Life and death. There is no bigger issue. And so it is terrible and strange, and often heart-burstingly sad, when we are confronted with the mortality of someone we know, someone who means a lot to us.

It is especially cruel when it comes at you sideways, unexpectedly. A fatal accident, a suicide, a heart attack that cuts someone down in their prime. Or maybe, worse still, an illness that has quietly gone too far, something that might have been treated successfully if it had been caught in time but which now has got an iron grip. Christ. Fuck. If only. We all know that feeling of monumental impotence and the towering sense of frustration and regret that goes with it…
Cancer. Sometimes it is people’s bravery, their stoicism, their composure, that allows it to gain too tight a foothold. They don’t complain. They don’t look for help. They think they’ll be OK, they’ll beat whatever the creeping feeling of dislocation is that’s coming at them, on and off, like an unwelcome apparition. Then, when they do finally get to see a doctor, it’s too far gone.
Thus it was with Nuala O Faoláin. There was something uniquely brave and brilliant about her response to the news that she had terminal cancer. By going on the radio, to talk to Marian Finnucane about it on RTE Radio 1, she acted in a way that was thoroughly in keeping with a life spent bearing witness, as a feminist, a journalist and a writer. Nuala is a naturally big-hearted and gracious woman, someone genuinely warm, who values feelings and emotions, and who was always interested in what other people had to say. But the flip side of this is that, in the long run, she was not shy about telling her own story, something she did in a way that was laced with the grit and grime, as well as the tenderness and deer-rooted tolerance, of hard-earned truth.
As it transpired, Nuala was happy, even in advancing middle-age, to do a lot of her growing up in public. In doing so, she added greatly to our collective knowledge of how people – and Irish people in particular – think, feel and act; the demons that haunt and drive them; and the capacity that we all have – as she had – both to make mistakes and to grow into better and wiser people by acknowledging them.
All of that dedication to putting the best parts of ourselves out there into the public domain, the better to help others, informed her decision to talk openly about the experience of facing up to death – and, perhaps the hardest part, of facing up to it essentially on her own.
In the course of what was a hugely compelling and very moving interview, Nuala said many things from which we can learn about the nature of human life. It was typical of her that even in her lowest public moment, she achieved the almost impossible feat of doing something good, useful, worthwhile – and ultimately, perversely you might say, life-affirming.
Nuala was brutally honest, and incredibly stark in much of what she had to say. She explained that she was taken aback by the extent to which the things which she had valued were drained of their goodness once she knew of her death sentence. What did any of it matter: the beautiful curtains that she had spent time choosing and putting up, the lovely view that she had from her room, all the things she had planned to do? “It amazed me,” she said, “how quickly life turned black.” It had, indeed, all been in the eye of the beholder and now that this eye was jaundiced by the realisation that it was all over – or almost over – the flimsy construct of what seems to matter fell away…
She also confronted the issue of God and religion. Nuala was unequivocal about the fact that she did not believe that there is life after death. That there is no God out there, taking an interest in human affairs. So often, faced with death, people crumble back to the old superstitions, fall prey to a weak-kneed acquiescence in the illusion that life goes on elsewhere. Nuala was having none of it. Other people might derive comfort from imagining that it does. She wouldn’t begrudge them. But there is nothing. This really is it.
And of course she is right.
Far from being a hopeless philosophy, once you embrace this realisation, then every moment that we are here, together on earth, takes on more meaning and greater value. Life is not about accumulating points for some imagined future benefit, in another realm. A one-act play, it is about seizing the moment, and doing as much as we possibly can in the here and now to shape the world, to make things better, to share the love, to enjoy ourselves and provide enjoyment for others – and to leave behind us, for those that follow, as our children surely do, the greatest possible body of work that we can get through to make their lives better.
We live on, precisely through what we do, and what we achieve, and what we leave behind in this life. And that is enough.
It is of course only a small consolation facing into the finality of what is so imminent for her, but Nuala O Faoláin can rest assured that she will live on and be remembered for a long, long time for what she has done – as a writer, as a public figure and as a singularly brave, generous and loving person. Now that is the kind of life after death that has real meaning…