The candle flickered in the lantern in the window, lit every night since David had started sleeping in the sitting room. Eight months since he hadn’t been able to climb the stairs to bed. Sixteen months since the second surgery to remove the tumour growing in his brain. Twenty months since he got the news he only had 12 more to live.
Because David was too full of life to leave it easily.
The mattress pump hissed as it rose and fell in the early morning quiet.
“Can you open the door please,” said David.
I looked around, puzzled. There was no door. The sitting room opened into the dining room, where we’d often gathered for raucous dinner parties with David and his husband Jonathan, me, Sally, Paula and Craig. Now we took it in turns to sit with David on the Marie Curie nurses’ nights off.
I reached for the plastic beaker of juice, thick with the chunky powder that helped him swallow.
“Have a drink,” I said, guiding his lips to the straw, thinking about other nights we’d spent drinking through straws. Galway in the ’90s, glugging flagons of cider through straws in Seamus Quirke Road before hitting the dance floor in The Castle, strobe lights flashing, the whites of our fake Converse glowing in the dark.
“Open the door,” David said again.
I held his hand.
“Sleep now David. I’ll stay with you.”
But he continued to ask me to open the door and eventually, as dawn crept in through the window and the candle in the lantern flickered out, I said: “The door is open, David.”
And he squeezed my hand.
A week later, David went through the door.
I was in my mother’s house in Sligo when Jonathan texted me to say David was fading. I lit a candle for him then, a candle with three wicks that could burn for days if it had to.
In the end, it burned for three hours.
Craig phoned me at 4pm.
“Have you got somebody with you?” he asked when I answered the phone, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask if David was gone because, even then, I was still hoping he wasn’t. Maybe Craig had just called for a chat. Or with an update. Or by accident.
That night I raised a glass to David and played all our favourite songs. The Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops, Rosie Vela’s Magic Smile, the songs we’d first bonded over at college in Galway, when I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. I cried listening to Mel and Kim’s Respectable, remembering how sad we were when Mel died.
I had a little dance by myself to Belinda Carlisle’s Mad About You, a much overlooked and under-appreciated classic we’d agreed sagely at the wise old age of 18. And in the opening seconds of Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls, the clip-clop of high heels on slick wet pavements, the slush of traffic through rain, I was right back there again. The fading light of evening at the start of a new term, streetlights coming on in the dusk.
We know that music is linked to our personal stories
— Catherine Loveday
The magic of Galway swirled around me, everything was new, unfamiliar and exciting as we took those first tentative steps into adulthood, poised at the start of life’s great adventure.
The power of music to instantly return us to the past is mind-blowing.
“I was walking through the Christmas markets in Dublin a few years ago, engrossed in conversation with my husband, when a piece of music came on and I suddenly had tears rolling down my cheeks,” says neuropsychologist Catherine Loveday. “It was my dad’s favourite Christmas song, When A Child Is Born by Johnny Mathis, and it completely took me back to my childhood Christmases. I was eight years old again.”
Loveday, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster and author of The Secret World of the Brain, believes music taps into our brain’s innate system for responding to emotions.
“We know that music is linked to our personal stories,” she explains. “Research shows that music becomes linked to our memories – the brain cell networks become actively connected with each other so that one will trigger the other. The representation of the music becomes physically paired with the representation of our remembered experience.”
I know what she means. I hear Echo Beach and I’m on a heaving dance floor in The Warwick on a sweaty Thursday night. The Beat(en) Generation sends me back to the white-tiled kitchen in Grattan Park that David used to call the abattoir; Pet Shop Boys’ Always on my Mind to a tiny two-bed flat on New Road, the lights of David’s HiFi system flashing like we were on a spaceship.
So it’s clear that music has a big impact on our brains and memories, but what’s the impact of grief on the brain? I asked Henry Marsh, neurosurgeon and author. He’s also the man who gave me back my life after he removed a tumour growing under my brain more than 20 years ago.
Grief is a whole-person experience. It impacts us physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, financially
— Niamh Fitzpatrick
“Everything you are thinking and feeling at the moment is the physical process in your brain from the neuroscientific point of view. So clearly, any trauma, any grief, will have an impact on it,” he says.
“Within a year, or even less, of losing a spouse, people over the age of 60 have a hugely increased risk of dying. That is a direct physiological response to a mental state.
“And there’s a condition called Takotsubo, where severe trauma or emotion causes a weird change in the shape of the heart, which can even be fatal, although it normally reverses. That’s neurologically mediated – our brains are intimately connected to our bodies.”
Psychologist Niamh Fitzpatrick has also observed first-hand how grief impacts every part of us. She suffered her own traumatic loss when her sister, Captain Dara Fitzpatrick, was killed along with three other crew members after their Irish Coast Guard Rescue helicopter crashed off the Mayo coast in 2017. Niamh talks about navigating her way through that grief in her book Tell Me the Truth About Loss.
“Grief is a whole-person experience. It impacts us physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, financially. There’s so many layers and levels to it. And it’s exhausting. The drain on us mentally, emotionally and in all sorts of ways is immense. And that’s because of the impact of the loss on our life, the impact of knowing we are never going to see that person again, that we’ll never sit with them or talk with them, we’ll never hold and touch them, we won’t do any of those things again.”
Grief, it has been said, is the price we pay for love. And along with music, the other great comfort I’ve found to help me cope with sadness is nature. Or more specifically, a beach in Lahinch.
The year before David’s diagnosis, we were in and out of lockdowns, not able to meet up very often. But when we did meet, we headed for the seaside.
I have photos of us smiling into the sun in Whitstable, eating fish and chips in Margate and standing with our mouths open in Herne Bay, gobsmacked by the most glorious sunset we’d ever seen, the sky glowing orange and red like a giant bonfire in the sky.
I remembered that sunset the year after David died, standing on the beach in Lahinch on January 2nd. Christmas had been rough so when January hit, I decided to take my sad heart to the coast.
Evidence shows that contact with nature lowers our blood pressure, cortisol levels and stress
— Henry Marsh
I’d spent most of the day on three buses, leaving Sligo early that morning while it was still dark. The rain was pelting down in Galway, with sodden ditches under water. The weather was even worse in Clare, swans and seagulls bobbing in the flooded fields. But as we approached Lahinch, a thin line of white light on the horizon started to force its way through the slate grey clouds and we arrived to blue skies and sunshine.
People were beaming at each other on the beach, several of whom stopped to tell me they’d been trapped inside by storms all week. As I stood taking photos of the sunset, I felt David standing beside me, smiling in the joyous light.
I spent most of the next few days on the beach, the sun shining so bright my friends messaged to ask if I was in the Mediterranean when I sent them my photos. And something inside me that was broken when David died started to heal.
“Evidence shows that contact with nature lowers our blood pressure, cortisol levels and stress,” says Henry Marsh. “I’ve always been a passionate believer in gardens and my proudest moment was creating a roof garden in St George’s Hospital outside the wards. Research shows that having a view of nature from a window shortens your time in hospital and also reduces the need for painkillers.”
I’ve gone back to Lahinch most months since. I walk on the beach and look at the beauty of it all and it helps me. Sometimes I feel David walking beside me.
I thought I saw him the other day, hoisting his rucksack on his back at Clapham Junction, putting his earbuds in and walking across the station platform, tall and purposeful, heading out to meet another tough day. His work as a community psychiatric nurse meant dealing with people who were often on suicide watch lists, living in some of the poorest and most deprived parts of London. But he never complained.
[ The things I’ve learned about living from dyingOpens in new window ]
The thoughts of him striding out with courage to meet the world, despite what it threw at him, gives me hope to do the same. Sometimes, a day is a hard thing to face. “Make a start,” says David in my head, “just get out of bed.”
It’s the best advice I’ve heard so far. Just get out of bed. And take it from there. The time passes and the pain of grief doesn’t go away, but it somehow becomes more manageable.
Albert Einstein said time was an illusion anyway. So maybe we’re still walking home to Seamus Quirke Road with bags of shopping to make our favourite dinner (pasta with ham in a garlic cream sauce – we thought we’d invented it until somebody told us about spaghetti carbonara). Maybe we’re still crossing O’Brien’s Bridge in the drizzle, my heels clip clopping on the footpath, West End Girls playing in our heads.
In memory of David Moclair. Lived for 53 years, loved forever.
