What Happens When the Heart Just Stops?

I thought for sure that I’d be writing here this issue about the Anglo Irish gang and the farcical revelations in the tapes published last week by the Irish Independent.

The Indo did what every newspaper and TV station in the world wants to do: they got the scoop. Hats off to them.
Every day, new levels of depravity were revealed among a group that had, just a few years back, been lionised as Ireland’s banking elite. It was like a rolling goon show.
It wasn’t just that they were exposed as parasites. Nor that the tapes confirmed what we already suspected: that they had behaved in a grossly irresponsible way throughout the entire process of dumping their debts on Irish citizens. Nor indeed that they acted like low-grade playground bullies, along the way. All of that was boys’ club stuff. Childish. Ridiculous. Laughable if it hadn’t had such appalling consequences for Irish citizens.
No. What I had planned to write about was the extraordinary witlessness which it revealed. And to use that as a springboard to discuss the outrageous salaries paid to the titans of Irish banking, not just then but now. Some of these guys were still employed by Anglo Irish Banks until relatively recently in its new guise as IRBC and were being paid ludicrously inflated money.
And for what?
I don’t mean to be unkind. But they were paid between ten and twenty times the average industrial wage for being so phenomenally stupid that they would carry out conversations of the kind that are now in the public domain over telephone lines they knew were being recorded. I intended to have a bit of fun with this, while also making serious points about the sheer craziness of the extent to which the banking elite had duped the political establishment here into believing that they were some kind of latter-day messiahs.
And then a different and far more visceral kind of reality intervened...
Last Friday morning, the call came. My mother, Peggy Stokes, had died at 8am in Leopardstown Hospital, on the south side of Dublin.
Peggy was born in 1919. We celebrated her 94th birthday in the hospital with her on February 3. It was a lovely occasion: tired as she was, she was happy to have her children and grandchildren around her. She blew out the candles on the cake, with a little bit of assistance from the youngest ones. She widened her eyes in wonder at being the centre of attention and talked and laughed and ate a bit of what was going. Eventually she felt wound down and was taken back to the ward to sleep.
Since then, the light had been growing dimmer. And finally, just after she had been wakened by the morning crew, the batteries ran out for the last time. She closed her eyes, never to open them again. To sleep the long sleep.
I drove out to Leopardstown with Máirín when I heard the news and we went into the small room where she had been staying. The nurses and the staff in the hospital were very kind and considerate throughout the last few months, knowing that the end was coming, as we all did. And so the hugs they offered were totally genuine and from the heart...
Peggy lay there, entirely still. Her hair, recently cut and styled, was pushed back from her face and I saw in her the warrior she had been, like one of the elders of a native American tribe. Her face was still strong and beautiful, wearing her 94 years relatively lightly. But time had done its cruel work: we had known that it would be a release for her when the moment came. And now that the marathon was over, it was with a sense of deep relief for her, as well as sadness for everyone who would mourn her, that I leant down to kiss her forehead.
How strange that sensation is! I thought of my father Maurice, who died a relatively young man in 1990, and the brothers Colm, Conor and Kevin, who we buried along the way, and the different, tragic circumstances in which I had done the same thing: given one last cold kiss to a departing brother, colleague, friend, loved one. And I thought of Bill Graham of this parish too, and the fierce sadness into which we were plunged by his loss. But even now, having experienced death first-hand often enough not to be too disastrously unmoored, there was something shocking in the recognition still: the life that Peggy’s parents, Patrick Joseph McKenna from Dun Laoghaire in Dublin and Sarah Moran from Caherlistrane in Galway, had given her all those years ago, creating a new and wonderful person out of their shared love, and the warmth and the energy that flowed through her veins ever since, was now at a final, non-negotiable end. What happens when the heart just stops? The blood had ceased to flow. As the song says, there was a hollow in her chest. And the cold earth was calling her, calling her, calling her...
I looked up, and out the window above the bed – and right there, captured by the window frame, were the television and radio masts of Ticknock. And the memories flooded back of the wonderful story that Peggy had written, well into her seventies, and which the Irish Independent published.
It was about the day that Maurice proposed to her. The detail is for another time. But – always a romantic at heart – he called for her at her home in Londonbridge Road in Sandymount, driving a Lancia Bugatti that he and his co-conspirators had repaired in the panel-beating shop he had started to commit his life to. “Would you like to come for a spin?” he asked her, and in all innocence she agreed.
They took a sort of inverse scenic route, heading into town first, towards O’Connell Bridge, before shifting south and driving all the way to the mountains, the engine roaring up to the crest of Ticknock. Looking down on the city they had both grown up in, he proposed by singing a song to her – and she said yes. And everything that followed followed – taking us through millions of chaotic and utterly unpredictable twists and turns to this very moment.
I had to smile. It was a beautiful, bittersweet backdrop against which to take into my heart the realisation that one last anchor had been ripped away from all of us: my brother and sisters Dermot, Philomena, Siobhán and Mary and indeed all of the rest of the greater Stokes and McKenna families.
Peggy and Maurice – and all of their brothers and sisters – came from a generation that was born into a country on the cusp of independence. In so many ways they carried the burden of creating a nation, of building a Republic, of which they hoped we could be proud. Many mistakes were made along the way. Things could have been done differently and better.
But no matter how badly things were twisted at times in the shaping of the new Ireland, what we can say of Maurice and Peggy and their extended family – on the Stokes side Seán, Tom, Vera, Maurice, Pearse and Anna and on the McKenna side Lily, Tommy, Nick, Ralph, Peggy, Jimmy, Carmel and Bernadette – and more generally of the good citizens of Ireland of that era, is that they were honest, decent, generous, hard working, idealistic people, who spent and ultimately gave their lives trying to do their best for the country, for its people and for their own children. Our responsibility now is to carry those essential values forward, emulating the good things as best we can and casting off any sneaking meanness of spirit, narrow-mindedness or misplaced sanctimoniousness, of the kind that poisoned the water here for so long.
And so, we will take the last of her generation to Glasnevin cemetery to say our final, heartfelt goodbyes. Peggy and Maurice gave us not just the gift of life, but the gift of love. As long as we live, we will be grateful for everything. Thank you. And sleep well...