Have I given people too much despair?

I don't know what to make of Nuala O Faoilean's interview about her terminal illness, which took place on Marian Finucane's show last week. (go to 6 mins 50 seconds to start it).

It ends with Nuala's whispered question, 'have I given people too much despair?'

I suppose it depends on the person, Nuala.

I found it deeply comforting and positive to be able to listen to two of the most influential Irish women of my lifetime discussing how it feels for one of them to face her own death. This pair have been a major part of the running commentary that takes place in Ireland, and have expressed views on pretty much everything that I have thought about in the last thirty five years or so. Death is one such topic, one that I seem to bump into a lot more these days, as you do when you age, so it is fitting that they tackled it.

There was beauty (which is the antidote to despair) in it as Nuala, despite her insecurities about it, is a deep thinker and she delivers her thoughts in a knitted wooly hat type of intellectual way that has always resonated with me as a similar kind of citified agnostic country catholic.

And there were flashes of the old Nuala, the Nuala that wrote for the Irish Times when I was a teenager and took no prisoners and taught me how to do it: the wry acceptance of how unimportant a mere woman at the edge of a small country on a small planet in a vast universe really is, followed up with a 'to hell with it, I'm going to voice my opinion anyway' speech.

Being faced with Nuala's desperate longing for a reprieve, her desolation at knowing life is finite, and her decision to share her despair with us was difficult. Why? To make it easier? To record it as a journalist? To get sympathy and attention?

It was hard to know what she wanted from us as listener.

Marian didn't wobble once which is probably testament to her work with the hospice movement, but she ended the interview very abruptly, I thought. Maybe she was going to cry.

She was very concerned about people with cancer and their families getting upset by conversations about death from cancer when there's great hope around nowadays.

Which I thought was a bit of a red herring. After all, she was interviewing a woman who was pulling back the veil of silence across the issue of death by cancer while dying of cancer.

Dying.

Not praying for some of the great hope there is nowadays.

But Marian is nothing if not reflective of the Irish love of a good red herring. That's why she's so successful. And why we don't talk about death by cancer generally.

Other people I know who listened to it have talked about the part of the interview that was most poignant for them. It's interesting. Some people were upset about Nuala leaving her room behind. Others were upset because she said she was glad she didn't have children. Another was upset by the way she didn't want to rear the fourteen year old girl she mentioned at the beginning of the interview. And everyone noticed the smoking thing of course.

There's a reason why we hear certain things of course.

I was interested in her current attitude to her earlier, oft-proclaimed view that passion was what counted.

Passion can go take a running jump at itself right now, apparently.

Marian asked her about love.

Well I always used to get love and passion mixed up, Nuala said, with one of her little laughs.

I always suspected that was the case. I never agreed with you about passion, Nuala. But I could never prove you wrong in my head, because I couldn't figure out what passion really was.

I think passion is an emotion you can feel about anything or anyone and yeah, it's great, but nowadays its meaning has been corrupted so much that we mistake it for other things.

I am passionate about photography.

They have a passionate relationship.

He is passionate about football.

etc.

I'm just noticing how stupid the word passionate looks by the way.

The above are all examples of what most people would consider the various forms of passion that exist.

And of course, when you grow up an Irish Catholic, the first encounter you have with the word is The Passion of Christ.

Here passion is a condition rather than an emotion, full of pain, suffering, misery, desolation, with the promise of elation at the end of it. Or elevation.

A heady mix.

And then you grow up and cast off the shackles of Catholicism and say thank Christ that's over, now I can have some fun and go out into the world.

And the world tells you that passion is actually, really about those things, just not necessarily on behalf of mankind, or indeed anyone else. Passion should be focused on the self: it can involve sacrifice (for yourself and your loved ones) to achieve greatness in your field, or a heady mixture of suffering and elation in a difficult (but emotionally and of course physically satisfying relationship), or even the loneliness (and moral sanctimoniousness) of a crusade.

To my mind, the world is difficult enough without having to try to have an obsessive, sacrificial relationship with it.

I told passion to go take a running jump at itself years ago.

Wry objectivity is a much easier approach. Or even self-piteous subjectivity, when it's that time of the month.

However, I've since found that passion sneaks back in. And when you let passion sneak into your soul, rather than grabbing at what you think it might be, it unveils itself.

A glance at the profile of the person you love makes you catch your breath yet again.

Why?

What makes that face do that to you?

Memorising all the lines radiating from their eyes, and wondering what caused them; the tinge of stubble on their jaw, the shine in their hair, and the swerve of their nose. The way the hairs lie across the shadow of the muscles of their arm.

Because you'd forgotten for a second how beloved their face is.

In case some day they don't come home.

To see how long you can do it before they sense that you are.

And then they catch your look. And it makes them feel great.

Why?

What makes that look do that to them?

That's passion. Right there.

The rest of it, all the moaning and groaning (as the Queen Mother would say) and focus and sacrifice and elation/ despair polarities is just obsession which is so prized in this world that is being run into the ground by obsessive people, it has been rebranded as passion.

I am wondering if Nuala did not mix up passion and obsession.

The way most of us catholic country girls have done at one time or another.

We are who we are.

Desolation doesn't change us.

It just makes us truer to our unique selves.

As Nuala would say.

When she wondered aloud how it was possible that she would be gone and all she knows gone with her I wanted to shake her, tumours and all.

You are a woman who taught two generations of Irish women how to think in their own way.

Thank you, Nuala.