The profession that he is in has changed. Its ideas of machismo have altered greatly and not just because his colleagues have become middle-aged. New attitudes are all the more apparent among the younger generation. He may not find Ireland an entirely pluralist society but at least he will find his countrymen and women broad-minded enough to know that we owe no explanations for what forms of pleasure or madness we deny ourselves. And he will also have a great time.
Getting It Right at the End
14 May 1994
Years ago, there was a different code. You went to see a friend who was terminally ill and you looked into the eyes which would not see for much longer and you swore that the person had never looked better. You could see a terrific improvement since the last visit, and it would be no time before everybody was as right as rain again. The more hearty and jovial the protestation, the better you thought the whole thing had gone. At least you felt you had handled the performance as it should have been done, and you were hugely relieved that nobody’s guard had broken down and there had been no danger of anyone saying anything important about life and the leaving of it.
We don’t know what they felt about it, the people who were at the receiving end of all this histrionic pretence that everything was normal. It might have been some consolation to them, but surely they saw through it. In the dark hours of the night, they must have wondered why there was no communication left between friends who had once talked about everything. Just when they needed real conversation most, they got reassurance, platitudes and, in fact, lies and this from friends who used to sit up until dawn to discuss the meaning of the universe, the future of art, and the likelihood of getting someone you fancied to fancy you. Why should it turn to ‘Ho ho ho, and aren’t you looking well today?’ It was because the well could not bear to admit the thought that the rest of the world was not well. So what do you do if a friend is terminally ill? You do not want to go in with a face like the tombstone they know is not far away. You might not wish to bring up unaccustomed spiritual reading, likely aphorisms or new thinking on reincarnation.
Last year I had a friend, who was given three months to live, and I asked him to tell me what were the best things people could do and what were the worst. He said that the very worst thing to do was to send a Get Well card, one with bunny rabbits crying into spotted handkerchiefs and saying, ‘Sorry to hear you are not so well.’ He used to look at these cards blankly and knew that they were the conditioned response and automatic reflex of people who meant desperately well, but who had to hide behind totally inappropriate greeting cards. He wanted to reply on another card, saying, ‘I’m trying, God damn it.’ But he didn’t. And he didn’t because he knew that the idiotic bits of card with hospital beds and sexy nurses and thermometers and bad puns hid the real message of sympathy and huge distress. He said that he really didn’t like people urging him to get another opinion and saying that it couldn’t do any harm. It would do harm, he thought, because it would waste time, the one thing there wasn’t much of left. He preferred people to call it cancer if they spoke of it at all, rather than use some euphemism, and he also wished that he didn’t have to spend so much time thanking people politely for their suggestions of healing crystals, prayers Never Known to Fail, or the laying on of hands by someone who lived half a continent away.
Those of us who knew him well and asked him how he wanted to do it were told. He wanted to remember the good, laugh at the funny, hear all the gossip, and try to be as normal as possible. Even though he could no longer eat, he wanted to come to restaurants with us and didn’t want to see anyone wince when he told the waiter he was on a diet. He said that three months was a terrific bit of notice to get. You could make all kinds of arrangements, ask people to take a book from your collection, burn incriminating letters, heal old enmities, and send postcards to people you admired. Once upon a time he had thought it would be good to die in his sleep or in a car crash. Something instantaneous. But there was a sense of time borrowed about this three-month sentence. Without being in the slightest maudlin, he said it was something we should all be lucky to get.
He said that he didn’t really like bunches of flowers, there was too much of the sick room and even the funeral parlour about them arriving in great quantities. But what he really liked was a rake of stamped postcards or a couple of colourful tracksuits which he could wear around the house, and a few videos to watch at night. He didn’t like letters telling him that lots of people had conquered this and surely he would too. But neither did he like the letters saying that he had a good innings and that, at 60, he had done everything. He wanted to be the judge of that. But he did love to hear from the many people he had known during his life, saying briefly that they had heard about his diagnosis and that they were sorry. Letters that then went on to say things he could hold on to, things about time well spent, marvellous places seen, and memories that would live forever. All this brought a smile to his face and made the tapestry richer and less laced with regret. He said that if at all possible, he would like there to be no tears, but he knew this was hard, and he didn’t mind unnaturally bright eyes, because he knew this was a sign of grief felt but bravely fought back. He could understand why some people hadn’t the guts to come and see him, but he wished they had.
It has taken me a year to get the courage to write down his advice to those who want to do their best for friends who are about to die. A year in which I have never ceased to admire his bravery and honesty and to believe that there may be a lot of it around if we could recognise it. We planted a rose tree, a Super Star, in his memory, and at last I feel the strength to pass on his advice to those who might learn from it.
For Tired Read Terrible
25 June 1994
It was a lovely sunny day on Bloomsday and I was sitting in the hallway of the Joyce Centre in Dublin, delighted with myself. Why wouldn’t I be? I was watching all the comings and goings, the people dressed up, the American tourists, the faces I hadn’t seen for years. I was waiting to do an interview and was given a glass of lager to pass the time. Not many people would be having as good a time on a Thursday afternoon at one-thirty, I said to myself.
And then a woman came in whom I used to know years ago, when we were young teachers. She was a very positive person then, I remember. She used to take her pupils on great trips to France, which they never forgot. She had amazing projects in her classroom, and she used to go around with a box on the back of her bicycle asking people who had gardens if she could have cuttings, and then she used to get the kids to plant them around the schoolyard.
She was a leader in everything, the first to give up smoking, the first to organise lunches where people were asked to contribute the price of a meal for the hungry, the first I knew to go to America for the summer and work as a camp counsellor. I had nothing but good memories of her.
She seemed glad to see me too, but then her face fell. ‘You look desperately tired,’ she said sympathetically. ‘Are you all right?’
Well, the sun went out of the day and the fun went out of the Joyce Centre and the taste went out of the glass of lager and the sense of being as free as a bird went out the window.
Tired is not a good thing to be told you look. Tired is terrible. And the really infuriating thing is that I was not tired, I had been in bed nice and early the night before. And I was tidy. Tired can often mean that you look like a tramp, but no, I had gotten all dressed up, complete with white collar, to be interviewed. And I wasn’t sweating or collapsing up flights of stairs. I was sitting calm as anything in the hall.
And if I was 25 years older than when we last met, so was she.
So, stupid as this may seem, I looked upset. I must have bitten my lip or may have looked as if I was going to burst into tears, because she said at once that she was sorry, and wanted to know what she had said.
‘I’m not tired,’ I said, like a big baby.
She tried to explain that tired was okay. We were entitled to be tired. By God, we had earned th
e right to it. We worked hard, we had done so much. It would be an insult if we weren’t tired.
She was backtracking, trying to dig herself out of it, I said.
No way, she insisted, and wasn’t I the touchy one trying to read other words into a perfectly acceptable observation, and more meanings than were implied in an expression of concern?
But what was she going to do about my tiredness? Suppose I had admitted it? Just suppose I had agreed that I was flattened by fatigue and had been waiting for someone to come in that door to identify it. What was her cure? Had she ginseng or Mother’s Little Helpers in her handbag? Did she have a personal fitness trainer, a protein diet, a Seventh Son or shares in a health farm?
We argued it away good-naturedly, as we had always argued in years gone by. She had always been a woman of strong views, a characteristic I admire. I have even remembered many of her maxims, such as ‘Avoid restaurants that have strolling musicians’, ‘Never play cards with a man named Doc’ and ‘Don’t resign before lunch’.
But what’s the point of telling someone that they look tired, even if you don’t mean it as a euphemism for old, ugly, unkempt or rapidly going downhill? Was it a kind of sympathetic come-on … expecting an answer along the lines of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen?
She was spirited about it. And she nearly won the argument.
Would I prefer, she wondered, if we were all to turn into those dinkleberries who greet each other with an effusion of insincere compliments: ‘Oooh, you look marvellous’ and ‘Oooh, you’ve lost loads of weight and honestly, I never saw you looking better, what have you been doing?’ The greetings and the compliments becoming like a ritual dance where the vain and the self-centred rake through a form of words, wondering if there is a ‘marvellous’ too few or an expression of astonishment not heightened enough. Surely we haven’t reached this stage?
But then, when she said tired, did she mean that as some sort of shorthand, to be a jovial punch on the shoulders between old mates, a kind of bonding between the worn out?
She thought about it.
She thinks she meant that she liked me from the old days, and it was good to see me again, and when she came upon me I had a serious expression on my face as I had been talking to a woman about her late husband and maybe she remembered me roaring about, not sitting down. And in a sense, she didn’t want to be one of those people who always said twitter twitter things and assumed other people had lives that were free of care. And on reflection, she said, now that we had argued the thing down to the bone, she would never as long as she lived tell another human being that they looked tired again.
Traveller’s Tales – The Call of the Check-In Desk
3 September 1994
Two years ago I went around the world, heading west into the sun all the time, and I loved every bit of it, except the two and a half days in Las Vegas and the memory of an unmerciful row in Los Angeles Airport. Looking back, I don’t know how we did it. If it’s Monday it must be Arizona, if it’s oysters at five pence each, it must be Auckland, if it’s police horses with red tinsel necklaces, it must be Christmas Eve in Sydney. If it’s people playing tinkling music and wearing flowers in their hair, it must be Bali. And this for two people who normally sit with two small cats looking at the television at night, or else in other people’s houses, staring mystified at bridge hands and wondering how many points you need to respond to a call of ‘one diamond’.
So now the urge has come again: the call of the check-in desk, the unpacking in strange hotel rooms, the day tour of a new city, the heat in October, the factor 15 sun lotion in November, the postcards home, meeting friends in far-off lands, the sense of something new going to happen every day, the writing of a weekly travel diary, of working out what possible time it could be at home if I wanted to ring the family or friends. I want to read newspapers again in different countries, obsessed with different issues, utterly unaware of our concerns. I’m looking forward to celebrating other people’s festivals and thanksgivings, lamenting their political systems and weeping over their ludicrous weather forecasts, where Met men and women look into the entrails and forecast, in different accents, sunny periods with some showers or showery periods with some sun and get paid salaries for doing this.
I don’t have four and a half months to examine the world this time, only about half as long, in fact. But I met a marvellous couple last week in County Clare, who told me they were doing the entire cosmos in three weeks and they found it a satisfactory kind of undertaking. The secret is having early nights everywhere, they confided, and drinking a lot of fluids – mainly bottled water – and not going to any country where the people were in any way hostile to your people.
Boastfully I mentioned that I was in the habit of touring the cosmos myself, and they wanted to know my secrets. These were different secrets; they had nothing to do with early nights, bottled water and wondering whether anyone would be hostile to my people. They had a lot to do with only meeting people you wanted to meet, seeing things you thought you would like rather than you should like, late nights and much bottled wine. I told them happily about packing half-a-dozen Ella Fitzgerald and Liam O’Flynn tapes – great for evenings far away – about bringing a small torch, having nothing that needed ironing and always going to airports an hour early to keep the blood pressure down. They looked at me steadily and thanked me for sharing this with them.
Younger friends wondered why would I visit a lot of the same places again when there were so many new places left to see. It’s hard to explain that if a dozen Australian sunrises are good, then two dozen are better, if laughing all night with great friends thousands of miles away was good in 1992, it should be just as good in 1994, and would not be long enough this time either. Last time I missed a general election, which was heart-breaking, but good friends sent faxes with essential information like the results of each count in Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown – good deeds like that will never be forgotten.
I have four weeks before I go, and now that I’m not in the business of dishing out advice any more, I’d love to receive some – if you have any ideas about travelling light or making things easier in some way, it would be great to hear from you. Nothing about travelling irons please, or sheets of tissue paper to make sure the creases fall out. No hints about putting jewellery in hotel safes; this would fall on deaf ears. I had four great dresses made by a friend of mine, who is actually a rather important person in costume design in a theatre. I gave her one dress as a sample, and asked her if she could find an assistant or a student who would make four like it, the only requirements being no discussion about it, no fittings and no ironing. She said she had to make them herself because she spent her working life telling others that you must discuss everything down to the bone, have a fitting twice a day and never use these horrible synthetic fabrics, but have everything natural and crushable. Her entire credibility would have been shot to pieces if it were known that she had a friend with such base requirements.
But out there, somewhere, there are people with marvellous ideas, like the journalist who told me that when you bought books abroad you should send them home by surface mail, which costs hardly anything and then they arrive as a lovely surprise weeks later when you’d forgotten about them. A photographer who told me that if I wanted great holiday snaps, I should look first at the main postcards of wherever I was and go to where they were taken, since these were the guys who had figured out the best angle to take the shot. And since there should be a pool of brilliant travellers’ ideas, I’ll publish some of the ones that appeal to me most.
Last time I went looking at the cosmos I swore I would be better informed when I went to examine it again; I would know intelligent things about the places I was going to visit. But, somehow, two years passed by and I never got informed. I greatly look forward to hearing any advice which might be put into practice during my second crack at the cosmos.
Love’s Last Day Out
11 February 1995
The l
ast Thursday of every month, their mother came to Dublin for an outing. There was a day excursion fare and if you got to the station nice and early you got a great seat on the train. Then, at what she still called Kingsbridge, one of her daughters met her. This was Jenny, the daughter who didn’t go out to work. They would meet Nuala, the daughter who did go out to work, at lunchtime.
It was a wonderful routine, never broken over the years, except when one of Jenny’s babies was inconveniently born in the last week of a month and once when their mother had a chest infection. The outing took the same form always. Jenny would drive down the quays, and her mother would cluck at the changes she saw on every visit. It had all been altered, the implication being for the worse, but they knew it wasn’t since last month or last year; their mother was thinking of 30 or 40 years ago, when the world was young.
Jenny would then park and her mother would sigh at the way so many people brought their cars into town for no reason at all. And then they would head for Brown Thomases. It was always said in the plural; if you said it in the singular it meant you didn’t know it. It was like people who said St Stephen’s Green. The tour took two hours, never less. In fact, Jenny thought that had the time been available it might have taken all day. Her mother stood at the front door and sighed with pleasure. Everything that lay ahead was like a wonderland. In a changing world this place remained as it always was, a temple of comfort and luxury.
They would start at the cosmetics counters. Mother knew a lot of the elegant women who demonstrated and sold the various fragrances and creams. Well, she didn’t really know them but she remembered them from visit to visit. ‘When I was here last month you were telling me about this new firming cream for the throat,’ she might say to one. They were invariably helpful and interested and often gave her a spray of something new and very sophisticated that had just come in. Years ago there had been a very nice woman called Caroline Mahon who mother had got to know. She had wept and sent a letter to the store when she read of Caroline’s death in the paper. But all these girls were very helpful and took all the time in the world. Which, as Jenny said grimly, was more than duty required since her mother’s face, with its dusting of face powder and merest touch of lipstick, was not going to be an arena on which the great cosmetic wars of the world could be fought and won.
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