It’s the mother of all journeys, from death to affirming life...

DIANE FOLEY’S HEART-RENDING AGONY AFTER THE BRUTAL MURDER OF HER SON LIT A CANDLE OF GOODNESS THAT CONTINUES TO SHINE

HER photojournalist son was kidnapped, beaten and degraded, then, in an act of barbarous medieval depravity, his head was sawed from its body, the severed skull placed obscenely on the spine of his lifeless, still warm torso.

Adding to the unfathomable torture, excavating a fresh trough for the relentless tide of Diane Foley’s emotional ache to fill, Isis uploaded their repugnant carnival of evil to the internet, the slaughter of her son, James, presented as warped theatre.

An observation on motherhood from the author Debra Ginsberg strikes at the heart of this story.

“The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that – a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.”

Ginsberg, overwhelmed by the profound experience of motherhood, wonders

“if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did – that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain.”

CLEAVED

Consider, then, how Diane Foley’s life was re-imagined, the sudden scuttling of an entire armada of parental hopes and dreams, when word arrived from Syria that the heart beating outside her chest had been brutally stilled.

Place yourself in her shoes. Your son, or indeed your daughter, savagely cut down, head cleaved from body in some distant, forlorn desert.

In the recently published American Mother, her voice so vividly captured by the towering Irish wordsmith Colum McCann, Foley takes us on a mesmerising journey. She permits us to walk with her along the pathway forged by her maternal love.

The 225 pages are laden with pain and torment, a visceral, soul-deep hurt. How could it be otherwise?

Yet the power of this electrifying tome is sourced not in the hateful energy that thieves the life of the creature formed inside her, but in the wattage of her courage and mercy and kindness, qualities that permit her to walk onwards toward the light.

Diane Foley is a peddler of grace.

It may sound perverse, but American Mother is a beautiful, even a cathartic read. Inexplicably, it becomes a story of hope, a candle of determined goodness that will not be extinguished.

There are some riveting scenes, notably in the opening chapter where Diane comes face to face with one of her son’s killers, an arranged conversation in an American courthouse, only the width of a table between the two.

McCann unlocks the vault where Foley’s most private thoughts reside and invites us inside.

“It isn’t bravery, she doesn’t think of it as that, no, not at all. Nor is it an act of grace or forgiveness. No. Perhaps it is just a refusal to be scared. Perhaps it is a way to say that you have not really killed my son. Perhaps it is as fundamental as that: I am his mother and you have not killed him, and I am here to tell you that.”

As McCann puts it: “The room is electric with the unsaid.”

Though this is her singular story, Diane is favoured with an exceptional collaborator. Walking the challenging ghostwriter’s tightrope, McCann’s balance is masterful.

Those who have read his back-catalogue – from the extraordinary Apeirogon or highly acclaimed Let the Great World Spin, to the earlier, gorgeous Dancer and This Side of Brightness – will know the Dubliner as a lyrical and soulful sculptor of sentences, an artist chiselling glorious, enduring images from the rich source material of his intellect.

Though we have never met, I have tracked

Colum’s career since the summer of 1987 when, as a student journalist on a sixweek college placement, I opened the doors to The Irish Press and crossed a threshold into wonderland.

McCann’s late father, Sean, was the paper’s Features Editor and a gentleman; remarkably generous with his time, advice and wisdom, signposting a track for a clueless, but ravenous-for-knowledge teenager to follow. At the time Colum was cycling across America and writing a weekly column about his travels.

PERCEPTION

I was hypnotised by its brilliance and insight. Though he was only 40 months my senior, a 22-year-old cub himself, the perception and erudition of his writing, the ink glowing with literary technicolor, left me winded with awe.

That summer I fed on the rich banquet of Colum and Con Houlihan’s words and felt myself grow.

James Foley, himself a one-time journalism student, was also a McCann fan. The latter’s collaboration with Diane on American Mother came about after the writer saw a photo of James in which he was reading Let the Great World Spin.

It compelled him to reach out to a grieving mother.

The result is a work that is profound and penetrating, the story burrowing ever deeper into the reader’s psyche.

Small things strike home. Like Diane’s observation that there is no word – in English, Spanish, French – for a parent who loses a child. A child who loses a parent is an orphan, a husband or wife who loses their life partner is a widower or a widow.

But there is no single word to describe a bereaved mother or father, precisely perhaps because, in its sheer awfulness, it is indescribable.

DISAPPEARED

As Diane writes: “What would capture and convey such loss?... It goes against the grain of life. We are all supposed to pass along before our children even begin to flourish. Otherwise, we have to go on living knowing that part of us has disappeared, unwillingly, unwittingly, from this world.”

And yet James, this essential part of her, does not disappear. He remains animate on every page, living again, as he did for those nine formative prebirth months, in the cradle of his mother.

McCann borrows a line from Thomas Campbell to perfectly describe the phenomenon: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

American Mother, a book made possible by a horrible death, is the ultimate celebration of life. Read it and allow Diane Foley’s grace to wash over you and work its magic.

‘To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die’