Heart Beat:In an appreciation I wrote about a recently departed colleague, I quoted from American poet Emily Dickinson's poem titled The bustle in a house.
The bustle in a house,
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries,
Enacted upon Earth.
I know. As many of the readers will know a very bad thing has happened to our family. We have lost our middle child, our beloved daughter Sara, in tragic circumstances. For obvious reasons I am constrained from writing too much about this now.
Dear Sara, I do want to write to you and about you, but as now my heart is too heavy and my eyes too full of tears. Your passing leaves a void in our hearts, which the most loving memories can fill only inadequately.
Shelley wrote that "grief itself be mortal". It does not seem so now and we are very far from being so dispassionate. With God's help, the pain will lessen and we will be able to remember you as you were, a beautiful, caring, dignified and compassionate girl and woman who brought so much happiness into so many lives.
Our family has been strengthened and comforted by the truly enormous outpouring of sympathy and succour from friends of all the family, from colleagues, acquaintances, clubs and organisations and from people we never even knew but who reached out their hands to us in our distress.
It has been a constant theme in the many thousands of letters we have received that the writers acknowledge that they can but find inadequate words of comfort or indeed no words at all.
I would like to say to them all and to those who attended the services for Sara that you provided a strong bulwark for us in our time of sorrow and this family would like to say from our hearts to those who stood with them: God bless you all and thank you.
I am conscious in writing that we are a privileged family with wide-ranging contacts who have rallied to our support. I am aware also that there are many who undergo similar deprivation and indeed worse, who do not have similar support. How they can cope is beyond my comprehension.
Yet folk do move on, the strength coming for some from the unquenchable human spirit. For others it comes from faith and the promise of resurrection. We unreservedly believe that we shall meet Sara again in the sunlit uplands.
Returning to contemporary Ireland; much has happened over the past few weeks. We've sort of got a new Government, with a different set of fall guys to replace the PDs who sank almost without trace. Otherwise, it seems, unfortunately, to be the mixture much as before.
I do note however that the Minister for Health, Mary Harney, to whom I offer sincere condolences on the death of her mother, has sat down with the consultants to explore the way forward. Hopefully this will issue in an era of consultation and co-operation, rather than antagonism and suspicion.
Col William Blacker (1727-1785), a man solidly of the unionist persuasion on this island, wrote a poem called Oliver's advice. It is a martial work full of fire and does not mince words:
"He comes the open rebel fierce
He comes the Jesuit sly
But put your trust in God my boys
And keep your powder dry."
The last line attributed to the Lord Protector, Cromwell himself, is very sage advice indeed. It should be noted carefully by the doctors, nurses and paramedics as they wait to see if anything has really changed. It would be infinitely preferable with goodwill, mutual respect and endeavour to move everything forward together. It would be wearying indeed for our health professionals to mount the barricades once again.
In the past few weeks for obvious reasons I have talked to hundreds of those in the front line of the health service, and I must confess I am not too sanguine about ultimate outcomes. The experience of the past few years has left deep cynicism in its wake but also a powerful sense of solidarity. Having quoted from the Orange side of the Irish equation let me quote from the Green:
"That hour of weak delusions past
The empty dream has flown
Our hope and strength, we find at last
Is in ourselves, alone" (John O'Hagan-1847)
In plain English, nobody can fix the health service without the willing participation of those working within.
I had alluded to the purchase of the Mater Private for the astronomical sum of €350 million. I read today that the money was advanced by one of our major banks. That is where the health service is headed; profit, not patients, being the motive. Co-location has nothing to do with patient welfare but is merely another prop from an overdeveloped and soon-to-be-troubled construction industry.
Sara, love, when I went through your papers and saw your miserable pay cheques as a fully qualified intensive care nurse, I made a promise to you that your old dad would fight this cynical inequality developing in our society. So I shall.
Back to Emily Dickinson and the lines I have quoted before: for us in family for us remains,
"The sweeping of the Heart
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity."
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon.