I AM writing this because Christina would have wished me to do so. Many have written generously of her life and work since her untimely death in mid September. That has been no little consolation to our son Eric, to me, and to her wider family, as we have sought to come to terms with the enormous gulf in our lives with which we have been faced.
Christina, I know, would have been surprised by the depth and breadth of the sorrow her death has evoked. She touched many lives through her work. For her, though, that work was a question of doing what she loved rather than seeking public acclaim. In that work, she sought always to be fair and accurate and, where necessary, to demystify that which others sometimes found confusing. For most of the past two decades, the bulk of her work concerned education.
However, as others have remarked elsewhere since her death, she was not a single issue journalist. From time to time, stirred by other issues, she turned her attention to subjects well removed from the educational system. In one sense, however, it might be said that her motive in doing so remained a desire to educate and to demystify. Hence my conviction that, in writing this, I am fulfilling an obligation to her.
I know she would have been deeply touched, though embarrassed, by almost everything that has been written about her in recent weeks. I say almost everything, because I know that she would have been deeply concerned that some of what was written about her lengthy battle with cancer - written with the best of intentions and from the most genuine of motives - painted too dark a picture of her treatment in the past few years and its effects upon her. She would have been concerned at the possible effects of this picture on other cancer sufferers and their relatives and friends.
Some time ago, stirred into action, as often, by a burning urge to clarify some complex matter for others, she wrote an article in The Irish Times. Unusually for Christina, it was written anonymously. It was anonymous because it dealt not with education but with cancer and the benefits of chemotherapy. It was written from her own experience of cancer and from her parallel experiences of helping to nurse two elderly aunts through the terminal stages of their cancers.
Characteristically, she wished to encourage a debate as to whether (and, if so, at what stage, particularly for the aged) chemotherapy might serve merely to minimally prolong an already fully lived life, at an unacceptable cost in terms of severe additional suffering and discomfort in the few months of life left to its recipients. She expressed no doubt about the fact that chemotherapy had given her extra years of life. She wrote glowingly of its benefits for many, of success stories with which she was familiar.
"Living with cancer," she wrote forthrightly, "is not a nightmare; I live a normal life, work hard and enjoy myself."
In latter years, that normality for Christina embraced a visit to hospital every few weeks for a blood transfusion. Her triumph was to make it a normality, not just for herself but for Eric and myself. Typically she drove Eric to school on a Friday morning, went on to the hospital for the necessary tests and then continued to work. At tea time she would return home, collect an overnight bag and drive herself into hospital.
Some time between lunchtime and Saturday evening, depending on the number of units of blood she had been required to receive, she would leave the hospital, drive herself home and resume a life which, by any standards, was remarkably full. The transfusions, she made clear, restored her for another few weeks: she had fresh colour in her cheeks, her remarkable energies were revivified.
Part of the preparations for her holidays in recent years routinely included such transfusions. So normal a part of our domestic routine did she make these hospital visits, so matter of fact was her approach to them, that we came to refer to such weekends as "refuelling weekends". I know she would wish me to make clear to others facing such a regime of transfusions that for her it was wholly restorative in nature.
But back to chemotherapy. She wrote that on at least two occasions she had demurred from suggested chemotherapy and had fought her way back on to a relatively even keel without it. Her willpower, as many knew, was formidable; her spirit, to the end, unquenchable. On one occasion, discussing her transfusions and medication, she briefly pondered the future and the question of possible long term side effects, before declaring firmly: I don't even want to think of them. I'll face them when I have to. I am not going to worry about them now.
She knew, though, that the long term prognosis was bleak. "When the time comes - as it inevitably will - when I have to make a decision on severe chemotherapy with concomitant side effects, I hope I will have the courage to opt to live out my last months in dignity, without palliative chemotherapy," she wrote.
On the weekend of her death, Christina had entered hospital to face the long postponed prospect of chemotherapy. I am told that, had it been successful, she would have enjoyed further years of quality life. I believe firmly she suspected her race was run. Within a few hours of entering hospital, her immune system ravaged by illness, she was dying from an infection against which she had virtually no defence. The planned course of chemotherapy never began. She had done better than live her last months in dignity: she had lived and worked fully until almost her last moment.
TO most, Christina was a journalist and expert on education; a trusted guide and counsellor on the complexities of the contemporary educational system. But away from her work, she was a loving mother and wife, and, as our personal friends well knew, the person around whom our household and private lives revolved.
I would be less than honest if I did not say that there were times when Eric and I resented the amount of energy and time which she devoted to the problems of other parents and other children; too often in recent years, she returned with the bulk of her day's energies spent. Selfishly, perhaps, we wished we could have commanded her prodigious vitality, enthusiasm and unbridled passion for life for our exclusive benefit. The paradox in our lives, as sometimes we discussed over the kitchen table late at night, was that on the one hand her work too often took her from us, yet on the other, it probably kept her with us for more years than we had feared might be the case. Her work was much more than a job for Christina. In all its aspects, it was an abiding passion and something in which she could immerse herself so deeply that other things, such as illness, could be thrust from her mind. Her commitment to her work, I am certain, had sometimes served to keep her travelling onwards with us.
Make no mistake. For all her public vivacity, energy, questing and determination that life should be lived fully and as normally as possible, Christina knew her time was limited. The same rigorous scrutiny and standards that she brought to her journalism and, while I'm at it, to my sometimes less than perfect efforts to fulfil the role of domestic helpmate and companion, were applied even more sternly to herself. She knew herself, her strengths, her weaknesses, better than any other.
She knew, I suspect better even than those who tended so wonderfully to her health in recent years, the exact state of her well being or otherwise. As a cancer patient, she sought to master the complexities of cancer and in particular, her type of lymphoma. She read omnivorously on the subject of cancers and their treatment and seemed always to know how active or inactive her lymphoma was. Indeed, it seems clear that in recent weeks she had done much unspokenly to prepare Eric and me, as well as some of her closer friends, or the possibility of her death.
She was not looking forward to the prospect of chemotherapy and the concomitant risks arising from her depressed immune system. She had told friends some time ago that her goal was to reach the millennium. More recently, I suspect, it had become that of seeing our son finish his secondary education. I find it no coincidence - that two days before she entered hospital for the last time, she drove him and his friends into town and picked them up again as they celebrated their Junior Certificate results. If she was going to miss his Leaving, then she was certainly going to be there for the Junior Cert.
She was determined Eric and I should be left with the happiest of family memories. Birthdays Christmases and other family events were joyous occasions. There were holidays in Ireland and abroad. Twice this year she had travelled to Turkey. On the first occasion, she led two of our dearest friends on a merry and energetic motorised tour of much of its rich archaeological heritage. A few weeks later, with our son's closest friend, we returned on a family holiday. She was becoming visibly frailer. Nonetheless, she was as formidably energetic as ever. Only 10 weeks before her death, she led us all on a physically taxing expedition up a gorge in southern Turkey, wading through icy water, scrambling over rocks and boulders as far as it was possible to go and far beyond the point at which most visitors had given it their best and turned back.
BEFORE beginning her annual marathon, explaining the complexities of this year's points requirements to another crop of students poised between second and third level stages of their education, she travelled west to her native and beloved Mayo and her equally beloved parents. Accompanied by her youngest sister, she drove the length and breadth of that county, visiting for a last time the mountains and seascapes which she loved so much. The last few weeks of her life were dominated by work: six days a week work, in which she wrote her daily column and personally dealt with hundreds of telephone queries. However, I and others had noticed that, for the first time, she was prepared to admit that she was failing to achieve the buzz of previous years from the task: that is, until the very end of this year's "Points Race."
On what was to be the last night she was ever to spend at home with us, she sat in the kitchen after dinner describing with all her old enthusiasm the subjects of her last two columns of the 1996 series. She was her old animated, sparkling self - eyes flashing, hands gesticulating, talking at high speed - as she described her exposure of those behind courses that had been offered in this country as being linked to "Trinity College and University." The Trinity concerned, she had discovered, was based in Spain, was unrecognised by the Spanish authorities and was owned by a religious organisation in the US. Her pleasure stemmed from one thing: the fact that, at a time of considerable stress in their lives, a group of students and their parents could have been saved from investing their money in courses that did not have the validity they claimed.
By the time that last column appeared she was already critically ill. Less that two days after she was dead. But she had lived her life to the end as she had wanted: active and fully committed to her work and her family. Her final months were filled with love, holidays, activity and the work integral to her being. Eric and I are proud to have loved her as a mother and wife, prouder yet to have been loved so deeply by her.
For Christina's funeral, I chose an extract from The Prophet by the poet and philosopher, Khalil Gibran, to illustrate the fulfilment her work had brought to her life and thus to ours and those of many others. Coincidentally, Gibran follows that passage immediately with one upon the subject of joy and sorrow.