Ó Faoláin’s candour

“In this delusional world the chimera of intimacy is cheap and confessions are a penny a dozen”

Speaker’s Corner
Aine Ryan

DEATH. What a morbid subject. To be frank, it’s not one I would normally choose to write about. I’m such a coward, I used to close my eyes when the television ad came on where the little old lady welcomes the Grim Reaper into her house and makes him tea and scones. 
My goodness, wasn’t it so brave of Nuala Ó Faoláin to look death straight in the eye in that shockingly moving radio interview with Marian Finucane. How courageous of her to call it as it is. Incurable cancer. An ‘ingenious enemy’. Tumours on her brain, lungs, liver. 
But why was the entire nation transfixed by this interview with a 67-year-old woman who is dying? Was it because of the tremor, the catch, in her voice? Was it because of the sense of intimacy portrayed in her dramatic story?
Only partially, in my opinion.
After all, haven’t we become inured by a daily diet of tacky tabloid exposés in which no personal boundary seems sacred. Surely the rash of so-called ‘reality television’ has, as good as, paled the primal rituals of the Roman Colosseum into insignificance.  
In this delusional world the chimera of intimacy is cheap and confessions are a penny a dozen. The voyeurism of tacky peep-shows has been replaced by You-Tube recordings of a Dublin teenager having sex, or a live television broadcast of a beheading.
The global village which we inhabit has vicariously become a virtual world, in which reality is choreographed, manipulated, edited and air-brushed.
Crucially, the reason Nuala Ó Faoláin’s interview had a deep impact – hit a national nerve – was because of its un-orchestrated genesis; its candid questioning; its raw honesty; its self-depreciatory insights; its rightful anger; its feminine intuition; its deep and complex humanity.
 Clearly, there was no spin-doctor in the background writing the unfolding narrative of this premature epitaph. Nor was there any wordsmith or editor painting that transparent gloss which banishes sincerity in favour of saleability. 
The only doctor that figured – hauntingly – was that insensitive one on that impersonal, cold and lonely A&E corridor in the New York hospital where her cancer was first diagnosed a mere two months ago. Ó Faoláin was simply there because her right leg had dragged a little after an exercise class. Then this faceless medic casually doled out her death sentence, as he passed her on the corridor. “Oh your cat scans show you’ve got two brain tumours and we’re going to do x-rays to see where they’re from. They’re not primaries.”
All alone, she tried to digest this damning news. Up until that moment, the best-selling author had ‘a terrific life’; in the room in New York with the silk curtains, the collections of books, the open fire; with her friend John; music; restaurants; a new writing project; perhaps a fellowship; Ireland; the cottage in Clare.
“I couldn’t deal with it. I was so shocked that I would pay attention to anything except to what I’d just been told. It took me a long time to work my way a little bit out of shock,” she told Marian.
Deciding against chemotherapy, Ó Faoláin confided she was suffused by feelings of ‘impotence’, ‘wretchedness’ and ‘sourness with life’, fear. 
Categorically dismissing the concept of an afterlife, she conceded, however, that the notion of God, ‘well, that was a different matter’.
“Somehow, you know, I don’t know how we all get away with our unthinkingness. Often last thing at night I’ve walked the dog down the lane and you look up at the sky illuminated by moon, and, behind the moon, the Milky Way, and you know you’re nothing on the edge of one planet compared to this universe unimaginably mysterious [and] vast up there,” she replied.
For this writer, Ó Faoláin’s candour was infused by a beautiful naivety. It was devoid of any artifice, any prescribed doctrine about dying. That was why it moved us so deeply.