to her brain and spine at that stage. She had to stay in for observation.
‘I always remember, the following morning, I drove home that Wednesday, I was devastated.
‘I went home to get clothes, get our dogs Mo and Beth into the kennels, get back up to Dublin. I arrived the following morning, the Thursday morning, and her bed was empty as I was walking up the corridor. My heart sank.’ Then he heard his beloved wife’s voice; she had gotten out of bed to comfort a younger patient who had been brought in during the night. ‘That’s just the type she was,’ Bernard says. Denise was then scheduled for radiotherapy for her brain and spine, which required the moulding of a head mask t o keep her t otally still during her treatment. As a doctor talked Denise t hrough what would be necessary, he asked if she had any questions. Her one request was that she would not have treatment on December 10, because Bernard had a medical checkup and, as always, she wanted to be there to support her husband.
Despite the rigorous treatment, however, Denise could not beat the cancer — and she was told in March 2014 that she would be sent to a hospice.
‘I always remember her turning to me and saying, “I’ll never go home again, Barney,’ her husband recalls sadly.
When admitted to Our Lady’s Hospice in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, she was asked what her three wishes would be if she could be granted anything.
SHE said: ‘ One, spend more time with Bernard. Two, spend more time with Bernard. Three, spend more time with Bernard. For me, that was a great sense of what we’d been through,’ he says. ‘In fairness, at times I feel guilty when I look back — I think, “we should’ve done this, we should’ve done that”... at least I know that, when there was little time left, she was just happy being with me.’
He adds: ‘ We never really got a chance. We discussed this before she died; I said, from day one, we were fighting cancer all our life, really.’
Despite being in a hospice, Denise kept writing in the notebooks she always had with her and continued to add to the mountain of music she had at home.
She passed away on March 31 last year, after planning every piece of music for her funeral.
‘It’s very, very hard to accept that loss of someone who was so much a part of your life,’ says a heartbroken Bernard. However, at the encouragement of a friend, he began finishing the cancer awareness song Denise had started. The track included vocals she had already recorded. ‘The first time
315 Women are affected
by ovarian cancer every year in Ireland, according to
the HSE
I sat down in studio, just to hear her voice, something took over me and said, “I want the best for her,” he says. ‘A friend did say to me, “I don’t think I could listen to my wife’s voice for a long time. How do you do it?” I just wanted the best for her.
‘It did actually get on top of me at times. I could see Denise, she was really the second chair in the studio. I’d be sitting in studio, she’d be sitting beside me.’
Bernard persevered and, with the help of several music industry professionals, he finished the song and even made a music video.
‘I knew she loved three things: One, hopefully me; number two, nature; and number three, music,’ he says.
The video features peaceful nature scenes and photographs of the clearly loved-up couple.
Bernard looks back with fondness at the couple’s time writing and recording together — even during the years when she was sick — and when they spent their days living as normally as possible and when the possibility of Denise not being there seemed unreal. ‘I never thought they were going to end,’ he says of those days. ‘We just got back to normal living. If I had one regret, looking back, we didn’t think it was going to end, so we didn’t stop our lives and say, “Let’s climb Mount Everest” because we always wanted to. We always loved doing music, so that’s what we went back doing.
‘It’s quite sad, when you think about it, that we were working on a song called Flowers From Heaven.
‘We never actually thought she was going to die. When you’re listening to the lyrics — “Voice from the wilderness spoke with the gentleness, silence my child, God is by your side always” — it really was leading her away from me.’
All of Bernard’s tracks are colour– coded, and anything yellow is Denise — he picked the colour because she was always so bright and cheerful, and ‘really gone too soon,’ Bernard says.
‘She had so much more she wanted to write,’ he says.
‘She was a tremendous talent and I’d like for her music to be heard. I do think she will live on through it, and it was very important — she really saw it as a legacy.’ Flowers From Heaven, for so many reasons, holds a very special place in Bernard’s heart.
‘ People have a f avourite song; when they hear that song, it brings up emotions,’ he says. ‘ With me, it’s a deeper level. I can see the lyrics being written, I can see me putting in a guitar part, taking a guitar part out. They have a deeper feeling. I can see every component.’ Bernard now hopes the song will not only raise awareness about ovarian cancer but also raise funds for vital services.
All proceeds from the single will go to St James’s Hospital Kilmainham Foundation in Dublin.
As with most cancers, early detection of ovarian cancer vastly increases survival rates, which is why Bernard wants — and indeed Denise wanted — to raise awareness. For while Denise lives on in memory and through her music, it is a disease which took her far too soon.
FLOWERS From Heaven can be downloaded from iTunes for 99c and the video can be watched on YouTube
Even in the hospice Denise
wrote music