Anybody who has seen somebody die in the open ward of a acute hospital will be able to relate to this poem by Paul Durcan (1944-2025). Most people now die in hospital with staff busy around them and something on the radio, television, or both. People might also be able to relate to the Durcan’s remarkable analogy with watching a death: “Is a bit like sitting in the front row of the concert hall/Watching a maestro performing Tchaikovsky’s Grand Piano Sonata./It’s spectacular, so to speak,/ But the audience feels helpless.” Many will also be familiar with “the old prick” of a consultant.

Durcan died last year, but I don’t get the impression from his poem that he’d learnt about dying from watching his father die. But another Irish writer from the West Coast, Kevin Toolis, wrote a book on his father’s death taught him how to die. I wrote in a review of the book: “Kevin Toolis, author of the beautiful My Father’s Wake, would agree with the surgeon Atul Gawande that we have forgotten how to die. Toolis’s core argument is that his forebears on an Atlantic-lashed island off the West Coast of Ireland had a familiarity with death that meant that they knew how to die. Unfortunately, what he calls the Western Death Machine has destroyed that familiarity leaving us with an existential dread of our inevitable mortality. But he ends the book with a call for rediscovery of how to die, although recognising that “It’s harder than you think to break away from the blinding of the Western Death Machine. In fact, it’s the work of a lifetime.” https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2020/08/19/relearning-how-to-die/

Glocca Morra by Paul Durcan

Dear Daughter—Watching my father die,

As one day you will watch me die,

In the public ward of a city-centre hospital,

Mid-afternoon bustle,

A transistor radio playing two or three beds away,

Paintwork flaking on the wall,

His breath dwindling,

His throat gurling,

A source disappearing,

Some of all that I am before my eyes disappearing,

Well, watching you own father die slowly in front of you,

Die slowly right under your nose,

Is a bit like sitting in the front row of the concert hall

Watching a maestro performing Tchaikovsky’s Grand Piano Sonata.

It’s spectacular, so to speak,

But the audience feels helpless.

When Daddy died

I wrung my hands at the foot of his bed

Until a consultant doctor told me to stop it

And to show some respect for the dead.

The old prick.

He had done nothing for daddy

Except pollute him with pills for twenty years

For fees in guineas.

They threw a sheet over him

And put screens around his bed

But I stood my ground

At the foot of the bed

While the transistor radio,

Like something hidden in a hedgerow

Went on with its programme—

Rosemary Clooney crooning

“How are Things in Glocca Morra?”