The Last Goodbye (29 page)

“But that’s it then – it’ll be curtains for me, won’t it?”

“Well, I don’t like to be bleak but yes . . . usually the end of life isn’t too far away at that stage.”

“How will it happen?”

“Do you mean, what is the next stage?”

I nodded.

“Well, usually after the patient comes in for pain relief, they tend to sleep a lot more and gradually sleep most of the time and after that stage it is usually a matter of days. If it helps, they usually pass peacefully.”

“But there must be something you can do – there has to be something?” Noel said. “Some new treatment or therapy or even a clinical trial drug? There must be nearly a cure for cancer at this stage. With all those degrees you have up on the wall there, there has to be something you can do!”

“I’m afraid not, Noel. While we have made great progress in fighting the disease in recent years, there is still so much that we don’t know about it and in Eva’s case it’s too far advanced. I’m sorry.”

“What about radiation treatment? You haven’t tried that!” He banged his fist on the desk and I jumped in my chair.

“Unfortunately in Eva’s case the cancer is so advanced that the levels of radiation required would be too much for her body to take,” Doctor O’Keeffe said softly.

When I got out to the car park I had to run to be sick into a flowerbed. The shock and devastation started to hit me. We sat into the car but Noel didn’t start the engine. We both just sat there staring straight ahead at the drops of rain running in rivulets down the windscreen in front of us.

I felt a sheer overwhelming sense of injustice and anger. This wasn’t fair. I was a good person, wasn’t I? I didn’t deserve this – my family didn’t deserve this!

“I’m not ready to die, Noel,” I whispered. He leaned over across the gearstick and held me in his arms. “I feel so robbed. I’m being cheated out of my future – the kids’ future. I won’t get to help Kate over a broken heart or watch Patrick try on his secondary-school uniform for the first time. Or Seán when he scores a goal in the County Final. Or get open-mouthed kisses from Aoife and watch her take her shaky first steps . . . Or dab calamine lotion on red chicken-pox welts. Everything. I’m going to miss out on so much . . . And I’m scared of what lies ahead for me . . .”

“It’s okay to be scared – I’m scared too, Eva. I want to hit out and shout at God or whoever is taking you away from me. It’s not the way it was meant to be. We were meant to raise the kids and then kick back ourselves, maybe go to visit your sister in New York or go to see the Eiffel Tower like you always talked about.”

“Oh God, Noel, how on earth are we going to tell the kids?”

On the drive home, I watched the trees, now bare, whizz by the window. The cycle of life continued – the leaves that had budded in spring, grown leafy and green through the summer and shed their leaves in autumn, were now dead. Exactly like me except I had never had a chance to reach the winter of my life or even the autumn. We decided to tell the three of them together. We felt it would be better to do it united as a family and hopefully they could help each other through it.

“Your mam and I need to talk to you all,” Noel said when they were all gathered around after dinner that evening.

Aoife was sleeping peacefully in her crib. She was such a placid child, God bless her. She slept and ate and you didn’t hear a thing out of her in between.

“What is it?” Patrick asked.

“Well . . . we got some bad news today, I’m afraid.”

“What?” Kate asked. I could hear the panic in her voice.

I took a deep breath and said, “I’m afraid I haven’t got much longer to live.”

“What?” they all asked in unison.

“But you can’t – what’s wrong with you? You seem fine!” Patrick said.

It was hard for them to see it. They saw me looking a bit thin and hair gone but otherwise going about as normal. They couldn’t see through my body to where this cancer was eating me up on the inside.

“I’m afraid I have cancer and it has spread.”

“I knew you shouldn’t have had her!” said Kate.

“Who? Do you mean Aoife?”

“If you didn’t have her none of this would have happened.”

“But Aoife didn’t cause me to get cancer!”

“No, but you could have started treatment earlier – I heard you and Dad talking about it – I’m not stupid, you know. You think you whisper these things and
‘Oh, we won’t tell the kids’
but we know everything going on. You’re selfish.” She was pointing her finger just inches from my face. “I heard Dad telling you that you had to take the treatment but you chose Aoife over the rest of us.”

I could see the worried faces of Patrick and Seán looking at me in confusion, not really understanding what was going on, but wondering if what Kate was saying was true all the same.

“I didn’t choose Aoife over anyone – I just wanted to give her the best chance. It was a horrible decision to have to make. I really didn’t think it was cancer, Kate – I thought it was benign and that it would all be okay and any risk to Aoife was unnecessary – but I was wrong.”

“Yeah, but even if you knew it was cancer, would you have taken the treatment when you were pregnant?”

I said nothing.

“Well, would you?” Her index finger moved even closer to my face and her eyes were wide with rage.

“Probably not, if I’m honest.”

“See! You obviously don’t give a damn about me or Patrick and Seán – Aoife has caused all of this. You’re a selfish bitch!”

“Kate – do not speak to your mother like that!” Noel thundered.

“Or what? You heard what she said – she’s not going to be around for much longer so it doesn’t matter what I say to her any more.” She stormed out of the room.

I could see Noel blazing, about to go after her.

“Leave her, Noel – she’s just angry.”

“Mammy, are you really dying?” Seán asked, tears welling up in his eyes.

“I’m sorry, love, I’m so sorry.” I snuggled my son into my chest and breathed him in.

“But who will look after us?”

“Daddy will. And Granny will help out too.”

“But I need my mammy.”

I wiped my tears away before they fell into his hair.

“Patrick, are you okay, love? I know it’s a lot to take in.”

He hadn’t said a word since Kate’s outburst. Patrick was the serious one of the three. He was the thinker and he would internalise his feelings.

“When will it happen?” he asked.

“The doctor thinks in few weeks.”

“But what about my confirmation?”

It was taking place in February, less than five months away.

“You’re going to have a lovely day and your daddy will make it extra special. And I’ll be there watching over you. I’ll make sure the sun is shining for you.”

“Are you scared, Mam?” Seán asked me. He was fiddling with the gold cross on my neck.

“No. Sure what have I got to be scared of? Aren’t I going to a better place where you can eat all the chocolate and sweets you want and you won’t get fat and you can play outside all day long because it never rains.”

He smiled at me, his innocent face looking up at mine in wonderment.

“Can you get Monster Munch there?”

“Absolutely, all the Monster Munch you can dream of.”

I spent the next few days under a black cloud. I just couldn’t stop crying, I would spend hours alone in my room because I didn’t want anyone to see me upset and then I would feel so guilty for spending the last few days of my life stuck down in my bedroom alone instead of with the people that I loved and I would feel even worse then.

I would cradle Aoife and stare down at her delicate perfection but then I would hand her back to Mam or Noel again just as quick. If I was honest with myself I was afraid to get too close to her because I was going to be taken away from her soon. It was better that she formed a bond with the people who would be there to look after her when I was gone. I also hoped, maybe a bit selfishly, that it would make it easier on me too when the time came to say goodbye. So even though it killed me and went against all my natural maternal instincts to leave my newborn out of my arms, I would hand her over to someone else and pretend that I needed to go and do something. Mam would say something like “Would you just sit down and rest, for God’s sake?” and put Aoife into my arms again but I began to get good with my excuses. I think Mam thought that I was angry with Aoife because, when it came down to it, I had essentially sacrificed my life for her, but that wasn’t it at all. I still didn’t regret my decision to forgo treatment but I felt angry that both of us couldn’t live. That was cruel. It was hard to rationalise why I would be given a baby when I was going to be taken away from her before she even had a chance to know who I was. That just didn’t make any sense to me.

Kate was avoiding me. She was gone from dawn until dusk, out with Aidan or her friends. If I did see her she would swerve past me to get out of the room. She was so angry and I wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t sure how to handle it and I didn’t want to spend my last days fighting with her.

Noel was spending a lot of time out on the land. I knew it was too hard for him to be around me. This was how he coped and I had to let him do it but I felt so lonely and isolated. My heart broke whenever I looked at him and I felt guilty because he was going to be left on his own to raise four children and try and make a living off the farm. It was only when we were in bed at night that he would take me in his arms and we would talk about what would happen after I was gone. Afterwards he would fall asleep and I would lie awake into the early hours, my mind whirring in anger at the injustice of it all. I’d had so much energy and fight when the mass was first discovered back in that first scan but over the last few months, as well as growing rampantly throughout my body, it had eroded my spirit.

Word had obviously started filtering through the village that I wasn’t well – neighbours and old school friends and people I would have known when Kate was in primary school – people I hadn’t seen in years – had started calling over to visit me. There were new people every day. It forced me to put on a brave face because I knew they would be awkward and embarrassed if I got upset or let them know that it got me down. I would hold court and offer a plate of biscuits and I knew that they were wondering to themselves whether I was really terminally ill at all. If I appeared calm and accepting it was much easier for all of us.

The pain was getting worse. I now had difficulty getting up out of a chair or walking. Spasms would grip my abdomen like a vice. I knew it was only a matter of time before I would need to go into the hospice and then, well, I didn’t want to think about what came next . . .

Chapter 41

I don’t know at what stage I accepted what was happening to me but I no longer felt like there was a raging battle inside my head. I didn’t want to waste another minute of the time I had left being sad and depressed. The fight was gone. But I was still frightened about what lay ahead for me – the fear of the unknown – what would it feel like to die? Would I be aware of it? Was there such a thing as life after death? I knew my mother would balk at that one. I tried to push the fears back out of my head as soon as they surfaced and instead I focused on enjoying the simple things. I was too exhausted to go anywhere so that ruled out doing things like making a last-ditch effort to see bits of the country that I had never seen before like the Giant’s Causeway, but I was able to enjoy long chats reminiscing with friends or when Noel and I recalled funny things the kids did when they were small. Like the time Patrick had said he told us he was running away and when we looked inside his sports bag to see what supplies he had packed it was just full of his books.

My sister Anna came home from New York to see me. She said she wanted to see me now and not ‘after’. The ‘after what?’, went unspoken between us. She stayed for a few days and then flew back again. That was a hard one – each of us knowing that we would never see each other again. We had hugged, too afraid to let go, until I had eventually told her to go on or she’d miss her flight.

I woke up one morning with a raging fever and I was writhing and moaning in the bed with pain. The tablets I had been given no longer seemed to be having the same effect. My whole body felt knotted with the cancer as its cells gradually took over whatever was left of my good ones. Doctor O’Keeffe had warned us that this might happen. With the chemo I was susceptible to all sorts of infections that an ordinary person would fight off. Noel phoned Doctor O’Keeffe to tell him and he had written a referral for the hospice. They were expecting me later on that day. I hadn’t eaten much over the last few days. I didn’t recognise myself when I looked in the mirror, I never thought I would use the word ‘gaunt’ to describe myself but that was how I looked. My clothes, which were once tight, now were falling off my body. Most days I just stayed in my pyjamas and dressing gown because I didn’t have the energy to get dressed and I spent most of my time in bed anyway. Noel said I was like a bag of bones and was constantly at me to eat something but I couldn’t stomach food. Still he would persist – he would bring me my breakfast on a tray before I got out of bed in the mornings and he would set a place for me at the dinner table in the evenings.