The key to making The Hospice was to talk openly about death - not as an abstract concept but as real, imminent and terrifying, writes film-maker Alan Gilsenan.
Sucking deep on a Silk Cut (Extra Mild, of course), in a strangely matter-of-fact manner, my mother said, "I'll have to go to Pearl . . . ". She was newly-diagnosed terminally ill and Pearl was Pearl Phelan, her girlhood friend and cousin from Tipperary. But Pearl was also Sr Ignatius of Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross.
As a boy, I remember our dropping Pearl back to the hospice after a visit. In my memory, it was always late on a dark autumnal Sunday afternoon. We would drive up the canal and drop Pearl home to the "Hospice for the Dying".
The sight of Pearl walking into the nun's residence at the hospice, her slim and somewhat beatific figure radiantly dressed all in white beneath her winter coat, seemed, by contrast, to make the whole place darker, more frightening to my young eyes.
For even then, in the 1970s, the hospice was still a place to fear. A place apart.
Years later, my mother did indeed "go to Pearl" and died there two short weeks later. Some years before that, my father had died at home, also under the care of the hospice, but this time with their homecare team. Both experiences had that heightened intensity that attends any journey out of this world. It is, of course, a profoundly emotional time for all, and the experiences of those inside the world of the hospice differs greatly from the perceptions of those on the outside.
My own sad, but paradoxically uplifting, experiences of hospice care are not unique, but naturally they inspired and influenced my approach to making The Hospice documentary series at St Francis Hospice in Raheny. My wariness about death had been replaced by a belief that dying was more easily approached by embracing it rather than by shunning it. It was better to be in the room of your fears rather than standing in the corridor outside.
In Ireland we pride ourselves on our capacity to engage with death. We have a rich funereal tradition. Wakes and open coffins, keening and prayerful litanies, slow processions through hushed towns and across frozen fields - all these form part of our imaginative landscape. But these traditions are receding with our changing times. We may still be great funeral-goers, but that too is changing. Our intimate connection with death is loosening. We are becoming removed from it. Death is becoming more of a fact and less of a lived experience.
In March, 1998, Cicely Saunders (the doyen of the modern hospice movement) wrote in a piece entitled "Why I Welcome TV Cameras at the Death Bed": "Voyeurism? Let us not treat it as that. Let us be positive. Dying is not 'in bad taste'. Dying people are not to be shunted out of sight. Death is not The Great Unmentionable. It has to be talked about, it has to be thought about." These were reassuring words to read when we began. But the question remained: how far should one go? Where was the boundary between honest engagement and crass intrusion? People's experience of impending death differs greatly. Many - with the assistance of those around them - find acceptance and comfort and peace, but certainly not all.
Early on, in discussions with the hospice staff, when I was getting carried away with myself in my eagerness to prove that I was approaching all this in a positive light, the medical director Dr Regina McQuillan pulled me up to remind me that there is suffering and tragedy and heartbreak too. It was a good and salutary note. It was a reminder not to sanitise it all, to romanticise the true experience. In the end, all one can do is trust one's own gut instincts.
Sometimes, for a moment, I was rendered speechless by the gravity of what we were witnessing. The courage. The heartbreak. There seemed to be nothing to say, no appropriate question to be asked. But ask something I would. For that was my job and that was the deal. Spoken or unspoken, our understanding together was to talk openly about death, not as an abstract concept, but real, imminent, terrifying death.
I would often baulk as I asked the most intimate of questions. Disarmed by the frankness and grace with which my awkward queries were received, I would then retreat to the safety of some cliche or other. "Anyway, you're in good hands here." Cliches allowed us return to safe territory, a tacit understanding that the truth was too hard to bear, too enormous to articulate. Cliche was fine. Cliche allowed us a way back to the world of the living, to the comforting everyday banalities that were now to be treasured, not scorned.
Often our participants said they were glad to talk, to unburden themselves, to help others, to leave behind a few moments to posterity. Their families frequently said that it was easier for the stranger to ask the difficult question, and they seemed glad to hear the answer. One was humbled by the dignity and generosity of these families. Their gratitude and their hospitality. Their concern for us, even in their most difficult hour.
We live now in a highly competitive media environment. Sensationalism is all. Contrived controversies are cooked up and overblown. Simple truths have little currency. Yet we strove to keep things simple, to keep it all within the realm of some sort of decency. It was reassuring, then, to have received such an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the series, an acknowledgement that the public (and, bless them, even the critics) have not become totally desensitised to ordinary feeling or experience.
Now, when I return to St Francis Hospice, I am reminded of that feeling that I had when I visited my mother in her final days. It is that absolute sense of being in safe hands. The comfort of complete competence, the assurance of dignity and respect, a strong sense of sheer goodness, even. For, in approaching death, we are all unknowing babes once more, and these doctors and nurses, these chaplains and social workers, care staff and cleaners - even Tina in the canteen - these mid-wives to the dying reassure us with their understanding that death, like birth, is not merely a medical event but one of life's most profound experiences.
I leave the hospice in the hope that they, or their ilk, will be there to shepherd me when I face my own inevitable - I falter even to write it down - my own inevitable death.
The final programme of The Hospice appears on RTÉ1 at 9.30pm on Monday