A couple of weeks ago, my eyes moved to a small headline, “Man Found Liable for Omagh bombing has died aged 70″. Colm Murphy was convicted of conspiring to cause the bombing in 1998 that killed 27 people. He was acquitted on appeal, then found liable in a civil case taken by the families of the victims. There’s a photo to accompany the headline, obviously an old one. Murphy wears a grey suit with shoulder pads and wide lapels, the kind that was fashionable in the 1990s. A handsome face, a builder in Co Louth with a large property portfolio. He died, no doubt, in a comfortable bed, surrounded by his family.
April 2023 was an interesting month. Joe Biden arrived to remind us all of the fragile grace of the Good Friday Agreement. Gerry Hutch walked free from a Dublin court, strode along the streets in search of a taxi, trailing a scrum of captivated onlookers. In Westmeath, Enoch Burke took his daily stance at the gates of Wilson’s Hospital School, a martyr to his self-righteousness. And I can’t help seeing these events as being interlinked, their intersection expressing something about the way we go about things on this island. Hutch’s swaggering criminality, Burke’s religious intransigence, Murphy’s militant nationalism - all balanced together with a delicate and miraculous peace.
Legacy is a word that has been popping up in recent speeches about the Troubles. Politically, it’s a useful word, it consigns those painful events to the past, helps the speaker to concentrate on the future, to turn their language towards the more simplistic agendas of policies and goals. But time and history aren’t so easily tamed. The past is never really past, just as the now that we live in is never really now.
Before the pandemic, while I lived in New York, I volunteered for just over a year at a hospice in Manhattan. Every Monday and Thursday afternoon I’d leave my apartment in Brooklyn and walk to the India Street Pier, where I’d board the East River Ferry and cross over to 34th Street, in midtown.
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The hospice was on the seventh floor of Bellevue Hospital, near the UN Headquarters. It was a normal-looking ward, with peach-coloured walls. There were two heavy doors to push through from the main corridor and, once inside, I always found myself struck by a discernible shift in tempo. It wasn’t only because the nurses and doctors spoke quietly in a hospice, though they did. Nor was it because they moved softly, or because the carpet was thick. On my third week, I pushed open the door to be faced with a gurney coming towards me, a sealed bodybag on top, a family - an extended family - standing behind it and looking directly at me, heartstunned. I walked past them to the nurses’ station and understood for the first time that it wasn’t the medical staff that dictated the pace of the ward, but the state of heightened awareness that accompanies death.
One patient in particular has stayed with me in the subsequent years. He was born in Shanghai. I won’t use his real name. I’ll refer to him as Mr Zheng. I knew nothing about him other than the few details written on the form that I received from the nurses’ desk at the start of each visit: his admission date, the name of his primary physician, his insurance company, his date and place of birth, his primary diagnosis, his diet.
He was in an isolation ward, which meant that to sit with him I had to wear a smock and medical gloves so that I wouldn’t pass along any infection. He was so frail, so delicate, always hunched in a foetal position. He had traces of stubble on his upper lip. Each week they were the same length. I wondered, but never asked, if the nurses shaved him regularly or if his beard growth had slowed to almost nothing. His liver was breaking down, so his breath smelled of acetone, like nail polish.
Twice a week, for three weeks, I held his hand for 90 minutes at a time, give or take. His eyes were usually open. His breath was thin. Sometimes his breathing dropped out altogether – and in these instances I would ready myself to call the nurse – but it always returned quickly, and when it did, he didn’t splutter or gasp; there was nothing dramatic about the situation. When I first began to volunteer, I was warned about these occurrences, that they would probably happen often. They did. And initially, they were troubling to witness, until eventually I accepted that what I was seeing was just the line of life dipping, momentarily, into oblivion. How porous the boundaries are, between this life and whatever happens next.
In the training I received, we were advised to speak to the patients, we were told that it was likely that they could hear our voices, and usually I did. But Mr Zheng seemed to embody so much silence that I found it better if I didn’t speak. Instead, I just sat and held his hand and thought my own thoughts.
So much of my childhood in Offaly returned to me in that strange room. It didn’t come like a dream, in snatches of half-remembered scenes, with dialogue, or relatives and friends coming and going. My recollections were much more visceral, more sensory than that. Later, back in my apartment, I noted down the things that came to me and reading them again now, they rise from the page once more – full of texture and volume.
The sound of cattle walking into a crush. The steam rising off a bullock on a winter’s morning. The smell of primroses. Scarecrows made from fertilizer bags. Nettles. Dock leaves. Billows of turfsmoke. Porridge cooked overnight in the oven. A barmbrack at Halloween with a spent match and a hard pea and a ring inside, all wrapped in slips of greaseproof paper. A horse foaming at the nostrils, using its tail as a flyswatter. Small rotten apples splayed under a tree. Soda farls. A tyre swing. Sparrows bulleting into a crumbling wall. Starlings in murmuration.
I think the reason I remember Mr Zheng so clearly is because of a gaze that he would regularly take on, a couple of times every session. Most of the time he would stare blankly into the mid-distance, but once or twice every hour, his eyes would gain lucidity and he would lean forward, towards something. It was obvious that he was seeing something, something beyond me, or the room itself. He was elsewhere. Something would move before him, in that elsewhere. Often, he would lift his arm a few inches. Sometimes he would motion to speak, but only sound would emerge, a rolling sound, a kind of keening.
In these moments, I’d reassure him that I was with him, that he wasn’t alone, that he needn’t worry. But eventually I stopped doing this. My gestures and words, though well-meaning, started to feel arrogant. I began to feel that I was elevating my own sense of reality above his. That I was telling him that this hospital room I was in, with its plastic furniture and nylon carpets and air-conditioning, was comprised of much more truth, validity than the place within which he existed. And eventually, in the latter sessions, I actually began to wonder if he was motioning to me to look at something far beyond my own purview.
When we talk about trauma – about reliving trauma, or dissociating from it – we talk about it as something stored within the body, a cellular activity that when activated releases images and sensations within our brains. Something real happened once, lying dormant until our bodies are triggered into remembering that event and we experience an imitation of it. This now feels like a weak explanation to me. We know that time isn’t linear. So why should we treat conscious experience as though it were?
My afternoons with Mr Zheng have caused me to question all of these presumptions. A lot of the textbooks around trauma compare the brain to a computer - using words like encoding, storage, retrieval - which gives the impression that there is a world outside of our brains and a representation of the world inside our brains and that we need the expertise of neuroscience to tell them apart. It also falls into the pattern of claiming that anything that can be measured by instruments – the plastic chair I sat in - is objective and real and anything that cannot – Mr Zheng’s visions – are hallucinatory and subjective.
I wonder if our memories are indicators of something much more profound. The brain has no point of convergence, there’s no place you can point to and say ‘Here I am’. There is no evidence to say that consciousness even exists within the body. Neuroscientists operate on the assumption that neurons ‘produce’ consciousness – but there’s nothing within their field of studies to prove that to be true. Put another way, I can say that our conscious experience happens, but we have no idea where and how this occurs. Put another way, I can say that our consciousness is our felt experience – a story we become immersed within.
The power of stories. Marketers and political consultants have turned the phrase into a sales tool, as if this power is something that we can harness and manipulate at will. The brain may well be a storytelling organism, but as any novelist will tell you, the storyteller doesn’t necessarily tell the story, often it’s the other way around.
We are all divided and discontinuous. The word ‘I’ is a story, one that changes, constantly. And I wonder if our beliefs - religious or political - are simply formulations that provide a quick answer to the unanswerable question – who are you? Or maybe we create them to answer the easier question - who are you not?
I wonder if Mr Zheng was aware of the word ‘I’. I can’t help but think that by the time I met him he had been released from the limits of language and rigid definition, that he existed untethered in a purer form of truth - a dappled landscape of light and sound, of smell and image.
The past couple of months have reminded us of the immense presence that the Troubles still occupies in our national narrative. Let’s not forget that stories can also lead to atrocities. Whoever it was that planted the Enniskillen bomb, whoever those men were that wielded their guns in the Kingsmill massacre, or in Loughinisland, or in the thousands of other sectarian killings that took place in this part of the world the latter part of the 20th century – did so according to a personal belief, a narrative.
I wonder about the stories that emerged for Colm Murphy, lying on his own deathbed. I wonder if he pictured the events around the Omagh bombing. I wonder if he regretted his past actions. Perhaps the decades of peace that followed the bombing changed his perspective or perhaps he clung to his justifications with the ferocity of a drowning man.
The most significant factor of the Good Friday Agreement was the removal of a physical border – a development that almost no-one, throughout the political spectrum, wants re-instated. Perhaps the next step in the process is to remove the borders in our minds. Perhaps we should think of ‘Irishness’ or ‘Britishness’ as less of a genealogical or geographical fact, and more as a narrative that we tell ourselves, sing about, dance to, march to. It’s not as odd a concept as it might first seem. A couple of decades ago, would any of us have referred to ourselves as European? Even the notion of being ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ on this island has vastly changed over the decades.
Perhaps a united Ireland will eventually arise from all our conflict, not as a physical territory but as recognition of the multiplicity of histories we each hold within ourselves.
Darragh McKeon’s book, Remembrance Sunday (Penguin Sandycove), is out now
