Authors: Maeve Binchy
Ah, but Maeve was always one to see what she wanted to see, he says. I would like him to come and meet his fellow students so I could be expected to create a rose-tinted world for him, where people are mature and wise and tolerant. This is not what he hears.
Right, I tell him, this is what I hear and see and notice. I notice that pubs, which love selling soft drinks anyway and always thrived on the mixers because they constitute almost pure profit, not attracting any tax, now have a whole rake of alcohol-free beers and low-alcohol lagers, and they are being wooed senseless by the various mineral-water manufacturers, dying to get their particular shade of bottle and label in.
Publicans, who used to collapse like a Bateman cartoon if anyone asked for coffee, now want to know if you want decaf or cappuccino. In recent years, I cannot have heard a barman make a joke about serving a Real Man a non-alcoholic drink. I haven’t seen a sigh, or heard a groan. I have never heard an explanation about someone being a Pioneer, it being Lent, or the breathalyser, or the price of gargle being offered. Maybe I don’t go to enough macho bars but I do go to a reasonable cross-section and in recent times I have never heard anyone being challenged after ordering the drink of his or her choice.
I agree that years ago the order would go, ‘Four pints, two gin-and-tonics, three large Paddies and a Cidona for your man!’ Your man was thereby marked as being outside the tribe. Nowadays it’s just as often the reverse; it could be a round of white wine and soda and many varieties of non or low-alcohol drinks and someone saying apologetically, ‘Do you mind if I have a short, it has been a bad day?’
Like smoking. People don’t say they’ve given up apologetically. The apology is from the one who asks for the ashtray. I told the man who thinks that attitudes are frozen that when I gave up smoking I was afraid to answer the telephone in case I had to have a cigarette before I spoke; I was so unused to the experience of one without the other. Not a good example, he says. The phone wouldn’t take me by the throat and say I was no fun without a cigarette – go on, have just one.
But I told him that he was guilty of over-dramatising himself. Everyone he will meet at his reunion will have read the bad news about how many units are safe per week. Some of them, admittedly, may have decided to take no notice, but they will know about them, they will not think he is wearing a hair shirt and chains around his middle if he doesn’t lower a bottle of sherry at the reception. Some of his colleagues and friends will have read the tests under the heading ‘Are you an alcoholic?’ and by question three realised that they should be in treatment. Some will have done something; some will have said these questionnaires are run by some backlash pressure group. But they will have read them. There will be colleagues who have had friends die of drink-related illnesses, or passed over for promotion because of being a bit unreliable in that department.
He will discover that the liquid lunch is no longer a permanent feature of Irish middle-class life in the mainstream, as it might have been when he left. Not an eyebrow is raised if a captain of industry or a politician or even a successful journalist asks for a glass of water; heads will not wag. They will not say that’s what has him where he is, either for good or evil. It’s just one more choice people make. Like having no car and walking to work can be as high in the pecking order as having a car the size of a house. I advise him to give it a lash.
The profession that he is in has changed. Its ideas of machismo have altered greatly and not just because his colleagues have become middle-aged. New attitudes are all the more apparent among the younger generation. He may not find Ireland an entirely pluralist society but at least he will find his countrymen and women broad-minded enough to know that we owe no explanations for what forms of pleasure or madness we deny ourselves. And he will also have a great time.
Y
ears ago, there was a different code. You went to see a friend who was terminally ill and you looked into the eyes which would not see for much longer and you swore that the person had never looked better. You could see a terrific improvement since the last visit, and it would be no time before everybody was as right as rain again. The more hearty and jovial the protestation, the better you thought the whole thing had gone. At least you felt you had handled the performance as it should have been done, and you were hugely relieved that nobody’s guard had broken down and there had been no danger of anyone saying anything important about life and the leaving of it.
We don’t know what they felt about it, the people who were at the receiving end of all this histrionic pretence that everything was normal. It might have been some consolation to them, but surely they saw through it. In the dark hours of the night, they must have wondered why there was no communication left between friends who had once talked about everything. Just when they needed real conversation most, they got reassurance, platitudes and, in fact, lies and this from friends who used to sit up until dawn to discuss the meaning of the universe, the future of art, and the likelihood of getting someone you fancied to fancy you. Why should it turn to ‘Ho ho ho, and aren’t you looking well today?’ It was because the well could not bear to admit the thought that the rest of the world was not well. So what do you do if a friend is terminally ill? You do not want to go in with a face like the tombstone they know is not far away. You might not wish to bring up unaccustomed spiritual reading, likely aphorisms or new thinking on reincarnation.
Last year I had a friend, who was given three months to live, and I asked him to tell me what were the best things people could do and what were the worst. He said that the very worst thing to do was to send a Get Well card, one with bunny rabbits crying into spotted handkerchiefs and saying, ‘Sorry to hear you are not so well.’ He used to look at these cards blankly and knew that they were the conditioned response and automatic reflex of people who meant desperately well, but who had to hide behind totally inappropriate greeting cards. He wanted to reply on another card, saying, ‘I’m trying, God damn it.’ But he didn’t. And he didn’t because he knew that the idiotic bits of card with hospital beds and sexy nurses and thermometers and bad puns hid the real message of sympathy and huge distress. He said that he really didn’t like people urging him to get another opinion and saying that it couldn’t do any harm. It would do harm, he thought, because it would waste time, the one thing there wasn’t much of left. He preferred people to call it cancer if they spoke of it at all, rather than use some euphemism, and he also wished that he didn’t have to spend so much time thanking people politely for their suggestions of healing crystals, prayers Never Known to Fail, or the laying on of hands by someone who lived half a continent away.
Those of us who knew him well and asked him how he wanted to do it were told. He wanted to remember the good, laugh at the funny, hear all the gossip, and try to be as normal as possible. Even though he could no longer eat, he wanted to come to restaurants with us and didn’t want to see anyone wince when he told the waiter he was on a diet. He said that three months was a terrific bit of notice to get. You could make all kinds of arrangements, ask people to take a book from your collection, burn incriminating letters, heal old enmities, and send postcards to people you admired. Once upon a time he had thought it would be good to die in his sleep or in a car crash. Something instantaneous. But there was a sense of time borrowed about this three-month sentence. Without being in the slightest maudlin, he said it was something we should all be lucky to get.
He said that he didn’t really like bunches of flowers, there was too much of the sick room and even the funeral parlour about them arriving in great quantities. But what he really liked was a rake of stamped postcards or a couple of colourful tracksuits which he could wear around the house, and a few videos to watch at night. He didn’t like letters telling him that lots of people had conquered this and surely he would too. But neither did he like the letters saying that he had a good innings and that, at 60, he had done everything. He wanted to be the judge of that. But he did love to hear from the many people he had known during his life, saying briefly that they had heard about his diagnosis and that they were sorry. Letters that then went on to say things he could hold on to, things about time well spent, marvellous places seen, and memories that would live forever. All this brought a smile to his face and made the tapestry richer and less laced with regret. He said that if at all possible, he would like there to be no tears, but he knew this was hard, and he didn’t mind unnaturally bright eyes, because he knew this was a sign of grief felt but bravely fought back. He could understand why some people hadn’t the guts to come and see him, but he wished they had.
It has taken me a year to get the courage to write down his advice to those who want to do their best for friends who are about to die. A year in which I have never ceased to admire his bravery and honesty and to believe that there may be a lot of it around if we could recognise it. We planted a rose tree, a Super Star, in his memory, and at last I feel the strength to pass on his advice to those who might learn from it.
I
t was a lovely sunny day on Bloomsday and I was sitting in the hallway of the Joyce Centre in Dublin, delighted with myself. Why wouldn’t I be? I was watching all the comings and goings, the people dressed up, the American tourists, the faces I hadn’t seen for years. I was waiting to do an interview and was given a glass of lager to pass the time. Not many people would be having as good a time on a Thursday afternoon at one-thirty, I said to myself.
And then a woman came in whom I used to know years ago, when we were young teachers. She was a very positive person then, I remember. She used to take her pupils on great trips to France, which they never forgot. She had amazing projects in her classroom, and she used to go around with a box on the back of her bicycle asking people who had gardens if she could have cuttings, and then she used to get the kids to plant them around the schoolyard.
She was a leader in everything, the first to give up smoking, the first to organise lunches where people were asked to contribute the price of a meal for the hungry, the first I knew to go to America for the summer and work as a camp counsellor. I had nothing but good memories of her.
She seemed glad to see me too, but then her face fell. ‘You look desperately tired,’ she said sympathetically. ‘Are you all right?’
Well, the sun went out of the day and the fun went out of the Joyce Centre and the taste went out of the glass of lager and the sense of being as free as a bird went out the window.
Tired is not a good thing to be told you look. Tired is terrible. And the really infuriating thing is that I was not tired, I had been in bed nice and early the night before. And I was tidy. Tired can often mean that you look like a tramp, but no, I had gotten all dressed up, complete with white collar, to be interviewed. And I wasn’t sweating or collapsing up flights of stairs. I was sitting calm as anything in the hall.
And if I was 25 years older than when we last met, so was she.
So, stupid as this may seem, I looked upset. I must have bitten my lip or may have looked as if I was going to burst into tears, because she said at once that she was sorry, and wanted to know what she had said.
‘I’m not tired,’ I said, like a big baby.
She tried to explain that tired was okay. We were entitled to be tired. By God, we had earned the right to it. We worked hard, we had done so much. It would be an insult if we
weren’t
tired.
She was backtracking, trying to dig herself out of it, I said.
No way, she insisted, and wasn’t I the touchy one trying to read other words into a perfectly acceptable observation, and more meanings than were implied in an expression of concern?
But what was she going to do about my tiredness? Suppose I had admitted it? Just suppose I had agreed that I was flattened by fatigue and had been waiting for someone to come in that door to identify it. What was her cure? Had she ginseng or Mother’s Little Helpers in her handbag? Did she have a personal fitness trainer, a protein diet, a Seventh Son or shares in a health farm?
We argued it away good-naturedly, as we had always argued in years gone by. She had always been a woman of strong views, a characteristic I admire. I have even remembered many of her maxims, such as ‘Avoid restaurants that have strolling musicians’, ‘Never play cards with a man named Doc’ and ‘Don’t resign before lunch’.
But what’s the point of telling someone that they look tired, even if you don’t mean it as a euphemism for old, ugly, unkempt or rapidly going downhill? Was it a kind of sympathetic come-on … expecting an answer along the lines of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen?
She was spirited about it. And she nearly won the argument.
Would I prefer, she wondered, if we were all to turn into those dinkleberries who greet each other with an effusion of insincere compliments: ‘Oooh, you look marvellous’ and ‘Oooh, you’ve lost loads of weight and honestly, I never saw you looking better, what have you been doing?’ The greetings and the compliments becoming like a ritual dance where the vain and the self-centred rake through a form of words, wondering if there is a ‘marvellous’ too few or an expression of astonishment not heightened enough. Surely we haven’t reached this stage?
But then, when she said tired, did she mean that as some sort of shorthand, to be a jovial punch on the shoulders between old mates, a kind of bonding between the worn out?
She thought about it.
She thinks she meant that she liked me from the old days, and it was good to see me again, and when she came upon me I had a serious expression on my face as I had been talking to a woman about her late husband and maybe she remembered me roaring about, not sitting down. And in a sense, she didn’t want to be one of those people who always said twitter twitter things and assumed other people had lives that were free of care. And on reflection, she said, now that we had argued the thing down to the bone, she would never as long as she lived tell another human being that they looked tired again.