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A riveting memoir:It’s not often that a piece of memoir which was written more than 30 years ago and has lain unpublished since then can rivet as much as ‘ Matthew, You Cannot be Sick’ by Rita Swan, an essay in the new editon of the Dublin Review.

Though a grieving mother when she wrote this, Rita Swan holds nothing back in describing her child’s suffering: the gnashing of his teeth; the fixed, glassy, solemn stare; his expression of excruciating pain. He had not responded for 12 days before the family took him to hospital, where meningitis was diagnosed and treatment undertaken. He died on July 7th, 1977. “We now think Matthew’s persistent problem with his left knee was caused by infection, and that his first three severe fevers were evidence of an invasion by Haemophilus influenzaeand an upper- respiratory infection that later caused meningitis,” she writes.’