This is no time to invite trouble in
The telling of tales of terrible events was a family competition, says author Kathleen MacMahon but her taste for tragic stories has vanished after such losses came knocking at her own door
Ihave a wise woman in my life. (I may actually have more than one, but let’s leave the others aside for the moment.) This particular wise woman took care of my children when they were small. She dressed and fed them every morning and walked them to school, while I drove through deserted streets to RTE to do the early shift on the radio desk. My first task every day was to make the check calls to Garda stations around the country and enter the findings into the news feed. “All quiet in Limerick.” “All quiet in Galway.” “All quiet in the capital.” (That’s Cork, of course).
While I was lining up stories for the lunchtime news, this wise woman was collecting my girls from school, bringing raincoats and wellies with her if it was raining and stopping off at the corner shop to buy them a ritual bread roll and a slice of deli ham. On sunny days, she took them to the playground or out on to the Shelley Banks. On rainy days, she sat at our kitchen table and made miniature bikinis for their Sylvanian animals. While she was at it, she passed on to them her unusual and — to me at least — sometimes baffling take on life.
I remember on one occasion arriving home from work and telling her that someone I knew had been diagnosed with cancer.
“Oh, I don’t want to know about that,” she said, holding the palm of her hand up, like a Garda on traffic duty, to stop me in my tracks. “Unless it comes knocking on my door, I don’t want to know.” I was shocked that she would say such a heartless thing. I was a news journalist, after all. I spent my days reporting road deaths, murders and all manner of tragic accidents. Our daily digest on the News at One included car bombs and terror attacks and natural disasters. “There’s never any good news,” said my childminder, which at the time seemed to me wilfully ignorant of her. I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to close their ears to life’s harsh truths.
In my defence, I should explain that I grew up in a family with a taste for tragedy. Terrible happenings were big news in our house, and the telling of them was a competitive event. A particularly gruesome incident might be recounted, on a daily basis, for years or even decades afterwards. “Do you know who that is?” my mother would ask, as we passed someone on the street. “I know, Mum,” I’d say, cutting her off at the pass. “You’ve told me a thousand times. The baby drowned in the bath. Very sad.”
My grandmother was just as bad. She liked to serve up, with relish, the story of the father who rushed to grab the loose end of the tug-of-war rope at the school sports day and in so doing severed the anchorman’s thumb. Another favourite was the story of the child who got strangled by the curtain cord while his mother was in the next room making the tea. You didn’t even have to be human to qualify: a hardy annual was the story of their beloved pet dog, who fell into the wet foundations of the new house and was cemented to death.
Grandmother was a professional storyteller of some repute, but my aunt Caroline could beat her at her own game. A master of the horror genre, Caroline’s repertoire was endless and varied. She even gave my twin girls a copy each of Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tales. In time, her husband took to limiting her to the telling of just one of her own cautionary tales per day. “Are you sure you want to use it up now?” he’d ask her. “Or save it for later?”
I can’t put a date on the moment I lost my taste for tragedy. Maybe it started with my mother’s death, at 66, of the cancer that had stalked her since her late 30s. Maybe it was Caroline’s sudden death, also long before her time, a year later. Or the death at only 42 of my gorgeous friend, Alacoque, who blew into my life in the 1980s, with her miniskirts and her red lipstick and her home-grown Wicklow brand of chutzpah. She died of multiple myeloma, leaving her husband and young daughter and a devastated wider family behind.
Since then, I’ve watched two other close friends die of breast cancer, in both cases leaving young children and grieving husbands behind them.
The countless harrowing details of those tragedies are private and not for the telling. The things I saw and heard, so sad as to be unspeakable. Something I never would have expected from myself, far from being a story to tell, my grief had no words.
I came to understand — belatedly but full-well — the wisdom of bolting the door against bad news. It’s not that I don’t have a heart. On the contrary, I discovered that I do have one, and that it’s not as strong as I once thought.
You’d think, having learned that lesson, that there would be no unlearning it, but that’s not how it works. Like any bad habit, the habit of imbibing bad news dies hard. During the pandemic, I found myself waking in the night to check the latest figures on my phone. I studied graphs of the curve that needed to be flattened. I zoomed in on the Worldometer chart of deaths per million, studying the small print until my eyes were square. Eventually, I would fall back asleep churning the numbers in my head for new cases in Iran. Waking again in the morning, I would reach straight for the phone and pick up where I left off.
The human stories were heart-rending.
Unimaginable to think that a child had died of the virus in London without his mother by his side. That old people were dying alone in nursing homes, their families prevented from visiting. The pictures from Bergamo, of a convoy of trucks laden down with coffins, once seen could not be forgotten. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be affected by it, not to feel connected to it. This was something that had the potential to harm us all, and we were all responsible for its prevention. It felt like a collective experience, and one that you had to take part in. That takes its toll, even on the onlooker.
I began to notice a fluttering of anxiety in my chest. I had to remind myself that I was safe and well with my family inside my house, and that I was doing everything in my power to assist anyone who needed me, while obeying the public health advice as best I could. Crucially, none of my beloved people had fallen seriously ill, and for that I was endlessly grateful. It was of no help to anyone for me to consume on a 24-hour basis the many distressing details of this unfolding catastrophe and take them to my heart. Sitting in my kitchen of a sunny morning, I took to turning off the radio and embracing the silence.
The days were getting longer, and the tulips I’d planted back in autumn were slowly flushing with colour. The lack of traffic sounds in the city had released the birdsong we can’t normally hear. There was opera streaming for free on the internet, a poem a day on Twitter, and all these things began to seem as important in my life as the news of the virus.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t horrified by the mounting death toll. It wasn’t that I wasn’t frightened that the hospital system would be overloaded, and that the doctors and nurses would be run ragged and get sick themselves, but my worries weren’t helping anyone and I learned all over again the wisdom there is in rationing the bad news you allow into your life.
I’m doing everything I can to protect myself and my family from the virus — the physical threat of it and the sorrow of it too — but as a wise woman once taught me, I’m not going to go inviting it in.