28 Jul 2008
June column - Nuala O'Faoláin
Nuala O’Faoláin died
last month, mourned by many in our community and in all sections of Irish life.
A month before her death she appeared on Marion Finucane’s radio programme and
spoke as people rarely speak about dying, starting a discussion of death which
is sorely needed in this country.
We think we’re pretty good at death, because we acknowledge it and turn
out to funerals even of people we don’t know very well, but we’re not really
good at it at all. “I’m sorry for your trouble,” we say, but we’re not great
about allowing people to grieve, and get quite annoyed if grief continues to
overwhelm someone after what we regard as an appropriate time. Above all, we
don’t talk about the pain of people who are looking death in the face, who know
they are going to die soon. We all know we’re going to die, but for some,
especially the young, it’s pure theory. Once death has waved a bony finger in
our faces as it carries off someone we love, that knowledge is stitched into
us, but as Nuala succinctly put it, “there is an absolute difference between
knowing that you are likely to die, let's say within the next year, and not
knowing when you are going to die – an absolute difference.”
Nuala O’Faoláin was not resigned to her approaching death, as we
comfortably hope the dying will be. Still comparatively young, she had made a
rich and productive life for herself between Ireland and New York, and seemed
to have moved beyond the disappointment she expressed in her first memoir, Are
You Somebody? Yet she chose not to submit to further
treatment which could not cure, but palliate and lengthen life by a few months,
“because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of
life.” Beauty and her love of
nature ceased to have meaning for her, and she could no longer read anything
more taxing than a magazine.
Yet in her last weeks she travelled, tasting for the last time
wonderful, life-enhancing things – Schubert in New York, Velazquez in the
Prado, a breakfast of coffee and tartine in a Paris café – stealing pleasures sick people are not supposed to be
up to. She made peace with her ex-partner, Nell McCafferty, refused to give a
damn about someone who had treated her unkindly, marvelled at “the inexplicable
goodness of family and friends”. And she wept for her beloved New York room and
its beautiful yellow silk curtains. She spent her last days ‘saying goodbye’ to
the lovely world which was being snatched from her, without any compensating
belief in an afterlife, lamenting the waste of the knowledge and experiences
which would die with her: “It seems such a waste of creation that with each
death all that knowledge dies.”
Dylan Thomas would have been proud of her rage against the dying of the
light, but it wasn’t comfortable for many of those who heard it. We long for
meaning in our lives, and O’Faoláin insisted on her right to feel that there
was none for her any more.
The language of the
press has sometimes been so hackneyed (‘Brave Nuala’ was perhaps the most
crass) that it seems like an insult to the woman who wrote so fastidiously and
with such honesty. It is a marker, perhaps, of how hard it was for some people
to hear what she said. The language of blogs and responses to them was often
equally stilted and impoverished, but also revealed a touching distress and
sympathy for O’Faoláin. More than one person offered to go to New York to fetch
the curtains, missing the point, you’d have thought, yet affirming the value of
the small, beloved things which break the hearts of those who have to leave
them.
I only knew one
person who was resigned to dying. She was 85, and had outlived all her siblings
and many of her friends; she was not strong, and had made preparations for her
death before her final illness, winding up her affairs, handing on to younger
members of the family memories of those who had died, or had become distant.
Her nieces and nephew were able to nurse her at home with the support of her
GP, and before she slipped quietly away she was able to say goodbye to the
many, many people who knew and loved her – a good death, you would say, after a
life well lived. The manner of her
dying comforted those of us who were left behind, yet I remember a change, a
sense that she had moved beyond us, knew something we did not. Thanks to Nuala
O’Faoláin, I have an inkling of what that was.