The Personals Read online

  Grief is a strange emotion. After the initial days and weeks passed, I remember sitting one day in a coffee shop in Cork and thinking that grief was actually quite a beautiful thing on one level. It takes you by the hand and shows you how much you really cared for someone. It led me to a new awareness about what grief is, how it can dominate your life if you let it and how you have to learn to live with your grief, to own it and to form your own personal relationship with it. ‘Grief,’ said Queen Elizabeth II, ‘is the price we pay for love’ and that’s probably the one standout quote that has stuck with me since.

  So now when I see ads like the one at the start of this piece, I’m more attuned to the possibility that grief may be stalking the lives of the sellers, hanging around each line of the ad like a heavy fog that is slow to lift. I phone the number.

  ‘I’m in Aldi, can we talk a little later on?’ says the voice on the other end of the line. The accent is a mix of Cork and Kerry, the kind of accent you’ll hear on YouTube clips of old IRA volunteers talking about ambushes in Ballyvourney or Kanturk. There were a few signposts in the ad that drew me in. First, the fact that the chair is in ‘excellent’ condition suggests it wasn’t used all that long, hinting perhaps at a recent bereavement or maybe, with luck, a miraculous recovery.

  ‘Genuine reasons for selling’ usually means that the seller is not a dealer or someone who buys items cheaply in order to sell them on for a profit. It’s more usually someone who had to buy something without much preparation, and now wishes to dispense with it. Often it’s someone who has experienced a significant event and now, after a little time and distance, feels ready to take a step forward.

  An hour or two after our initial phone call, when the Aldi run is complete and the car is presumably loaded with bags of German jam, power drills and wetsuits, we speak by phone again.

  Julia has a voice which is warm and open, and she seems to have time to talk which, in this era of instant messaging when people don’t even have the time to leave voice messages, is really refreshing. She tells me the chair had sold a week earlier and made €5,000, just under half the original purchase price. She had been reluctant to place the ad, and before doing so had phoned a number of health and charitable organisations wondering if they would buy the relatively new motorised chair from her.

  To Julia’s surprise, there was no way to recycle the chair, even though she makes the point that regular wheelchairs and walkers were recycled by the health services all the time. So, in part spurred on by desperation and exasperation, she turned to the small ads. We talked a little about that, and also about the different view of the world you get when a loved one starts using a wheelchair. She was struck by how footpaths and roads present obstacles, and how people, both consciously and subconsciously, look at you differently.

  The wheelchair belonged to her husband, Julia tells me, and shortly after he began using it they went away for a weekend to a hotel, which he had booked. ‘When we went to check in, the person at the desk would automatically speak to me, even though the hotel booking was in my husband’s name,’ she tells me. ‘In our local area, after my husband began using the wheelchair, some people would look at us and not even say hello and just keep going. It was so strange.’

  Julia tells me that her husband had had health problems most of his adult life, and added to this, he had suffered a number of strokes and then a heart attack. His health difficulties eventually resulted in him having both his legs amputated, which had a devastating physical and psychological effect on him. He had been an incredibly active sports person, the kind of man who would be comfortable parachuting out of a helicopter. To go from that high level of activity to sitting in a chair all day long meant a huge adjustment for him and for her, she tells me.

  While all this was happening, Julia was dealing with a lot of grief in her other relationships. In the space of 12 months she lost her mother and two close friends, and then her brother came through a battle with throat cancer. You have to stay positive, she says, and initially at least the wheelchair was a real plus in their lives. ‘It was fantastic in that he was able to go around the shop on his own,’ she says. ‘It did bring its own problems though, and again things you don’t think about beforehand, like how high items are on shelves and how hard it is for someone in a wheelchair to reach them. But you learn to live and adapt.’

  The first bolt of grief to hit Julia had come in January 2015 when her father had passed away suddenly. It had been a massive shock to the family, and the first time she and her seven siblings had had to deal with grief. Following that, in April 2015, her husband had had his foot amputated, and then just over a year later, in June 2016, his second one was also removed. Shortly after that, her mother had passed away. No sooner had one wave of grief hit when she had to brace herself for another and another. ‘It was a really difficult few years,’ she says. ‘If I actually sat down and thought about it chronologically, I would probably crack up. I don’t know how I’m still here,’ she adds candidly.

  Just as she was getting over that series of traumas, in June 2017 Julia’s husband passed away. She tells me that you have to look at the positive side of grief. She thinks back to the morning her husband died, for example. ‘There were two rapid response personnel and two ambulances at the house the day he died. It was unbelievable the support I got,’ she says. ‘They worked on him and had all these machines in the house and they kept me updated on what was going on. They held my hand and really helped me through it. When it happened, I felt happy for him. Every day, he was in constant pain and each morning a new pain was added to his existing ones. The last few months were really hard.’

  At this point we break off and begin to chat about the merits or otherwise of euthanasia. I tell Julia about an old college friend who travelled to Switzerland when the pain of his condition became too much and ended his life in a clinic there. I saw something of the suffering he underwent and could perfectly understand his decision. But I tell her, having experienced the sheer emotional devastation of suicide, I’ve also seen the incredibly destructive impact that ending one’s own life can have on those who are left behind as they struggle to piece the meaning of that sharp ending together. I tell her I feel conflicted about the issue.

  Julia feels no such conflict when she reflects on the way her husband suffered towards the end. ‘I totally agree with euthanasia,’ she tells me. ‘I would vote for it without a doubt. For people who suffer towards the end it is so horrific for them. With my own mother and father, they both got sick just three months before the end and that was it. It was short. My father was 78 and my mother was 80 and they were largely healthy and happy people and lived lovely lives. But there is in a way a form of euthanasia in Ireland; we just don’t speak about it.’

  When talking about grief, sometimes people fall into a pattern of asking if calendar events such as Christmas will be tougher than usual. A lot of focus is placed on anniversaries and particular times of the year when the family would have been together. For what it’s worth, if grief has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes it’s not the big life events that are the most difficult to cope with. It’s the rainy Tuesday in February when a musty smell brings the person back into your life, or the way someone clears leaves from a driveway on an autumn day, or a seaside sound or a song fragment in a shopping centre lift. And while birthdays, Christmases, weddings and all those life events can be difficult, very often grief is hiding in the mundane.

  When you’ve cared for someone who was sick for a long time, adjusting to life without them can be difficult, but the adjustment to a life in which you no longer care for them can be equally difficult. ‘I had an hour a day to myself for the past five years,’ Julia tells me. ‘That was when the home help came in and I would take that hour and go to the shops. I now have a new lease of life. I don’t mean it to sound like I was a prisoner in my own home but I’ve gone from basically providing 24/7 care to nothing. It’s a really big c
hange.’

  She says she’s one of the lucky ones in that she did get to say goodbye properly before her husband died. About a week before he passed, he was lying in bed and she was sitting in a chair next to him. He motioned to her to lean in closer to her and then he whispered through strained breaths: ‘I really do love you.’ Julia choked up and didn’t really know what to say. He’d caught her off guard in between fretting about making him comfortable and ensuring his needs were met as humanely as possible. ‘I just said jokingly, “Sure I love me too.” He then said something else and I don’t know what it was, but I said to him, “Do you think you’re dying?” He said, “Yes” for the first time, and I again just passed it off with a joke, something along the lines of, “You’ll bury me yet.”’

  Looking back now she says that over the next few days there were tell-tale signs that he was losing his fight against illness. At two o’clock in the morning on one of those days she went in to check on him and she says he was having a loud chat with himself and laughing. When she asked who he was talking to, he said his parents, both of whom had died decades earlier. Julia says she hopes she’s not being too graphic but she wants to tell me what the end was like.

  Living in a rural area, with the post office and the pub and the local corner shop under threat, the opportunity for conversation becomes limited. So while it might seem strange that someone I have never met is relaying the most intimate details of her and her late husband’s final moments together, it felt to me that she had stored all this up, waiting for the moment someone asked her – really asked her – how it was. Sometimes too it’s easier to tell a stranger.

  ‘When I went in and he was talking to his parents, I discovered he had soiled himself and the bed needed to be changed,’ she tells me. ‘I do know now this is what they sometimes call the final run, if you know what I mean. At the time, I was thinking how will I clean this up now without upsetting him? That’s the kind of thing that goes through your mind. So, I said to him, “I’m going to get a basin and tidy up a bit, and then after that, I will make a nice cup of tea for us.” While he wasn’t looking, I slipped off the sheets and pillows and changed them. I was glad the way I dealt with it; he had his dignity intact. Twenty-four hours later, he was dead.’

  It’s a year or so since Julia’s husband died, and she’s still a relatively young woman – only in her mid-fifties. She says she has a lovely new home in Cork, which she and her husband had moved into just three months before he died. That’s important, she says, because it doesn’t hold a lifetime of memories and she can start again in the home and not feel weighed down by images of the past all around her. Although she’s keen to say that she has no interest in meeting someone new or starting another relationship. She’s heard all the clichés about grief and grieving from well-meaning people since her husband died. The biggest one of these is the phrase ‘time is a healer’. ‘It is,’ she says, ‘but you have to put in the time to heal. That’s the hard bit they don’t tell you about.’

  The chair had been sold to a man in west Cork, who had a heart procedure coming up and was nervous about the impact it might have on his mobility. He was sounding very pessimistic on the phone when they were organising collection and she says he was full of trepidation about what lay ahead. ‘I’ll bet,’ Julia says, ‘that he’s had his operation and has made a great recovery and doesn’t need the chair at all. I’ll bet he’s alive and kicking and will be for a long time to come and the chair is gathering dust somewhere, waiting for the next person to inhabit it.’

  Part Three

  PETS’ CORNER

  A Monkey Is for Life – Not Just for Christmas

  For sale: pair of breeding monkeys (with or without cage). Evening Echo, 2014

  The above advertisement appeared in the pet pages of the Evening Echo among the birdcages, goldfish bowls, free kittens and pedigree puppies, during Christmas 2014. When I phoned the contact number, a man with a strong rural accent told me the monkeys were gone. He wasn’t keen to go into the story of where the monkeys had come from or how he had come to possess them, but he did agree to put me in touch with the buyer. So the next morning I arrived at Rumley’s Pet Farm, a few kilometres outside Cork city. Ivan Rumley told me that he’d already sold the male monkey but would be happy to show me around his mini-zoo and introduce me to the female.

  This land had been earmarked for development during the boom (the last one, not the supposed current one), but the plans were never realised, and so now the Rumleys have done a great job building on their strategic position between Cork and Kerry to develop a tourist and educational business. And that’s where the monkeys came in.

  In one of the outhouses at the back of the farmhouse are two large pens, and inside one was a marmoset monkey, one of the smallest breeds in the world. ‘She is just three years old and it was my first time seeing an advertisement for monkeys in the Evening Echo,’ Ivan Rumley told me. The seller had bought them as pets from a dealer in Northern Ireland. It’s easier to buy exotic animals on the island of Ireland than it is to buy a dog or a cat because of the lack of regulation. When the owner of the monkeys fell ill, he needed to offload them in a hurry and turned to the small ads. Ivan Rumley bought the pair for more than €1,000. ‘To be honest, I was only looking in the Echo for a pony,’ he told me.

  Finding Shangri-La

  Wanted by pensioner – medium-sized mixed breed dog m/f for company and lots of country walks. Free to good home assured. Evening Echo, July 2018

  Over the years I’ve been reading them, pensioners have posted some of the best and quirkiest ads I’ve come across. For example, a guy I rang one time was looking for a transistor radio. When I phoned him and we got talking, he told me he was about to start a campaign to get the city authorities to increase the height of all the bridges in Cork because he claimed swans were hitting their heads when they flew under them on their way to Canada ...

  When I saw the above ad it drew me in straight away and thankfully the man behind it needed little persuading to tell me some of his story. We arranged to meet near Collins Barracks on the north side of Cork city. He was wearing colourful shorts and a Michael Jackson T-shirt. I reckoned he was in his sixties, but he could have been older. He was a tall man who pointed to a hearing aid in one ear, which meant I had to stand on his right-hand side so he could hear me properly. As we strolled to his house he was happy to chat about his life and particularly his attachment to dogs.

  Before we met, he had given me the name of his estate, and because I had arrived early, I walked around wondering which house was his and whether I could match the voice to his physical space. One small bungalow with flowers growing from all angles outside and a bowl for a dog in the porch (bit of a giveaway) seemed a fairly strong possibility.

  In the end, we didn’t go as far as the house; he preferred to talk in my parked car outside his estate, although he struggled to get into it because of some ulcers on his leg that had just been dressed. Whenever possible, I prefer to meet people in their homes. It’s their own patch, where they’re usually most at ease and I’m the one out of my comfort zone a little, which helps balance the situation. The car works fine though, once people overcome their initial self-consciousness about a microphone being pointed towards them in a confined space.

  I began, as I nearly always do, by asking Charlie to read out his ad for me, which he did in a lovely mellow Cork voice, which had a tone perfectly befitting a man of his years. After he’d read the ad he started talking about his love of dogs and walking. ‘I used to have three or four dogs all the time and I have lots of photographs at home of every place we walked – Carrignavar, Whitechurch, Rathpeacon and Glenbeigh,’ Charlie told me. ‘I don’t walk for fitness. I just do it with the dogs. Any of the walks would be 10km out and 10km back. To be honest, that would be the shortest one I’d do.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t walk without the dogs?’ I ask him. ‘No, I did a few walks on my own there r
ecently, that’s why I advertised – ’twasn’t the same thing, you see. The old dog I had wouldn’t go out at all towards the end. He was fit enough, but he just wouldn’t leave the estate. You’d miss the company,’ he says.

  Charlie has had dogs since he was 20, so for about half a century he’s always had a canine companion. ‘The first dog I adopted was out in Africa, in the Congo. I was in the army at the time and I was 18,’ he explains. ‘We were one of the last battalions to go out, the 38th, and there were always a few dogs around the camp. You weren’t supposed to touch them in case of rabies, but there was a lovely young Alsatian that I got attached to. That was the first one I had, and then I used to look after a few in the barracks as there was always a couple of strays. And then people over the years gave me dogs, so I never really paid for any of them.’

  We talk about breeds that are suitable as family pets, which dogs work well in cities and the different temperaments of various breeds. When I ask which had been his favourite dog, his voice begins to crack with emotion and his eyes redden. He looks away from me out of the window, not wanting me to see him upset. He coughs, to borrow a line from Heaney, angry tearless sighs. ‘I think ... the fella that died recently,’ he says. ‘He was a good-sized dog, like an Alsatian face. I had him 12 years and he got leukaemia two years ago and in two months he was gone.’