I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE BUT TO GET USED TO OUR ‘NEW NORMAL’
It’s a phrase many people are using about life post-Covid but for Declan Murphy it will be far more difficult after the death of his wife Sandra, as he tries to prepare his sons for life without their beloved mother
BACK in mid-March, as the rest of the country struggled to get to grips with the seriousness of the Covid-19 crisis, Sandra and Declan Murphy and their two young sons, Mark and Eric, were already in the depths of their own sort of lockdown.
After spending most of the last year in Cork University Hospital (CUH), being treated for polycystic kidney disease, Sandra was brought home by her family to their home in the village of Coachford, just west of Cork City.
The 51-year-old mother of two was taken off dialysis on March 6, and Declan was told it was likely she would only live for another five days. In the end they got 12 more days with her, with only very close friends and family calling in to see them as they waited with her.
On March 18, six days after the start of lockdown was announced, Sandra died surrounded by her three boys. Although a desperately sad and intimate time, when all their concentration was focused on making Sandra as comfortable as they could, it was also impossible to ignore what was going on around them.
‘With Covid going on, it was all so surreal,’ says Declan. ‘We were very aware of it, and it’s a horrible situation for the world to be in right now, but in a strange way it saved our family from going through a lot more than we were already experiencing.
People are brilliant and very kind, but for our children, it saved them going through an awful lot. Because of Covid, Sandra’s funeral was very limited in numbers, which was better for the boys. My brother died last September and they were both at the funeral, it was their first one, and they just couldn’t get over the level of sympathising. It was so bewildering for them, sitting in the church for a couple of hours, so that was a huge blessing for us.’
While the pared down numbers for Sandra’s funeral were understandably welcomed by the shattered Murphy family, it still left an entire community in mourning and unsure of how to show their grief at the passing of such a vivacious and much loved member.
It’s a situation that has become familiar in villages, towns and cities all over Ireland during these testing times of restrictions.
Resourceful and determined to show their support and respect, Coachford found another unique and very special way to mark Sandra’s death and share their condolences with her husband and sons.
Over three days in May, more than 90 people did individual runs in Sandra’s honour. Between the group, which included runners in Dublin, Wales and Toronto, they clocked up more than 850km and raised just under €17,000 for the Irish Kidney Association.
Runners also included teachers and students at Coachford College, where 14-year-old Eric is in second year and Mark, 18, has just completed sixth year, and members of their local GAA club, Aghabullogue, as well as the soccer club for which Declan played and helps coach, Coachford AFC.
‘The death of Sandra had a deep impact on all the members of our club who felt fortunate to have known her,’ explains Coachford AFC treasurer Peter O’Riordan. ‘She was a great supporter of the club and was always on the sidelines cheering on her sons Eric and Mark.
‘Her passing away during lockdown, prohibiting funeral gatherings, presented us with a challenge as we really wanted to find a way to pay our respects to her husband Declan, a coach and past player and her sons.’
Coachford College teacher Shane Creed also put together a video, featuring 60 of the Murphy’s family and friends, from 12 different local sports clubs, pucking a sliotar or kicking a ball to each other as a way of highlighting the charity running challenge.
These ‘passing’ videos have become something of a thing during lockdown, an effective and clever way of helping to keep people connected while apart.
And in a poignant move, Mark and Eric Murphy feature at the very start, kicking it all off.
The boys, their father says, are ‘doing brilliantly’.
‘I couldn’t be happier with how they are,’ he explains. ‘Sandra effectively had been in hospital for the last year of her life, so we had some sort of preparation.’
IT’S JUST three months since Sandra died and this weekend, Declan faces into his first Father’s Day as a single dad. It’s not a situation he could ever have predicted when he first met Sandra, when she was just 14.
While Declan, who owns and runs the local Centra store, was born and bred in Coachford, Sandra was originally from Tower, near Blarney.
‘We met as kids in Macroom,’ he explains. ‘It wasn’t a huge long relationship, we’d go missing for a few years and then rekindle it for a few years, then eventually I got lucky. I suppose I always carried a torch for her.
‘She was so much fun, so vivacious, a party animal really.
‘Someone said to me when she died, with the lockdown, she missed her own party because we couldn’t have a funeral. That’s the best way to put it.’
They got together for good in their late 20s and were married in 1999, when Sandra was 30, and had the traditional big Irish wedding. At first she continued to work at the hair salon she ran with her business partner Niamh on the northside of Cork City. But once
the boys were born, she then stayed home to take care of them.
‘She was a homemaker supreme,’ Declan says. ‘Both Eric and Mark are sport crazy, soccer is their main thing but they play all sports. And Sandra was into whatever the boys did, they never put a foot wrong as far as she was concerned.’
About ten years ago the Murphy family learned that Sandra had polycystic kidney disease (PKD), which causes fluid-filled cysts to form in the kidneys. It can impair kidney function and can sometimes cause kidney failure.
‘It’s a very manageable disease,’ says Declan. ‘And her kidney function was periodically checked over the years. But what happened to Sandra is quite rare, [the cysts] began to attack her liver.’
As her condition began to get more serious, it was decided to remove one of her kidneys. ‘But nothing was gained from that,’ says Declan.
Sandra began dialysis — when a machine does the work of the kidneys, filtering out toxins and excess fluids from the blood before it’s channeled back into the body — about four years ago, travelling to the renal unit at Cork University Hospital three times a week.
Dialysis wasn’t a thing I knew a huge amount about before this happened,’ says Declan. ‘Going to the hospital three days a week, it became a way of life for the four of us. Sandra was always very positive about it. Up to the last she always felt she could get better.
‘She just had a run of very bad luck — just as it started to get worse she was due to go on home dialysis, which gives you a much better quality of life. She went on a transplant list, but would be taken off it when she wasn’t well enough.’
At one stage last year, a very close friend of Sandra’s made an extraordinary offer of a gift to her, to be her living donor. Much to everyone’s delight, the friend was found to be a good match.
The transplant at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, however, was called off just as Sandra was about to be wheeled down to theatre.
‘That was devastating,’ Declan says quietly. ‘It was one of her best friends and during her surgery, in layman’s terms, they found a vein underneath the kidney that had split into two. When that happens, it’s a no-no.’
It’s hard to fathom the level of disappointment and frustration Sandra’s family and friends must have felt. Kidney transplants have an excellent record of transforming a sick person’s life.
‘You get a kidney and you’re home within a week,’ says Declan. ‘More often than not, the donor will be in hospital longer than you. The surgeon said they’d get another kidney, but a short time later, the cysts started attacking her liver.’
Her health began to decline at a rapid rate.
‘She wasn’t well enough, she was trying really hard to get well,’ says Declan of trying the transplant route again. ‘And then last November she had an operation to removed part of her liver in the hope it would stop being attacked. But it didn’t work.’
For most of the last year of her life, Sandra spent much of her time in hospital.
‘She’d get out for three days and then have to go back in for a week,’ says Declan. ‘Or she’d come out feeling fairly good and then be back in hospital within a day, that’s the way it was going. Most of it was spent in Cork University Hospital in the renal unit, they have a fantastic team in there.
She was trying to fight and was always very positive about it. Collectively we were always hopeful, as you are when someone is very ill. You always try to look for the positive. But I suppose since last November, after the operation in St James, I knew from the way the surgeon spoke afterwards, it wasn’t good.’
Shortly after Christmas, Declan was warned his wife’s condition had little chance of improving.
‘I was told on December 27 there was nothing more they could do,’ he says. ‘And in a very, very nice way, they more or less told me it would be the humane thing, just to stop the dialysis.
‘Hindsight tells me they were saying to stop it then, but that’s hindsight. Then it got to the March and I was told the same thing again.’
Declan says he and Sandra never talked about her death, or what would happen after she died.
‘No, it’s not a thing we hugely discussed,’ he says. ‘Did she know? Probably, deep down. But it was very important to me to keep her in a nice place and a nice state of mind. So we never went there, I would have found it too hard.
‘Obviously I spoke to doctors, but it wasn’t something I shared with her, she was fighting till the end and there was never any talk about when she was gone.
‘You see, all the provisions would have been made for me going first, if you look at the stats.
‘We thought we’d 20 more years and more in each of us.’
After Sandra’s death Declan took a couple of weeks off work.
WE HAVE a great team in the shop and I was grateful to them, but work is a good tonic,’ he says. ‘There’s a staff of about 17 or 18 so there’s been a lot to organise with the restrictions. Mark, my older boy, works there too.
‘He was due to do his Leaving Certificate, so he had all that in the mix, just for good measure.’
While there is much talk about the country, and indeed the world, getting used to a ‘new normal’, for the Murphy family, coming to terms with their new reality will be an altogether more intense experience.
‘Look, I’m still in shock,’ admits Declan. ‘But the easiest way to say it is that I don’t have a choice here. But I know we’ll emerge from this, our boys will be OK. They’re already doing brilliantly.
‘We were prepared in a way, with Sandra being out of the house so much for the last year, it laid a foundation really.
‘But our new normality has to come. As I said to our boys; we will emerge from this and that’s my job now, to make sure that happens.
‘The support we’ve got from everyone around here, the sports clubs and the school and beyond, has been very humbling.
‘I’m not one for the limelight and I’m not finding doing interviews like this all that easy, but something very positive has come out of this, so I feel a duty to push it forward.
‘I want to get the message out there, about the incredible work that the Irish Kidney Association does for families like mine. And to ask people to carry a donor card, to think about the difference it can make to other families out there.
‘In a way, what happened to Sandra was pure bad luck, her condition would have been very treatable, if the cysts had not started attacking her liver. It was a very rare thing.
‘But part of Sandra’s wonderful legacy now is that in the celebration of her life after death. Our community raised funds for the Irish Kidney Association to help other kidney patients like her and we can take great consolation in that, for which I’m very grateful.’
OORGAN Donor Cards can be obtained by phoning the Irish Kidney Association on 01 6205306 or freetext the word DONOR to 50050