Are kids as a road sign on the motorway to death? I’ll choose to ignore that one
THERE’S A THEORY that having kids is one of the first sure signs of your own mortality. The birth of a first child moves you from the lowest rung on the generational ladder into the middle.
Theoretically that move should highlight that this movement is irrevocable and at some point you’ll find yourself teetering at the end, peering into the abyss, with your grandchildren at your bedside.
I never bought that. In my arrogance, I saw the elder’s arrival as an opportunity to relive and embellish the non-existent glories of my youth.
I saw a captive audience who would have to believe tales starring me as the dashing hero. All the crashing disappointments of adolescence and early adulthood could be respun to make it appear I had deliberately and consciously chosen the path that led me to the same point everyone else gets to.
That mediocrity had been arrived at by shunning success. I turned my back on glory rather than never getting close to a point where I could try to reach out and grasp it.
This is called personal family history revisionism, and as far as I can see it happens in most families. We are full of familial lore depicting past random acts as assuming the significance of the Treaty in Irish history.
We tell our stories as if we set out to get to exactly where we are, instead of being a variable in a constantly evolving, highly complicated evolutionary equation.
This belief (a required belief for survival) that we’re in total control of our destinies permeates through, resulting in an unspoken vow, kept at the back of our minds, that we will unlock the secret. We will figure it out and we will never die. Our kids will have to put up with our rambling, nonsensical stories forever.
Kids as a road sign on the motorway to death? I’ll choose to ignore that one.
But last week I joined a club that, for a €70 entrance fee, promises to put you very much in touch with your own mortality. The administrators encourage you to see your GP before getting involved, and insist on you signing an indemnity form that states you enter knowing the risks involved. Some 12,500 other mortality investigators signed up too, and together we ran the Dublin marathon.
This was my third, so there was no excuse for my being unprepared for the horror when it came. All marathon stories start the same: “I was fine for the first 20 miles . . . ” Well, that was true for me, too. The last six nearly ended me.
Conscious that I would pass my family around mile 23, in my delirium I felt concern that the kids would be upset to see me in the state I was in. My hamstrings had already seized at this point, the first of three instances, and shortly before the meeting point my lungs seemed on the verge of collapse. Your chest tightening while running is not pleasant.
I ran by. We hugged and waved. I finally crossed the finishing line.
Later, I asked the elder how I had looked. She said I looked fine. For the first time the possibility of dying was consciously in my mind, but apparently I looked “fine”. The drama in your own life really is very much in your own life. To everyone else, your extremes are mundane.
That night, after showering and feeding, I limped into the Leeson Lounge. My dad rang to check how things had gone. When he heard where I was, he told me there used be a picture of my grandfather on the wall there.
I hunted him down. Staring out at me from the front row of the Galway hurling team, beaten by Cork in the All-Ireland final of 1953. James Brophy. I had sat in the corner where the picture resides on a number of occasions before, but had never made the connection.
In 1953, Jimmy Brophy would have been five years younger than I am now. He was smaller than me, more powerfully built, but I have his face. It’s the odd things you notice when you see yourself on the wall of a pub in a picture taken over half a century ago. Our hairlines are identical.
I could have sat and looked at him for a long time, but feared I’d creep out the people sitting beneath the picture. My friend came over and I showed him my Granda. “Oh yeah,” says the buddy, “he looks way slicker than the rest of them.”
He did. He does. And in some way, my being there with my legs screaming, admiring him, made things feel less random.
- abrophy@irishtimes.com