‘Reading the notes, it was apparent that the disease had taken the same course as previously, first melanoma and then attacking the lungs,’ explains Dr McGarrity.
‘The medical notes from the Marsden did state that there had been a query over the progress of the disease seven years before. Seems that it had regressed of its own accord – there was no mention in the notes of any possible interventions – divine or otherwise.’
Dr McGarrity describes Siobhán as a most unusual woman. ‘She really was a special kind of person. Certainly I wasn’t used to meeting anyone quite so articulate. On one occasion she talked to me about her disease. She painted a graphic picture.’
Siobhán told the doctor, ‘I feel like my body is an apple and every day there are more and more black spots and bruising. Soon my whole body will be covered.’
Being almost the same age as Siobhán and a mother herself, Dr McGarrity admits that she held a particular affection for her. There was also a more personal reason: the doctor’s own husband had also been diagnosed with cancer. He and Siobhán were undergoing treatment at the same time. Dr McGarrity, while discussing Siobhán, revealed that he was ‘very poorly’.
‘Siobhán’s disease had gathered momentum,’ she says, ‘and as she got more sick, she seemed to gain more strength. Her strength of character and resilience meant that she remained positive up to the end – though she did know she was dying.
‘She had an acceptance of that fact and never shied away from discussing what would happen to the family after she had gone. Her concerns were always for the husband Peter and the children, Oscar and Constance.
‘Her attitude was impressive,’ says the doctor, who all too often these days is confronted with patients losing their battle against cancer. She offers this insight, ‘I honestly don’t believe Siobhán was afraid of dying. She was a girl of remarkable faith. She accepted her fate and in our discussions no avenues were closed.
‘She was intelligent and open; she heard what was said about the upcoming stages of the disease. The Marsden had suggested she might have between nine and eighteen months. Siobhán never asked me to be more specific. In the event she lived for just another four months.’
Siobhán was admitted to Belfast City Hospital’s Cancer Centre in Holy Week 2007.
‘We took her in for some pain management and specialist nursing,’ Dr McGarrity explains. ‘It was expected that she would return home and the plan would have been to arrange hospice care as she got nearer the end. The end came suddenly, but I know Siobhán died with great dignity and courage.’
Nurses on the ward at the Cancer Centre, trained to deal with dying patients, were also struck by Siobhán’s level of acceptance.
On the day she died, at noon on Easter Saturday, 7 April, one of the nurses put her thoughts into words. ‘Siobhán slipped away peacefully into the arms of God – he refused to let her suffer any longer.’
Now that we have traced the course of Siobhán’s final years through the memories of those close to her, let us look at her experience as she recounts it in her own words. Each of the remaining chapters closes with an extract from Siobhán’s Story.
SIOBHÁN’S STORY: WE’LL MEET AGAIN
On 5 May 1999 I closed and locked the door of my office in the Literature Department of the University of Sussex, nestling beneath the hills of the South Downs.
The day was warm and sunny as I set off across campus to walk the five miles to Brighton railway station by way of the seafront. It was 1991 and I’d taken up the post of lecturer at this most modern and radical of universities after eight years in America as student and then teacher.
My head was filled with observations on the work of students already seen that day and I made a mental note of work to be discussed with those pupils whose tutorials I had hastily rearranged.
Mentally I also ran through the research needed for an upcoming guest lecture and wondered if I’d left behind any important papers or reference books in my rush to leave the building.
Certainly I’d left my outdoor coat and a small overnight bag, deciding that I already had more than enough to carry. My briefcase was, as usual, filled to bursting with paperwork, publications and unmarked essays.
There was no way of knowing that more than a year later I would still not have returned to my paper-strewn desk in that office with its sign on the door ‘Professor Siobhán Kilfeather, Lecturer, English Literature’.
Sitting on the train from Paddington to Shrewsbury on the way home to our cottage in Shropshire, some 220 miles from Brighton, I replayed in my head the previous evening’s telephone conversation with my husband Peter. He was at home with our two children, Constance, who was four, and Oscar, who was coming up to two. I had carefully timed my phone call till after the children were in bed and the Manchester United game against Liverpool had finished on Match of the Day.
Peter was depressed. He couldn’t disguise it, though he was making a real effort to sound normal. At the time I thought, ‘If this is how he reacts to a disappointing football score, what will he feel like if the results of my tests are positive? He’s getting things a bit out of proportion.’ But in my heart of hearts I knew the reason.
‘Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?’ I asked yet again. The only explanation I could force out of him just didn’t ring true. He tried to make me believe that his upset was because Paul Ince had scored an equaliser against Manchester United in a 2–2 draw. But I knew my husband too well. The unspoken message in his voice was stirring up in me a feeling of impending doom.
‘Expect me home tomorrow,’ I said quickly. Already I was visualising changes I would need to make in my schedule. Peter wouldn’t admit it but I knew instinctively that he had received the results of a biopsy I had undergone a month earlier at a local hospital at Stoke.
His voice told me what he refused to put into words. The test was positive. I had cancer.
All the way home my mind refused to let go of the word ‘cancer’. I tried to escape into the make-believe world of books – always my escape from the real world – but my mind refused to concentrate.
The motion of the train seemed to echo my thoughts: Living with cancer, dying from cancer, living with cancer, dying from cancer…
It was close to midnight before I drove down the dark and narrow lane to our home, a mile above a cross-country road outside Shrewsbury.
Peter’s face was etched with pain and worry, but still he tried to distract me from hearing the bad news. He claimed tiredness – trying to put off for just one more day the stark fact that we were staring into the unknown. Our lives were about to change irrevocably.
‘Let’s deal with it in the morning,’ he said.
However, I was not to be put off – the suspense was agonising.
Knowing that I would be difficult to contact during classes at the university, I had instructed the hospital to leave a message on the answering machine.
‘Let me hear the message, right now,’ I demanded.
But Peter had already wiped the tape clean. As if by erasing the message he could erase the truth.
Finally, close to tears and as the clock struck midnight, he gave me the bad news: ‘The