Life

Radio review: The Vigil examines dying moments

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

The Vigil Radio 4

Sunday with Miriam RTE Radio 1

As with the graphic reality of birth, the truth about dying is often a taboo subject.

Fact is, it’s not like the movies portray – all soft and misty. Forget the big final conversations too.

Julie Eisner’s Vigil was a series of intensely moving interviews with people who have watched a parent die.

She talked about her own mother’s death – a three-day vigil when she and her sisters did not know what to do. They made tea, made phone calls .... there’s no instruction booklet. If they left their mother’s bedside, would she die?

She wanted a moment like in the films when her mum might say: “I love you Julia” and she’d tell her intimate and wonderful things and they’d have a profound moment.

But her mother had Alzheimer’s: “I held her hand and I felt a bit jealous that I wasn’t being told nice things,” she said.

A man talked about his father’s dying and how they lived as they had always lived to the end - making tea, watching Pointless, doing a crossword ... it was the beauty of the mundane, not about the things spoken, but about the things unspoken, he said.

A woman said she just wanted the dying to be over for her mother.

An artist sketched his father at the moment of death.

It’s not uncommon for the dying person to wait for the family to leave the room before slipping away ... a last generous act of love?

This was an honest, refreshing conversation - like opening a window and letting a soul fly away.

Alastair Campbell was interviewed by Miriam O’Callaghan as volume five of his diaries hits the book shelves.

This volume is called Outside Inside and records the time when he left the Blair government and his yoyo-ing between being there and not.

He chatted with Miraim about his eldest brother, Donald, who had schizophrenia.

His brother was diagnosed in his 20s. But he had a pretty good life, he said.

“He had more friends, incredible passions – music – he held down a job for 27 years at Glasgow University.... Very few people with schizophrenia do.

“They understood he had a value. He wasn’t just a schizophrenic, he was a person who had schizophrenia and he was the university’s official piper.”

On Blair, he was candid – back then, Tony got a better press than him: “now he gets much, much worse time than me,” he said.

The conversation turned to his own episodes of depression and he left the listeners dangling: “Next volume, you’ll meet my psychiatrist, he said.