‘HOW WILL I live and who will I be without my mother?’
Laura Kennedy wrote a column about receiving the news that her mother has terminal cancer and only has one year to live for The Irish Times last week.
The response to the piece has been huge, and speaking to the Brendan O’Connor Show on RTÉ Radio 1 this morning, Kennedy described her 57-year-old mother as an “incredible person”.
“She raised myself and my brother by herself and worked two jobs for most of her life. She’s just an incredible person to know really,” she told the presenter.
“It’s only since I grew up that I realised. I think single mothers have a reputation… that if you raise children alone and in poverty generally, statistically, they do not grow up to have lots of university education and lots of opportunity but my mother worked so hard.”
Kennedy also described how her father was an alcoholic and her mother didn’t want her children growing up in that environment.
She extracted herself [from that relationship] with no money and no support and she did it for us really.
Kennedy told the show that her mother had always worked so hard and the plan was for her to start enjoying herself more now.
“In the next few years that was the aim, that she would finally take some time for herself.
It’s always been about sort of subsisting, getting by to a certain point until she could get to the day where she could do the things she always wanted to.
“There is a limited amount of time now so everything is about her now, and that’s how it should be.”
‘There’s only one certainty’
Kennedy described how the process of all the tests took months and they finally ‘got left with an answer that is the worst possible one’.
She explained that cancer was found in two parts of her mother’s body and they were told it was either two different kinds of cancer in two parts of the body or one type that aggressively spread. It was the more serious kind – a cancer that had spread.
The oncologist told them the average time for people with this prognosis is one year or less. Kennedy said the ‘or less’ “makes you want to fling yourself across the room”.
The one thing you want in a situation like that is some certainty, something to hang onto, but there’s none.
“That’s really what you have to come accept, which is extremely difficult, just total uncertainty, accept there’s one certainly in the scenario and that’s that the person you love is going to die.
You get this news which is just appalling and you think okay I can’t react the way I might like to. I can’t get emotional, I can’t get angry because it’s not about me.
“This person needs me and I need to remain calm and be there for them.”
‘I wept over the cake’
Kennedy added that while “a fog of depression would be quite justified” for her mother, her main concerns instead are “still my brother and I, and making sure we are set and are looked after and that we’re okay”.
“And after that she wants to do stuff, because she has never done stuff, as it were.
Doing nice things, staying in nice places…she deserves to be taken care of, so that’s what’s happening now.
“I think she wants to cast of all the shackles she had in the past. My brother lives in London, I think she wants to stay with him more.”
Kennedy is also a PhD Candidate at Trinity College studying psychology. She is taking the next year out to care for her mother but she said that the psychology helps her to deal with the difficult emotions. She added that:
You build your sense of identity, there are parts of yourself that you know and experience only in the company of a parent and when your parent is gone so is that part of you, so you’re mourning more than just the loss of the physical person, there is something you have lost in yourself that is irretrievable.
Speaking about her mother’ health at present, she said, “At the moment she’s very good, yesterday she sent me a photo of a cake she baked. She used to bake a lot and she hasn’t done that in a while and I wept over the photo of the cake.”
Kennedy took to Twitter after the interview to say that her mother told her she couldn’t have any of the cake as it’s for her neighbour who has been cutting her lawn.
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