Brendan Courtney and mum Nuala
TALK ABOUT GRIEF, LOVE AND GROWING OLD IN COMFORT
Dad thought the first documentary was a great idea It just hit me — I will never see him again
ABOUT six weeks ago, Nuala Courtney was out driving in her car, in a rush to get home, as usual. Heading to Tallaght, the suburb where she and her husband Frank had raised their family, a thought hit her with such ferocity that she had to stop and pull over.
‘It suddenly struck me, why am I rushing? I don’t have to go back,’ she says. ‘I always had things I had to do, go see Frank, go to work. Now I had no need.
‘It just hit me — I will never see him again. That was only six weeks ago.
‘I’m a psychotherapist, it takes a long time to comes to terms with grief, I know all that, but I suppose it’s a bit different when it’s so very personal.’ Frank Courtney died on the morning of June 7, 2017, at Our Lady’s Hospice in Harold’s Cross in Dublin. Less than six months before, he had become something of a mini-celebrity, after featuring in the powerful RTÉ television documentary, We Need to Talk About Dad.
Presented by his son, the broadcaster and fashion designer Brendan Courtney, it charted the family’s struggle to access suitable care supports after Frank suffered a major stroke in the summer of 2015 — one that left him incapacitated and needing 24/7 care. Once a strong, powerful man, a builder by trade, who had spent his life taking care of his wife and children, the devastation the stroke had on Frank and his family was brutal. The difficulties they faced while trying to navigate the HSE’s Fair Deal Scheme, which provides financial support to people who need long-term nursing home care, was very frustrating to watch.
The subject matter was grim, yet it was also an uplifting program, helped by Frank’s flashes of dry humour and his glamorous wife’s obvious love and devotion to him. Broadcast in late January 2017, the documentary struck a cord with thousands of people across the country who found themselves in similar situations. The Courtneys were hailed for their openness and for shining a light on the stressful bureaucracy that surrounds care support for the elderly here.
The morning after the documentary was aired, the-then Minister of State for Older People, Helen McEntee, issued a statement announcing that a consultation process had been launched, ‘With a view to establishing a new statutory homecare scheme’. A system that’s now expected to come on stream by the end of next year.
In the end, Frank never did return home. His health deteriorated and he was transferred from Tallaght Hospital to the hospice, which is where he spent the last year or so of his life. Since his death, Nuala has coped by keeping busy. A petite 70-something year-old, with a mass of blonde curls that frame her fine features, she admits to still finding it hard to come to terms with life without Frank, a man she spent close to 55 years with.
From Inchicore, Dublin, Nuala met Frank, from Crumlin, at a dance. ‘I was 15, he was 18 and that was it,’ she says with a smile. ‘My mum thought he was the best thing that happened to me — I was a bit wild — she loved him. He was a great boyfriend. We married when I was 20 and had a flat in Rathmines before moving to the northside.’
While Frank worked as a building contractor, Nuala went on to train in teaching hairdressing and worked for some time with the old Vocational Educational Committee (VEC) in one of their colleges.
When she was 25, however, her young family was hit by an appalling tragedy, one that gave them their first experience of horrendous grief.
‘I had a little girl who died of a cot death and then four years later I had another girl, who died again of a cot death,’ she explains in a steady low voice. ‘So you see, I’ve dealt with grief before.’
We are sitting at a dining table in Brendan’s city centre apartment and the 46-year-old TV presenter is more than a little surprised that his mother has brought up his two sisters who never made it out of infanthood.
He stops the interview briefly to check with Nuala that she really wants to share this story about her baby daughters. ‘She normally doesn’t like talking about this,’ he explains. ‘So I’m being protective. They were either side of me, I was born in the middle. Dad used to say we’d used up all our [bad luck] credits. He’d say: “We’ll be grand, we’ve used up all our credits.”’
Nuala is happy to continue. ‘You see the awful thing is, when Frank died, I was back there,’ she says. ‘It brought all that grief back as well.
‘My sister told me afterwards that after the girls died they didn’t know what to do with me, I wasn’t talking. But I didn’t want pity, I didn’t want anyone to tell me it was OK, because it wasn’t OK. I remember being on Henry Street with my mother one day and we met a woman and she asked how was I and how was the baby? I said: “She’s great.”
‘When we walked away my mother said to me: “You do know she’s dead?” And I told her: “I’m not watching their faces any more mam, I can’t.” Aisling was six months old and Orla was four months, they had to have postmortems because they were healthy babies. My sister went to the postmortems, I didn’t want to know what it was, I just wanted to know that I wasn’t responsible. I think every woman who experiences a cot death will feel guilty.’
‘They died for two different reasons and there was nothing anyone could have done,’ adds Brendan. ‘It was just very bad luck.’
‘Frank was great during that time,’ continues Nuala. ‘He was selfemployed and thank God at that time we didn’t have much money because I think I would have hit a bottle a day of anything.
‘I went back to work and back to training, I couldn’t get enough of learning. I did one qualification after the other, I had to keep busy.’
As well as training to be a yoga teacher, Nuala completed a Bachelor of Arts and qualified as a psychotherapist. She has been running her own practice for the last 12 years, from an office in her back garden, which Frank built specially for her.
She also had her other children — Deboragh, Suzanne, Brendan and Daniel — to take care of and raise.
‘After something like that happens, you keep your children close to you,’ she says. ‘I hated them moving away from the house, always thinking something might happen to them.’
‘Bad luck’ did strike again, however, this time it was to Nuala herself. After a routine gallstones operation in the summer of 2014, she contracted septicaemia and was kept in an intensive care unit to be treated.
‘She was in hospital and I was signing forms for her to be induced into a coma,’ says Brendan. ‘My dad was there too, when suddenly he just collapsed on her bed. They whipped him off to the stroke unit then helicoptered him to Blanchardstown Hospital and removed the blood clot. It was a crazy time, we were being told by doctors that mam had a 40% chance of survival and dad had a 50% chance, all in one morning.’
After six weeks in hospital Nuala made a full recovery. Frank also recovered and was released about ten days later. ‘But he didn’t make any proper changes in his life,’ says Brendan. ‘We were all in denial.’ The following summer, Frank suffered another stroke. This one was severe
and left him totally paralysed, apart from one hand. He spent about a year in hospital. ‘It was heartbreaking,’ says Brendan. ‘He had to be hoisted to the toilet, which he found very difficult.’
His time in the hospice was totally different, the staff were amazing, and there was a feeling of hope. He became really good mates with some of the staff, so he had this whole final stage of life, which was amazing. He was busy!’ As seen in the documentary, before it became clear that Frank would need to go into the hospice, the Courtneys struggled with getting a suitable care plan in place. They looked into nursing homes, but knew Frank, who was still in his early 70s, would not be happy in one. They also discovered the Fair Deal Scheme, as it stands, does not cover any kind of homecare costs — even though the costs of him staying at a nursing home would be roughly the same as Frank getting cared for at home by hired professionals, which according Brendan, who thoroughly researched both options, was about €2,500 a week.
‘I was with a TV producer friend, telling her about Fair Deal and how complicated it is,’ says Brendan. ‘And she said: “It’s a very interesting subject matter for our generation, would you make a documentary about it?” I told mam and dad about her proposal, laughing about it, but then dad said he thought it was a great idea.’
The Courtney family were delighted with the positive reaction to the documentary, so when the idea for a second documentary was mooted, they were happy to get involved again. This time, using Nuala and Brendan’s own experiences and investigations, they look into how prepared Irish people are to deal with the needs of our rapidly ageing population and how much responsibility we need to take for our elderly loved ones. ‘We didn’t pay attention to the warning signs, like the first stroke that dad had,’ explains Brendan. ‘We never did build a bathroom downstairs. We didn’t plan and that’s what the essence of the second documentary is about: planning.’ The Courtneys even travelled to Miami and Spain to explore how pensioners cope there. ‘The obvious thing to do is to downsize,’ says Brendan. ‘But there’s nowhere to downsize to. So we looked abroad to see what they do. In America, they plan their pension from when they leave college. Then we were in Valencia. You can sell your house here and buy one the same size for half the price and live on the other half of the money. There are real estate companies solely devoted to finding places for retired people.’
Nuala says she got a lot out of making the programme but still understands why Irish people have been so slow make arrangements for old age. ‘You have to own up in the first place that you have to do it,’ she says. A resolution to Nuala’s future is found by the end but people will have to watch it to find out what it is. ‘We’re all happy with the decision,’ Brendan says, smiling. ‘Yes, I think it’s going to work out very well,’ she replies.
‘If someone in their 40s is watching it and their 70-something mother says: “Do you want to have a conversation?”, we’ve achieved what we set out to do,’ says Brendan. ‘Our parents were fantastic. They created choices for us. This is mam’s time now.’ WE NEED to Talk About Mam is on RTÉ One tonight at 9.35pm
You have to own up to the fact you have to plan