The tragedies have come in remorseless succession and, every time, words fail. As the summer-that-never-was fizzles out, autumn arrives this weekend with a procession of funerals for four young people who were snatched from their families in a breath last weekend.
Three teenage girls – Grace McSweeney, Zoey Coffey and Nicole “Nikki” Murphy – were being driven by Grace’s brother, Luke, to Clonmel to celebrate their Leaving Cert results. We can imagine the exuberance in that car as it travelled towards town.
Can’t you almost hear the laughter of exam relief and the babble of young voices discussing the future possibilities unfolding before them? Then, bang. They were gone.
What can you say? It is unspeakably cruel. All that promise, all that vitality vanished in the blink of an eye. Words fail.
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Words failed too when Dlava Mohamed, aged 16, and Kiea McCann, 17, died in a car crash a month earlier on their way to their debs ball in Clones. That car too must have been bubbling with expectation for what joys adulthood had in store for them. Then bang. They were gone. The newspaper photographs of the girls showed lovely young faces open to a world of wonder.
Four weeks before that, two 18-year-old boys died in separate incidents on the same day during their post-Leaving Cert holiday on a Greek island. Andrew O’Donnell appeared to have suffered a fatal fall on rocky ground in Ios. Max Wall was speaking to his father on the phone when he died suddenly.
The excited planning that must have gone into that holiday, the days being counted down until the exams would be over and they could set forth into the great big world with their friends. All that alluring, mysterious future stretching out before them, only for those boys to return home to their families in coffins. The very thought of it makes your mind shut down. It numbs you. What can you say? Words fail.
How fortunate are the rest of us that we have the luxury of allowing words to fail us. The ambulance crews, the gardaí, the fire fighters, the clergymen who are the first to reach the scene each time simply must find some crumbs of language. It falls to them to say something to the dying, to find the last words they will hear on this earth.
They must find words to tell parents who have only just waved their children off on their celebrations that they will not be coming back to them. In every sense, they are the first responders. Even as they are trying to cope with the sight of unthinkable devastation, they must search for some expressions of solace. Words are not allowed to fail them.
Most young people checking their CAO offers after the Leaving Cert are not planning to become priests or fire fighters or ambulance drivers. They want to be lawyers or accountants, entrepreneurs or engineers, techies or stockbrokers or architects or consultants.
You don’t need CAO points to join the emergency frontline but what you do need is wisdom beyond the ken of most of us. These people are the matrix of our communities. They are the gatekeepers of our going. We should remember that.
In his Booker longlisted novel, Old God’s Time, Sebastian Barry conjures up the policeman’s apprehension as the bearer of life-shattering news and, on the other side of the door, the spontaneous fear instilled by the sight of a garda’s silhouette outside after the bell has rung. What dire news do they bring?
Last October, after the lives of 10 men, women and children were violently extinguished by a gas explosion in Creeslough, Co Donegal, the country was rendered mute with shock. The local priest, Father John Joe Duffy, confessed he could offer no explanation for the horrendous loss of lives and offered love instead. “I am part of you, part of this community, and it is together that we will make the journey,” he told mourners at the funeral mass for Jessica Gallagher, a vivacious young fashion designer who had been due to start a new job in Belfast that week.
In June 2015 after six students, all aged 20 and 21, died when a balcony collapsed during their J-1 visa holiday, a rite of passage to the adult world, in Berkeley, California, Ireland was strangled with the inexpressible grief of it.
The national flag flew impotently at half-mast as Fr Frank Herron, at a service in the Church of Our Lady, Foxrock, said: “The tragedy is that they were heading out full of life and full of the joys of summer. They had the whole summer to look forward to.”
Earlier this week, Jack O’Sullivan, aged 14, was laid to rest after he drowned while swimming in the embers of summer at Passage West in Cork. Savannah Calvert was 14 too when, earlier in the summer, she was buried in a pink coffin after being hit by a car in Limerick.
To compound the tragedy, she had been living a full life despite having cystic fibrosis, a condition that had already taken the lives of two of her sisters. On Tuesday, three more people, including a three-year-old boy, Tom O’Reilly, perished with his grandparents in a car crash in Cashel. On Wednesday, another three-year-old child, Rosaleen McDonagh, was killed by a car in Portlaoise.
The loss of young lives has been unremitting this summer, from sizzling Greece to the slippery wet roads of rural Ireland. After normal living was put on hold by pandemic lockdowns and just when young people were starting to spread their wings and get ready to fly, they got snapped away.
Families are mourning. A paralysis of grief afflicts whole communities. But tonight, and tomorrow night and the night after that, our first responders will be out there again, finding words that defeat the rest of us.
Poet Paula Meehan composed A Prayer for the Children of Longing at the request of Dublin’s north inner-city residents in memory of their young people who died from drug use.
In it, she finds words for us all:
Grant us the clarity of ice
The comfort of snow
The cool memory of trees
Grant us the forest’s silence
The snow’s breathless quiet
For one moment to freeze
The scream, the siren, the knock on the door