IT’S an age thing. Flip open the iPad, scan the news and light on the obituaries. My father used to sit in the armchair, large cup of hot tea balanced on one knee, two ginger snaps on the other and the old broadsheet Irish News spread wide between outstretched arms.
He always read the deaths. “Do you know who’s dead?” he’d say. It’s a very Irish thing.
Once upon a time, we rolled our eyes. Now, I open my mouth and my dad jumps out.
“I know more people below the ground than above it,” he’d sigh.
My friend has retired. “I spend my time going to wakes and funerals,” she confesses. There’s only so many rubber ham sandwiches and cups of tea a body can stomach.
I’m not big on body viewing either. Forget what they say, I’ve never seen a corpse that truly looked like himself.
My obituary addiction began with the journalistic task of penning obits with a large “Not for publication until death confirmed” note at the top.
When I catch sight of certain well-known people strolling along Botanic Avenue or mulling over the cabbages in the local greengrocer’s, a light pops on in my head and I see a great big red teacher’s tick. “Gotcha!” it says, “You’re on file.”
They, unawares, continue scanning the cabbages. “Carpe diem,” I’d like to whisper.
But it’s other lives – lives remembered – that hook my interest. It’s what some people can pack into their lives, how they can shine unseen – like Wordsworth’s Lucy – a violet by a mossy stone.
Carol Bell was one such violet, “half hidden from the eye”. Her friend, Irene Tuffrey-Wijne, from the L’Arche community, wrote about her in the Guardian.
“My friend Carol Bell who has died aged 68 of acute aortic thrombosis was, despite being a woman of few words, a community builder with a huge capacity for friendship. She would shake hands with everyone she met – visitors, strangers in the street, people at church – asking after their family and their pets.”
The writer goes on to say that she was born, the second of seven in London in the 1950s, and had severe learning difficulties. The family struggled, there was little support and at two years old she went into a hospital for “severely subnormal children”.
She lived there until she was 39. When such institutions were shut in the late 1980s, she went to live in a L’Arche community, which believes in shared lives between people with and without learning disabilities.
Very little was known about her institutional years – records were lost – but there were hints – the way she folded her clothes impeccably; the way she flinched if lightly touched on the back and how she’d say: “Ignore him. No party for you,” if someone misbehaved.
But as she relaxed into her new life, she came into her own. She showed deep compassion for anyone in distress, loved babies, dogs and music and was the queen of ice cream.
She was reunited with her mother and birth family; she found a second family with L’Arche.
You don’t have to go so very far back to hear of children with learning disabilities who lived lives in institutions.
I’ve read of mothers who were told: “This child’s not right. Put him away and go on and have another... forget him.” But parents do not forget. They visit and they try. Sometimes it’s just too challenging.
You don’t have to go too far back to hear stories of concealed pregnancies and mother and baby homes. You don’t have to turn the clock back so very far to hear stories of psychiatric hospitals where people lived out lonely lives when they should not have been there.
In an old psychiatric hospital in Dublin, they found women’s handbags containing what patients had brought with them when admitted. But they never collected those handbags... they never left. In each bag was a pair of rosary beads. Often there was a key to a house door that would never be used again. There were photographs of children, lipstick, mirrors, books.
Our world is far from perfect for people with any kind of disability. But it is so much more inclusive. I’m biased. I have a nephew and a god-daughter who shine brightly.
They are loved, they are adored. Of course there are question marks. What does the future hold?
But communities like L’Arche see the person, not the disability first. We owe them for their uncompromising love and inclusion. We owe them for seeing the shining star that was Carol Bell.
