Love and Loss in a Pandemic Darragh McManus meets a woman honouring her late mother in a moving new documentary
Darragh McManus talks to Siobhán Cullen about the death of her mother, Eileen, and why she needed to honour her memory in a new documentary about the people and stories behind the cold statistics of Covid-19
To date, more than 1,770 Irish people have lost their lives to Covid-19, with almost 28,000 infected, since the virus arrived here in spring. Those are the bare, verifiable statistics. But as Siobhán Cullen rightly points out, “By and large, people don’t relate to statistics – and every single person who dies had family, friends, neighbours, in-laws, whoever, who are also going through a horrendous time. They’re human beings and can’t be forgotten.” That’s one of the main reasons why the Dubliner got involved with Love and Loss in a Pandemic, a special once-off RTÉ documentary. Her mother, Eileen O’Neill, died of Covid 19 on March 18 – the third person known to have died of the virus in this country.
The producers, she says, “told me they wanted to humanise people by doing this show, and that struck a chord with me. So this is my way of evoking Mum’s memory. And I want it to be a tribute to her, because I couldn’t have a funeral. Mum wasn’t just a number. She was a warrior and an incredible woman who did a huge amount in her life.”
Speaking from a motor-home in Clare, where she’s on holidays – her husband is also there, working remotely – Siobhán recalls how, right from the start, the whole Covid situation was worrying for her.
“For some reason,” she says, “as soon as I heard of it, I was aware of the seriousness of it. I could see it creeping closer and closer.
There was a massive party in Temple Bar the week before St Patrick’s weekend and I just went ballistic on Twitter, and then kind of kept that up.”
Her moving tweets, which documented Eileen’s dying, caught the national mood and the public’s attention. “After Mum died,” Siobhán goes on, “I was contacted by the Irish Independent to do an interview, which I did as a tribute to her – and to get across to people how serious this was.”
Now comes Love and Loss in a Pandemic, an important documentary which explores the grief, anxiety and heartbreak of a number of families. Siobhán’s own situation was particularly difficult, as both her children live abroad so weren’t here when their grandmother died.
And because Eileen was one of the first casualties of Covid, the normal protocols surrounding illness, death and burial were absent, as authorities struggled to understand exactly what they were dealing with. For starters, Siobhán had to wear full PPE while visiting her mother.
“That was very hard emotionally,” she says. “You’d walk out of the lift and meet the desk nurse, who instructed us how to put on the full gear. Gown, boots, double gloves, hair covered, a mask, eye-goggles and a shield over all of that. Then when we left, we were told how to take it off. When I went in Mum didn’t even know me – all she could see were my eyes.”
Funeral arrangements were also mired in an upsetting uncertainty. Siobhán says, “When Mum died on the Wednesday, I asked about arrangements for seeing her, but they kept changing things – there was no protocol in place at that stage. We got to see her in the morgue, where they do post-mortems. Then she went to a funeral home, and there was none of the usual hand-shakes and conversation with the undertaker: we had to set up a conference call, with my brother and myself, to make the arrangements. And that kept getting delayed, because they were in contact with other undertakers, trying to find out what they could and couldn’t do.
“Then I said I wanted Mass and was told no church would take her, but we might get a priest to say prayers. In fairness the local parish priest, who didn’t know Mum, agreed to do it. And I wanted all this done sooner rather than later, because I was scared they’d introduce mandatory cremation, which is the last thing Mum wanted. Again, we had to tie in with the funeral home.”
The eventual funeral Mass, held that Saturday morning, was “surreal as well as awful”, Siobhán remembers. She says now, “We had our Mass, albeit a short one with just four of us there and a sealed coffin. When it was over, we waited in our cars so they could disinfect the coffin before it went into the hearse. Then at the cemetery we were escorted in, the road blocked behind us, and had to wait in the cars because the gravediggers didn’t want us near. They buried Mum and left, and we went to the grave. “Talking to you now, it seems almost unbelievable. If you wrote it in a book, nobody’d believe it.”
Eileen’s health had not been great before contracting Covid: she’d had a stroke which left her fairly immobile, suffered from COPD and was living with Siobhán, her primary carer at the time. Still, the sheer speed of how quickly her mother went surprised her.
“She just took a very sudden turn on Friday, March 13. Due to Covid she was put into isolation in St Vincent’s straight-away. I got a phone-call on Sunday, to say she’d tested positive, and she died on Wednesday.
“All during that period, it was very hard, very emotional. I’d phone Mum every day and was trying to stay strong and keep her going, then would collapse into floods of tears when I’d hang up. The speed of it was shocking. It was horrendous.”
“Mum wasn’t just a number. She was a warrior and an incredible woman“