DEATH may be the only thing inevitable in life, but it’s what you do with your life and who you spend it with that is most important.
Dr Kate McGarry and Dr Finbar Lennon fell in love as medical students in 1960s Dublin and were married for more than 40 years, balancing busy careers as doctors with raising their four children.
As retirement beckoned, they looked ahead to quieter years, with more time for each other and their growing family. Then, in April 2016, Kate was diagnosed with a cancer of unknown primary origin. As a couple came to terms with this devastating news, Kate resolved to write a memoir in order to share her experiences with others – as a medical professional, as a patient, and as a wife and mother.
Kate was a highly respected consultant physician at Our Lady’s Hospital, in Navan, Co Meath, and president of the Irish Heart Foundation. A trailblazer for Irish women in medicine and a thoughtful and compassionate doctor, she continued this in illness, writing “to help fellow cancer sufferers” face their illness and prospect of mortality.
Kate, whose grandfather lived in Warrenpoint, lost her fight for life in January 2018 before completing the book, but before her death, she made her husband promise to finish writing it for her. The result is The Heavens Are All Blue: A Memoir Of Two Doctors, A Marriage And A Life Of Love Before Loss.
As well as a reflection on fighting cancer and coping with grief, The Heavens Are All Blue is a love story between a couple who first met at the cycle rack on the Belfield campus of University College Dublin as first-year medical students.
“Kathleen [as he always referred to his wife] was always close to her patients and spent an awful lot of time with them and they were very grateful for that,” says Finbar, who wrestled with his own heartache while finishing their story. "So I think she wanted to pass on some words of wisdom as a result of her experience and I took that cue in the commentary I make myself in relation to life and death and medicine in its different forms and guises."
One of the last cohort of general surgeons to be appointed in Ireland, Finbar spent many years working at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. Later he worked in breast cancer surgery at Dublin’s Beaumont and Mater Hospitals, where he now teaches undergraduate medical students.
Well used to delivering bad news to patients, he says the response is very different when it is directed towards your own loved ones.
“You never think about the likelihood of being on the other side of the table. Yes, we knew about the medical aspects of it, which didn’t help as Kathleen’s results were conclusive enough to suggest the likely prognosis,” he recalls.
Yet throughout her illness Kate refused to give up hope, looking towards new immunotherapy treatments.
“If there was any chance at all that something might work, she wanted to try it. I guess that’s human nature.”
But Kate also had some personal milestone she wanted to see before her life’s end.
“She was quite determined in telling her oncologist that she needed to go to her boy's wedding and see her grandchild born. He understood that while obviously the chemotherapy was important, there were lots of other factors involved.”
While working, Finbar had many conversations with patients and families over the ethical dilemma of whether or not to have cancer treatment to prolong life.
“In the ever-bustling world of medicine today it’s easy to give less attention and care to the dying when the very opposite is required,” he says.
In his teaching capacity, he is keen to pass on to medical students the old fashioned values of compassion and listening.
“Oncologists in particular are so busy, with so many patients to deal. But for the individual patient to feel comfortable they need you to come and sit beside them and be prepared to have a chat," he says.
“I always tell my students now when they are treating patients that you have to be a good listener. It’s important not to be prescriptive in the way you deal with them, but to have a conversation and agree a plan with the patient.
“It is old fashioned, but there is still a lot of worth in it. I hope I get this across in the book,” adds Finbar, who also expresses his old romantic values in the reflective poetry he shares in The Heavens Are All Blue.
The son of an English teacher, he shared a love of poetry, and kept many poems he had written over the years. Some are published within the book, as well as others he wrote in response to Kate’s passing.
And his advice for others grieving for a loved one?
“It is very important to talk. Often when you are bereaved, you feel alone and retreat into your loneliness rather than talk about your lost loved one. It’s important to reach out to family and friends when you feel low. It doesn’t matter whether you are a labourer or a millionaire, we all have the same human needs.
“In life and death it comes back to the old basics of when communities and companions were so important in Irish history and folklore. Medical advances have improved, but things haven't really changed much in that context.”
:: The Heavens Are All Blue by Dr Finbar Lennon and Dr Kate McGarry is published by Hachette Ireland and is available now
