When I was a kid, our family holidays would be spent in and around Castlebar. It was a tortuous trek: a six-hour drive from London to Holyhead, made all the more excruciating by me playing the role of the are-we-there-yet child. I’d usually start long before we even reached Wales.
Yet the exhaustive length of the journey never stemmed my excitement, and to this day I can still hear the metallic clanging of the ferry, smell the tang of diesel and grease.
It was always Castlebar because that’s where my mother’s sister lived, along with her husband and five children. We’d go on day trips to beaches around Mayo or visit Killala, where my mother and my aunt were originally from. My father would team up with another uncle and they’d nip off to the Galway races.
Of the five cousins, the youngest two were babies back then, so my sister and I spent most of our time with the three eldest. All brothers. Although we came from one of the biggest cities in the world, it was the three brothers who seemed more sophisticated. They were confident and funny and played music and seemed to have a more complete sense of who they were and where they came from.
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Their lives took different directions, though for all of them music and a tendency for yarn-spinning had a central place. They were instinctive storytellers
I’m sure it did, but I can’t remember it ever raining when we were in Castlebar. We’d walk down the town with our cousins: something our mother would never have dreamed allowing us to do in London. It was exotic, but also familiar: as the children of emigrants to England, we were of both places; neither one thing nor the other.
These memories have, of course, something of a golden hue to them now. But I also have the odd sensation that the older I get, the more recent they seem: like time doesn’t move in a straight line at all but loops around itself continually. My childhood holidays in Castlebar feel like they were a million years ago. Or last week.
The three brothers are all dead now. Their lives took different directions, though for all of them music and a tendency for yarn-spinning had a central place. They were instinctive storytellers. And all three died in similarly cruel circumstances: a sudden cancer diagnosis, the disease travelling quickly through them. The funeral of the last of them, the eldest, was a few weeks back: the day of the Parnell Square attack and the riots when Dublin burned. He was cremated, so he probably would have found a joke in there somewhere.
The worth of a person lies not just in how they lived their life, but how they faced the end of it.
All three of them reached a point in their illness when they knew nothing could be done; and all three reacted to this in the same way. They were still relatively young men, yet they didn’t become bitter or curse their genetic ill-fortune. They opted to remain themselves, to be funny and charming and tell stories. Perhaps they were putting on a brave face. Perhaps they didn’t want to add to the anguish of their families. But I suspect – or I like to think – that the imminence of death also brought them to realise the importance of continuing to be who they were, of living their lives in the best way they knew how.
From his bed in the hospice, the eldest made all the practical arrangements himself. He sold a fishing boat. He attended a wedding. And although he had a long career in the music industry and countless friends and admirers, he opted for a private funeral service. He said he wanted to get certain things arranged, and then he didn’t want to hang around.
He had an Indian and glass of wine with his family, and the following day he died. It’s a test that will, eventually, be presented to all of us. The worth of a person lies not just in how they lived their life, but how they faced the end of it.