Chapter One
By the time you’re reading this, I’ll more than likely be gone. Buried or cremated, scattered somewhere miserable and windy — whichever they grudgingly agreed upon on in the end. Funny enough, that part doesn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought it would. What’s strange is writing to people from the other side of it. Sitting here knowing there’s a version of you reading these words while I’m no longer anywhere at all. Just ether.
The doctors never come out with it straight away. Not in Ireland anyway. They circle around things first. Use soft hands with hard news. “We’ll keep you comfortable.” “We’ll focus on quality of life now.” “Spend time with the family.” As if you’re too stricken to grasp what they’re really saying through the platitudes.
My news, the diagnosis, they call it, happened on a Thursday in Vincent’s. Pissing rain outside. Proper Dublin rain too — the kind that soaks through your tackies and leaves the whole city smelling damp and tired. There was an old lad coughing his lungs up behind the curtain beside me and some poor young nurse trying to smile at everybody like that could somehow make the place less grim. I knew before the consultant even sat down. You can tell by the way they look at you. People suddenly become very kind when you’re dying. Too kind. Their voices audibly drop a few octaves. Nobody holds your eye too long. Instead they look down and then to the side.
The consultant had one of those careful heads on him. Glasses halfway down his nose. Folder in his lap he kept opening and closing. I actually felt sorry for him for a second. Then he said it. Well — not directly of course. They never say, “You’re dying, Eamon.” That would nearly be refreshing. No, they dress it up nice instead. Talk around the thing sitting in the room between you both. But once you hear words like terminal, aggressive, spread, palliative. Well. The writing is on the wall.
And the mad thing is, after all that, after hearing the worst thing you’ll ever hear in your life, what did I do? I apologised for taking up his time. That’s Ireland for you. I even thanked him on the way out.
Outside the hospital people were carrying on like normal. Buses still late. Couples arguing. Some fella roaring into his phone outside the Centra. I remember standing there under the awning thinking, how dare the world keep moving. You expect a bit more drama when your life’s ending. Thunder maybe. Choirs. Some feeling that the universe noticed. But no. Traffic lights still changing. Somebody buying a chicken fillet roll. Rain coming sideways across the road same as every other Thursday in Dublin.
I didn’t tell anybody for nearly two weeks. Because once you say it out loud it becomes real in a different way. It stops belonging just to you. Suddenly you’re managing everybody else’s grief along with your own. So I kept quiet. Went home. Put the kettle on. Watched the news. Fed the dog. Sat there staring at Fair City on the telly like a man whose organs weren’t quietly packing it in one by one.
Death does something odd to your head. You start noticing small things fiercely. The sound of the immersion kicking in. Cold air coming through the bathroom window. The way your mother’s voice still lives somewhere in your memory years after she’s gone. You realise your whole life was actually made of tiny things nobody thinks to write down. And that rattled me more than the sure thought of dying did if I’m honest — the thought that eventually nobody would remember any of it properly. Not my brother falling through the shed roof drunk at sixteen. Not my father ruling the house with the seven kids with an iron fist. Not the girl I nearly married. Not the god awful rows. Not the craic of good nights out at the pub. Not the shame half this country dragged around silently for generations pretending everything was grand.
That’s why I’m writing this now. Not because I think I was important. I’m not or rather I wasn’t. I was just another Dub trying his level best half the time and making a complete balls of it the other half. But it was still a life. And before I disappear altogether, I’d like somebody to know the truth of it.