Dad’s Diary

The world is a poorer place. My beautiful mother Anne has died. She had been in hospital for an operation and sadly contracted coronavirus in there. For the first week of the illness, we held out hope, since she remained cheerful and vibrant as ever.

Yet we knew that a grim moment of truth was coming, as a point comes when symptoms can suddenly begin to worsen in severe cases. We fearfully noticed that her breathing was becoming more laboured as we spoke on the phone. The diagnosis of pneumonia came, followed by a rapid succession of bad news as to the severity of her condition.

One evening, my brothers, my father and I were told that we could visit her. The doctors said things weren’t looking good, but there was still a faint hope. We donned full PPE, and my father and I went in to see her first. She was in a calm room in the ward, being well cared for. Although unwell, she was cheerful, and managed to laugh at us arriving in, looking like spacemen in our PPE. She even chuckled at the virus too, saying “It looks like I’ve been hit by my second wave of the coronavirus”.

We sat together and chatted happily during those precious moments, and spent time looking at pictures of her grandchildren. Her face lit up as she spoke so lovingly of each one. She said, “We have such strong love between us in our family, that is a powerful thing. It is the most important thing”. After a time, I reluctantly left, so that she and my father could have some time together. My mother had a rare ability to put a smile on the face, and a glow in the heart, of everyone she met. She managed this, even the very last time we spoke. I went home with a heart full of love, to tell my four anxious children that she was unwell, but happy, comfortable and thinking lovingly of them all.

The following day, the doctors told us that things had deteriorated overnight and that she had fallen into a sleep. Our last faint hope was lost, as she was moved onto palliative care. My wife broke the news to us, as she had been liaising with the medical team. She sobbed as she said the words nobody wants to hear, “your mother is dying”. I somehow quickly finished up my work and then I called the older children in.

The older kids already knew that their beloved grandmother had coronavirus and that things were not looking good. With an arm around my 9-year-old daughter and my 11-year-old son, I told them the bad news, as gently as I could. They cried, we spoke, we embraced and cried again. Then, at one point, I suddenly noticed that my daughter had the happiest, most contented smile on her face. I asked what she was thinking of, and she said: “I can still feel her hug, it was so warm.”

For the next two days, as my mother slept her final sleep, we all dreamt of her. It almost felt as though she was coming over for a chat as we slept. Each of us woke in the morning feeling that we had spent time in her presence.

On her last night, I drove alone to the hospital, as a powerful storm rolled in from the Atlantic. Wrapped in PPE, I went into the room where she lay. Now there were no drips and no beeping monitors. She just lay sleeping, like someone dreaming pleasant dreams.

She lay not a mile from where she was born, in the crucible of love that was the O’Connell family of Glasheen road in Cork city. The bodies of her parents and brother lay close by in St Finbarr’s Cemetery. The church they worshipped in was just across the road. I spoke of them, and said the prayers she would have heard nightly as a child, hoping that those familiar cadences would somehow reach into her waning consciousness. The next morning, when I returned, she was gone. She was gone on her journey, into the deepest love, and into the mystery of God.

She turned 73 just a few weeks before she died. We had hoped for many more years of her joyful presence. Yet, even in our devastation, there is some consolation in a life beautifully lived. A life spent bringing love and joy wherever she went, as a teacher, a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and a friend to all.

Even in these strange times, when the powerfully curative Irish funeral rituals are held in abeyance by the pandemic, we were flooded by messages from far and wide, to honour a woman loved so much by so many.

She had never feared death, thinking of it as walking through a door to a more beautiful world than this, one without sickness, cruelty, war or plagues – such as the one which took her in the end. She has gone home, leaving the world warmed by her love.

Anne Fitzgerald (nee O’Connell)  was born on January 21, 1948, and died on February 13, 2021 in Cork University Hospital.