AROUND the middle of October I published a collection of columns with an autobiographical introduction and I was interviewed by Gay Byrne, on The Late Late Show about that account of my life. The conversation turned to loneliness. I admitted to being lonely, especially at times like Christmas. In fact, I said - with a bit of self-dramatisation - "I don't know how I'm going to get through Christmas."
From later that night, when several were put through the door of my house, the letters started coming in. Within a few weeks I'd had about 200, some of them very long. A few come every day, still, though now they're from people who have read the book. I have them in a special box I bought and I'm going to keep them with me till I die, and then they'll be destroyed without anyone else reading them.
Because they are private. Many of them are too intimate to quote from even anonymously. They are an archive of revelation. And of generous feeling. They seem to have come straight from people's hearts. I don't know what happened to Irish begrudgery - not a single one of these letters is begrudging, even when they're from people who do not at all see eye to eye with me. Getting these letters has been an extraordinary episode in my life. Opening my post has been a more warm and festive occasion than Christmas ever was.
I've been asked to real Christmas in Co Limerick: "My mother and I would be delighted to see you. Before during and after Christmas. Bring your dog.
In Glasnevin: "Never spend Christmas alone and sad. You have my number and address.
In Stillorgan: "You'll never be without a welcome in this house as long as my husband and I are alive.
In Co Cavan: "We would be delighted for you to come and spend Christmas with us or indeed any time you feel like coming."
In Newmarket-on-Fergus: "We do not possess any luxuries or a posh house but we can offer people who are feeling down and lonely a place in our home and hearts."
In Glenageary: "If you are looking for company this Christmas we live in a sizeable old house."
In Cork city: "The door will always be open to you in our house.
In Co Cork: "Our Christmas includes a spontaneously combusting Christmas pudding."
In Lisburn: "You need not walk alone at Christmas. There is a small room that is yours anytime you are visiting the North. My wife is very capable of making you at home and comfortable."
In Adare: "Join us and the ducks and the dogs and the hens. Sure - we're all strays."
In west Cork: "I am inviting you and your dog to spend Christmas. The area in which I live is rural. Chapel five minutes away, three bars within a two-mile radius."
AND I've been allowed glimpses of hidden lives. "Strange - it is my mother's anniversary and I had just come home after attending her anniversary Mass and I thanked God for her goodness and the gift of faith that she passed on to us. But your poor Mum RIP I reckon was drowning the heartache."
"Now that the children are growing up and away creating their own futures, I ask, where am I now? There exists that almost physical desire to feel needed."
"My paternal grandmother died and her husband sent the elder girl to some relatives and put my other aunt and my father aged three into two separate orphanages and he went to New Zealand and never came back."
"My mother once told me she was being eaten alive by her children and she would have died if she had not gone away."
"I am in the process of separating from my husband of 23 years. People ask me how I am going to cope without a partner but I've been without a partner for most of those 23 years so I'm not afraid facing that."
"My husband was really a fine man but I know now that when I married him it was really to produce for my mother and father my father was dying of cancer at the time.
"I work in a laundry and I did a survey of my co-workers and none of them would be where they are given the educational choices of today so you see you are lucky."
"I'm a man in my fifties also aware of the ticking biological clock who has felt the pain of being alone for Christmases, summers, Easters, and multiple hank holidays."
"I am living on my own in a bedsit for the past 13 years, my cat being the sole reliable company.
"Maybe we could meet for a chat; I could come up to Dublin for a day. I have a dog and could not leave him for longer."
"I have left loneliness behind as I share my life with a lovely woman - this is mine and my friend's first relationship and we are both in our fifties. Sorry I can't give you my address but I'm not `out'."
"The time I have felt most `whole' during the past couple of years was when I spent some time on Inis Mor."
"Last Christmas my mother was in hospital, I'd broken my arm and was told not to drive and neither my brother or sister asked me at the time or since what plans I had for Christmas Day."
"My Dad beat me a lot and then when remorse took over he'd buy me sweets and goodies. To this day I have an awful weight problem."
"Two of my daughters, brilliant graduates despite being a generation younger than your mother, fell in love and suffered the fate of all the thousands of women before them."
"When I had to go into a psychiatric hospital the shame was the worst thing. I hope that this country will help us tolerate and love each other in all our pain and imperfections."
"I enclose six short stories you may have time to read. I have been wondering what I should do with them (my husband suggested the dustbin).
"I have been blind nearly 12 years. Jesus has been a great friend to me and I just love him."
"...of the eight remaining children seven are alcoholic and a number are also drug dependant. All these absolutely beautiful babies my mother had - and we were all beautiful to look at - were systematically annihilated emotionally by our abusive father. I spent years being very angry at my mother because she didn't save us but now I realise that she really didn't have any choice. On one occasion she told the priest of the abuse and he advised her to go back to him. When she did leave, he totally cut her off financially."
My correspondents have shared their resources with me, as well as told me their stories. That last writer mentioned her son - "the most wonderful gift God has given me, and He has given me many gifts."
Another said: "I believe that God revealed himself to you in the presence of your friend who nurtured you through difficult times: the `Greater One' has love and care for you which surpasses all understanding."
Every kind of advice was offered. "Last year I went on a skiing trip to Bulgaria. I was 49 and had never skied before. A lot of people are snobby about Bulgaria but I found it grand."
"The book that has changed my life is Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy."
"A book that's brilliant is Return to Love by Marianne Williamson."
I shall offer one beat of my heart each day for your happiness.
I was sent tapes made by the visionary Vassula, tapes by the Jesuit Anthony de Mello given into my hand a book called The Art of Trust by Lee Jampolsky and offered the disk of an unpublished book called Unitary Perception by a Dr Ruben Feldman-Gonzalez, who himself knew Krishnamurti.
A letter enclosing articles says: "I came to metampsychosis over two years ago and I can see the change in myself."
"The De Silva method of dealing with stress helped me enormously."
"I think that our life is a mystery to us, but that it is always meaningful."
"What about the Blessed Sacrament chapel in Bachelor's Walk where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed?"
"Can I recommend The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck."
"I bring you the message that God loves you. And I love you."
"When one gets old and when there's a real need, there will be someone there to care for us."
From Mullingar, a woman sent a candle: "Tuesday is St Anthony's Day and if you say the novena and light the candle every Tuesday you will see your life change."
From Co Tipperary: "I went to a grand course on angels last year. I verily believe we will never go astray or be too bothered if we talk to our angels."
The idea that life is a quest for meaning and that its bad times are part of its meaning was everywhere. A dear teacher from my school days ended her letter: "Keep searching. You are nearly into port. But then you'll sail off again, somewhere exotic."
An old lady from Donegal scratched out a more traditional note: "You are such a nice girl. I just want you to know you are remembered in my prayers."
I will, as it happens, be on my own that week around Christmas. I'm taking the advice of the correspondent who told me to go to Bulgaria, so I expect to be falling around in the snow with other skiing beginners. I don't know how Christmas Day itself will feel in that place. But I will have at least one companion that morning - a stranger to me, but somehow known. This person wrote to tell me that reading my story made him "upset. Why? Because it reminded me of my life. The surprise in that (for me, if not for you) is that I'm neither middle-aged or female, I'm twenty-three and male."
This young man describes his life in rural Ireland with his mother and father, trying to understand "the meaning of my mother's house", and trying to find his voice, which is the more difficult for him because he is gay. "I don't have a voice. Of course, I could have a voice - a voice so loud it would deafen the people closest to me, and I suppose I could argue that this voice is more important than those people. Or I could keep my voice out of their earshot and probably tear myself apart building that balance. These are the kind of thoughts your book has evoked in me...
"Years ago I used to pray before I went to sleep. I'd say the usual lines and then I would imagine looking at myself from high above my house and I could see all the roads in the area shooting like spokes from a bicycle wheel away from my home, and I would see myself walking along the shining moonlit spokes, passing the houses of our neighbours, and I would ask God to bless each one of them and at the end I would say a special prayer for the people who had died inside each house. Now, I don't pray any more but most nights I make time to make a sort of mental inventory of people who have affected me in some way, be they dead or alive.
"I just want to say that you will be in my thoughts for quite a while. And next Christmas Day as I give your book to a friend you will be in my thoughts again."
So that young man's spirit and the spirits of all the people who went to the trouble of writing to me will be present to my spirit of Christmas Day. Technically, I'll be on my own. But only technically.
