My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on that day, he would have been wearing his pressed suit, with medals and poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners gathered respectfully at the Cenotaph where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. I cannot think of the First World War without also thinking of Enniskillen, so as we prepare to commemorate the one hundred year anniversary of the Battle of the Somme – in which my grandfather fought – I am also remembering those old men gathered in remembrance at the Cenotaph in County Fermanagh.
My Granda never forgot the wars and the men who fought beside him. Never. He made sure I remembered too. Because of him, I have always known that “the war to end all wars” ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He told me so many times on our walks down the Moss Road. At just 25, he had been part of that “template of civic cooperation.” As Private James McFadden, No. 15823, he enlisted as a volunteer soldier with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Following his training at Finner Camp in County Donegal, he was promptly shipped off to France, where he fought, scared yet brave, in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele. For untold miles, he crept through the muck, weary, thirsty, lost, and far from home. One of too few who survived the battle at Passchendaele, Granda carried to safety another young soldier, Sammy Campbell, who hailed from The Upperlands, a village outside Maghera. Granda told my mother the story many times – lest she would forget. Too, he told of the raging hunger that drove him to steal chickens from a French farm, of the thirst and weariness that almost broke him.
My grandfather did not belong in the muck. He belonged on the banks of the Moyola River, fishing, or cutting turf at The Moss. It saddens me to picture him far away from the bluebells and foxgloves that once lined winding lanes to houses along the Broagh road.
By the time I was in my teens, doing O-level English and learning by heart much of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est,” I had already committed to memory my grandfather’s own story of the “war and the pity of war,” and how it had been fought on faraway fields, in particular, of a dark evening that found him and his brothers in arms, afraid, parched with thirst, their billy cans empty. Crawling on their bellies through a field somewhere in France, I imagine they felt something close to euphoria when they came upon the little stream, followed by a horror that would haunt my grandfather into old age. I shudder to think of him on his knees by the edge of the stream, reaching into it and cupping the water in his hands, bringing it up to his face, and then noticing its red tinge because flowing in the foreign water was also the blood of a young German soldier who had died close by. Phlegmatic, my grandfather recounted those details in a voice I can still hear. I can see him. I can see his beautiful eyes, twinkling the same blue as mine, his trademark checked shirt, and the tweed cap he twirled in the fingers of his left hand. As he tells the story, he pauses to drink tea.
Granda liked his tea with only a drop of milk – just enough to color it – and two spoonfuls of sugar. Increasing the odds that it would be strong, his was always the last cup poured from the pot. Often with two Rich Tea biscuits impossibly balanced upon a saucer, the delicate china cup somehow belonged in his elegant hand. To cool his tea, and to my great amusement, Granda sometimes poured it into the saucer from which he subsequently drank with a little slurp. He wore cable-pattern vests my aunt had knit for him pulled over his signature checked shirts – his favorite was red and white. My mother is convinced those checked shirts were his way of remembering what he wore, how we was, as a young immigrant in America. The timing seems right, given the rise to popularity of Pendleton plaid shirts before World War II. My mother also tells me that the plain blue shirt he wore to my grandmother’s funeral seemed as out-of-place as he must have felt in a world without her.
Before his world changed, Granda and I spent part of so many Sundays on long walks. At the top of the lane, we always stopped and looked right, looked left, looked right again, before turning left towards the Moss Road, along which gypsies were occasionally encamped. Sometimes, as a treat for me, he carried barley sugar sweets deep in his pockets. He taught me to look out for nettles and the big broad docken leaves that were supposed to soothe their sting.
As a girl, my mother had been sent by my grandmother, down this same road, to deliver sandwiches and flasks of tea to her father and the other turf cutters. I often wonder what they would have made of the young Seamus Heaney who lived just down the road and often sped by on his bicycle, sandy hair blowing in the wind. Could they ever have imagined the smallness of their world enlarged for global audiences through “Digging” and other poems that pulled taut the stuff of life and those who lived it within and beyond the banks of the Moyola River:
“My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf.”
And so on this day when we commemorate one hundred years since the first day of Battle of the Somme, in which nearly 60,000 British soldiers were killed, I am remembering my grandfather, all that he fought for – what was gained and what was lost.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive, he would have been wearing his suit, with medals and poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners gathered respectfully at the Cenotaph where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68.
Granda never forgot the wars. He made sure I remembered too. Because of Granda, I have always known that “the war to end all wars” ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He told me so many times on our walks down the Moss Road. At just 25, he had been part of that “template of civic cooperation.” Private James McFadden, No. 15823, he enlisted as a volunteer soldier with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Following his training at Finner Camp in County Donegal, he was shipped off to France, where he fought, scared yet brave, in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele. For untold miles, he crept through the muck, weary, thirsty, lost, and far from home. One of too few who survived the battle at Passchendaele, Granda carried to safety another soldier, Sammy Campbell, who hailed from The Upperlands, a village outside Maghera. Granda told my mother the story many times. Too, he told of the hunger that drove him to steal chickens from a French farm, of the thirst and weariness that almost broke him.
My grandfather did not belong in the muck. He belonged on the banks of the Moyola River, fishing, or cutting turf at The Moss. All these years later, it saddens me to picture him far away from the bluebells and foxgloves that once lined winding lanes to houses along the Broagh road. By the time I was doing O-level English, learning by heart much of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est,” I had already committed to memory my grandfather’s own story of the “war and the pity of war,” fought on faraway fields, in particular, of a dark evening that found him and his brothers in arms, afraid, parched with thirst, their billy cans empty. Crawling on their bellies through a field somewhere in France, I imagine they felt something close to euphoria when they came upon the stream, followed by a horror that would haunt Granda into old age. I shudder to think of him cupping the water in his hands, bringing it up to his face, then noticing it was tinged with red. Flowing in the foreign water was also the blood of a young German soldier who had died not too far away. Phlegmatic, my grandfather recounted those details in a voice I can still hear. I can see his beautiful eyes, twinkling the same blue as mine, his checked shirt, and the tweed cap he twirled in the fingers of his left hand.
I remember how Granda liked his tea, with only a drop of milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. Increasing the odds that it would be strong, his was always the last cup poured from the pot. Often with two Rich Tea biscuits impossibly balanced upon a saucer, the delicate china cup somehow belonged in his elegant hand. To cool his tea, and to my great amusement, Granda sometimes poured it into the saucer from which he subsequently drank with a little slurp. He wore cable-pattern vests my aunt had knit for him pulled over his signature checked shirts – his favorite was red and white. My mother is convinced those checked shirts were his way of remembering what he wore, how we was, as a young immigrant in America. The timing seems right, given the rise to popularity of Pendleton plaid shirts before World War II. My mother also tells me that the plain blue shirt he wore to my grandmother’s funeral seemed as out-of-place as he must have felt in a world without her.
Before his world changed, Granda and I spent part of so many Sundays on long walks. At the top of the lane, we always stopped and looked right, looked left, looked right again, before turning left towards the Moss Road, along which gypsies were occasionally encamped. Sometimes, as a treat for me, he carried barley sugar sweets deep in his pockets. He taught me to look out for nettles and the big broad docken leaves that were supposed to soothe their sting.
As a girl, my mother had been sent by my grandmother, down this same road, to deliver sandwiches and flasks of tea to her father and the other turf cutters. I often wonder what they would have made of the young Seamus Heaney who lived just down the road and often sped by on his bicycle, sandy hair blowing in the wind. Could they ever have imagined the smallness of their world enlarged for global audiences through “Digging” and other poems that pulled taut the stuff of life and those who lived it within and beyond the banks of the Moyola River:
“My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf.”
And so on this Remembrance Sunday, I am remembering Heaney and my grandfather and the rhythm of so many lives changed by war.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Remembrance helps us to learn about our shared history, that includes people across faith and ethnic backgrounds. There’s no point in a shared history if we forget about it.
An October 2012 YouGov poll commissioned by British Future, a non-partisan Think Tank dedicated to exploring national identity, the very crux of who we are, reveals that less than half of respondents aged 16 to 24 can identify 1914 as the year World War I broke out. More than half are unaware of the contributions of other countries to the British war effort. Australia, Kenya, India, Canada . . . all sent men, money, and munitions. In fact, during World War I, over 1.3 million Indian soldiers volunteered to fight. In World War II, that number doubled, but over the past century, we appear to have lost sight of what Shiraz Maher describes as a “remarkable template of civic cooperation . . . between different races and religions, united by common purpose.” It has disappeared in history.
Today marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and brings with it an opportunity for remembrance beyond mere commemoration, an opportunity to consider the poppy, worn proudly by my grandfather who fought The Great War, as a symbol of remembrance. It would never have occurred to him that the poppy pinned to his lapel might cause offense to anyone in Ireland. Lest we forget, the Irish died in the trenches along with the British. But the poppy – like the shamrock, the pink ribbon, the wedding ring, the star-spangled banner – is a contentious and complex symbol, and the debate still roars over whether or not it should be worn in Ireland. For some, it represents British imperialism, and wearing it is akin to endorsing and glorifying British soldiers who, on a Sunday in 1972, during a Civil Rights march in the Bogside of Derry, shot into a crowd of unarmed and peaceful civilians, killing thirteen of them.
Twenty seven years ago, on the night of the Enniskillen bombing, far from home at the McNicholls Arena in Denver, U2 took to the stage with this:
“Well here we are, the Irish in America.
The Irish have been coming to America for years Going back to the Great Famine, When the Irish were on the run from starvation And a British government that couldn’t care less
Right up to today you know, There are more Irish immigrants here in America today than ever Some illegal, some legal A lot of them are just running from high unemployment.
Some run from the troubles in Northern Ireland From the hatred of the H-blocks and torture. Others from wild acts of terrorism Like we had today in a town called Enniskillen Where 11 people lie dead many more injured On a Sunday Bloody Sunday …”
https://youtu.be/4xwDK36_REA
In the middle of the song, sick of the killing, Bono had this to say. I consider it a seminal moment in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, in my own history, and it rings in my ears on this Remembrance Sunday:
And let me tell you something . . . I’ve had enough of Irish Americans who haven’t been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home…and the glory of the revolution…and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don’t talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What’s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where’s the glory in that?
Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution, that the majority of the people in my country don’t want. Sing ‘No More!’
A decade later, he sang the song again, turning it into a prayer for Omagh, where the Real IRA loaded a non-descript car with 500 pounds of explosives, parked it in the middle of the little market town, where it exploded, killing twenty-nine people and injuring hundreds. I will never forget the Omagh bombing. It happened during my daughter’s first trip to Ireland. Not quite eight months old, she was the surprise for my mother’s 60th birthday party. I remember that night holding her tight while watching the news in my parent’s house, the accounts from witnesses who were devastated by the blood that flowed in the gutters, the pieces of people on the street: “Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. People were lying on the floor with limbs missing and there was blood all over the place. People were crying for help and looking for something to kill the pain. Other people were crying out looking for relatives. You could not really be trained for what you had seen unless you were trained in Vietnam or somewhere like that” recalls one of the volunteer nuns on the scene at Tyrone County Hospital. A war-zone. A killing field.
The Omagh list of dead “reads like a microcosm of Troubles deaths, and left no section of Irish life untouched. The town they attacked is roughly 60:40 Catholic:Protestant, and the dead consisted of Protestants, Catholics, a Mormon and two Spanish visitors. They killed young, old and middle-aged, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and grannies. They killed republicans and unionists, including a prominent local member of the Ulster Unionist Party. They killed people from the backbone of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They killed unborn twins, bright students, cheery shop assistants and many young people. They killed three children from the Irish Republic who were up north on a day trip. Everyone they killed was a civilian. The toll of death was thus both extraordinarily high and extraordinarily comprehensive.”
How could Omagh happen after Enniskillen, where twenty-seven years ago, at 10.43AM the IRA detonated a bomb without warning, killing eleven ordinary people and injuring sixty:
I don’t think there’s a family or community or a parish anywhere in Ireland that wasn’t touched by the great wars that didn’t have family members, members of the community who lost lives or who suffered in those wars. This is part of our shared history and I wanted, and the Irish government wanted to be part of sharing that remembrance.
But every newspaper story was more about the fact that Mr. Kenny did not wear a poppy, the wreath of green laurel he laid for the Irish government, incongruous among the crimson poppies.
Today, for the first time in sixty years, Ireland takes part in the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in London, with Irish ambassador to Britain, Dan Mulhall, placing a wreath of green among the wreaths of poppies.
Lest we forget that war is not over, security is tight in the United Kingdom on this Remembrance Day, with the threat of a terrorist attacks weighing heavily following the recent arrest of four men allegedly planning a series of attacks with today’s ceremony in Whitehall a possible target,
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive, I imagine he would have been wearing his suit, medals and poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners at the Enniskillen Cenotaph. Granda never forgot the wars. He made sure I remembered too.
Because of Granda, I have always known that “the war to end all wars” ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He told me so many times on our walks down the Moss Road. At just 25, he had been part of that “template of civic cooperation.” Private James McFadden, No. 15823, he enlisted as a volunteer soldier with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Following his training at Finner Camp in County Donegal, he was shipped off to France, where he fought, scared yet brave, in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele. For untold miles, he crept through the muck, weary, thirsty, lost, and far from home. One of too few who survived the battle at Passchendaele, Granda carried to safety another soldier, Sammy Campbell, who hailed from The Upperlands, a village outside Maghera. Granda told my mother the story many times. Too, he told of the hunger that drove him to steal chickens from a French farm, of the thirst and weariness that almost broke him.
Private James McFadden
My grandfather did not belong in the muck. He belonged on the banks of the Moyola River, fishing, or cutting turf at The Moss. All these years later, it saddens me to picture him far away from the bluebells and foxgloves that once lined winding lanes to houses along the Broagh road. By the time I was doing O-level English, learning by heart much of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est,” I had already committed to memory my grandfather’s own story of the “war and the pity of war,” fought on faraway fields, in particular, of a dark evening that found him and his brothers in arms, afraid, parched with thirst, their billy cans empty. Crawling on their bellies through a field somewhere in France, I imagine they felt something close to euphoria when they came upon the stream, followed by a horror that would haunt Granda into old age. I shudder to think of him cupping the water in his hands, bringing it up to his face, then noticing it was tinged with red. Flowing in the foreign water was also the blood of a young German soldier who had died not too far away. Phlegmatic, my grandfather recounted those details in a voice I can still hear. I can see his beautiful eyes, twinkling the same blue as mine, his checked shirt, and the tweed cap he twirled in the fingers of his left hand.
I remember how Granda liked his tea, with only a drop of milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. Increasing the odds that it would be strong, his was always the last cup poured from the pot. Often with two Rich Tea biscuits impossibly balanced upon a saucer, the delicate china cup somehow belonged in his elegant hand. To cool his tea, and to my great amusement, Granda sometimes poured it into the saucer from which he subsequently drank with a little slurp. He wore cable-pattern vests my aunt had knit for him pulled over his signature checked shirts – his favorite was red and white. My mother is convinced those checked shirts were his way of remembering what he wore, how we was, as a young immigrant in America. The timing seems right, given the rise to popularity of Pendleton plaid shirts before World War II. My mother also tells me that the plain blue shirt he wore to my grandmother’s funeral seemed as out-of-place as he must have felt in a world without her.
Before his world changed, Granda and I spent part of so many Sundays on long walks. At the top of the lane, we always stopped and looked right, looked left, looked right again, before turning left towards the Moss Road, along which gypsies were occasionally encamped. Sometimes, as a treat for me, he carried barley sugar sweets deep in his pockets. He taught me to look out for nettles and the big broad docken leaves that were supposed to soothe their sting.
As a girl, my mother had been sent by my grandmother, down this same road, to deliver sandwiches and flasks of tea to her father and the other turf cutters. I often wonder what they would have made of the young Seamus Heaney who lived just down the road and often sped by on his bicycle, red hair blowing in the wind. Could they ever have imagined the smallness of their world enlarged for global audiences through “Digging” and other poems that pulled taut the stuff of life and those who lived it within and beyond the banks of the Moyola River:
“My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf.”
And so on this Remembrance Sunday, I am remembering Heaney and my grandfather and the rhythm of so many lives changed by war.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
My breast cancer is not just about me as I discovered when my then fourteen year old daughter decided to break her silence about it. In her own way, on her Facebook wall, and on World Cancer Day 2012.
Thus, on this day designated for speaking up and out, in 2014 focusing on Target 5 of the World Cancer Declaration which is all about reducing stigma and for debunking the myths that abound about breast cancer, I share with you her words and mine from February 4, 2012 . . .
I didn’t know about a World Cancer Day. Until today, I’d known only about Breast Cancer Awareness October when the world turns pink for an entire month, so when I detected the lump on my breast on October 30, I should have been grateful for having made it until the end of the pinkest month, blithely unaware that cancer had come calling. Since then, I swear I have encountered more metaphors of war in breast cancer literature, than I ever found in my collection of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and I am uncomfortable. Within the context of breast cancer, I show up – albeit reluctantly – for every appointment, procedure, and surgery. As a cancer patient, I am doing what is expected. I am being treated. At best, I am obedient. Not battling. Not a warrior in pink.
I cannot say the same for my darling girl. Just a heart-beat ago, she was so tiny, asleep and swaddled, snug in the space between the crook of her father’s arm and the tips of his fingers. Safe and secure. Then, too soon, fourteen and tall, impersonating “strong and stoic,” leaning on her beloved dad and he on her as they wait together for surgeons bearing good tidings. Neither feels safe nor secure. She is fighting so hard to keep the tears from falling, squaring up with false bravado to keep the fear at bay, to confront the panic that her mother might die. She balks at the notion of carrying the mantel of “kid with the sick mom.” She wants her teachers to know nothing about it in case they might feel sorry for her and give her a good grade out of sympathy. Mostly, she doesn’t want her friends to feel awkward around her, to tiptoe as if on egg-shells, afraid to say “cancer.” A quick study, she has grown keenly aware of the pink stuff of breast cancer and is confounded by it, not knowing just the right thing to say about all those “I love boobie bracelets” casually wrapped around teenage wrists when her instinct is to defend me because I was unable, technically, to “keep a breast.“
Remember being fourteen? It was that time reserved for rebelling a bit, for rolling your eyes at your mother’s taste in clothes or music because, well, she was your mother and therefore “so embarrassing.” Fourteen was for pushing boundaries and buttons and for experimenting with make-up and myriad ways to sign your name (with hearts instead of dots above “i’s”) or style your hair. For our girl, this rite of passage is forever marred by her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, before which she didn’t have to feel quite so guilty about perfectly acceptable and anticipated acts of rebellion. It is unforgivably unfair. But that’s the nature of breast cancer, isn’t it? Unfair. Lest I forget how it has interrupted her life, I am considering again today the first time my daughter spoke of the cancer that came to our house like a thief in the night.
I didn’t know – and I’m sure I still don’t – the extent to which cancer has shaken our beautiful daughter, stirred a fear that others dear to her are at risk. So when I read the note she posted on her Facebook page on February 4, 2012, World Cancer Day, I realized our girl needed to tell – to share with anyone who would listen, in one fell swoop, that cancer had come calling and that her mom was sick, to tell them that being aware means you have to actually do something. She is the only warrior here. She’s my hero. Here’s her note:
In honor of World Cancer Day and my mom, I’m telling the truth …
Each and every one of you reading this note, know this: you are important to me. And I don’t ever want to lose you. Please be aware. Do not think that just because you’re you, breast cancer won’t harm you. Infect you. Frighten your whole family. Breast cancer doesn’t discriminate. You can’t escape from it. And my mom, my dad, and I had to face up to that harsh reality. On November 11th of 2011, my mother was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer. She told me everything her doctor had told her. About how she had three tumors, and how they had been probably hiding there for five to seven years. Three tumors. Three of them, just sitting in there for all that time, never to be found by her mammograms because they were hidden so well in her tissue. Fortunately, two of the three were benign, meaning they would not hurt her. They were not cancerous. However, one of them was a cancer. Malignant. My mother’s right breast had a cancerous tumor. But my mom had cancer. My mom had cancer. Mymomhadcancer. I didn’t hear much more of what she said. After she said “tumor” and that only “two out of three” were benign, it was hard to hear anything else. All I could say was, “But you’re going to be okay…. right?” I asked that question maybe four times in a row. I remember later on she and my dad told me about the next doctor’s appointment, during which she would find out which surgery was best for her. A lumpectomy or a mastectomy. It sounded like she was hoping for a lumpectomy, which would only remove the tumor. It sounded simpler, but it also meant radiation. Radiation is nasty. A mastectomy means removal of a whole breast. Soon I found out my mom’s treatment required a mastectomy. I would be out of school for a week.
That week, I stayed with my mom’s best friend, Amanda. Amanda is like our own family; she has known me ever since I was little. I stayed at her house once before, when my dad had major heart surgery. Now again, I stayed with her while my mom was going through surgery. Seven and a half hours. An entire school day of waiting. Then my dad – who waited the whole seven and a half hours in the hospital – called to tell me the news.My mom was okay. The surgeons were very happy with the results of not only the removal of the tumor, but the reconstruction of her entire breast.
I remember seeing her in the ICU, when she woke up from the surgery. Her skin was so white, as pale as Boo Radley‘s. Her normally inky blue eyes now reminded me of a colorless sky. I cried at the sight of her. She looked like my mom, only dead. She had been given lots of morphine and so much other medicine, so she was way beyond groggy. Out of it. And then she was able to smile. She squeezed my hand, and she asked me what day it was . . . four times. Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. I cried. My dad cried. He wiped his eyes on his shirt. We just stood there crying, rejoicing that my mom was going to be alright.
After removing her original breast and the cancer, her surgeons used skin and tissue and fat from her abdomen and molded it into the shape of a new breast. It was amazing! Today, her reconstructed breast looks almost identical to the other one. Made from her own skin, it looks fine. Just a bit bruised. But those bruises will fade, and this cancer will become just a bad memory. Unfortunately, we still have some healing to do. There’s a large scar across her abdomen, and it hurts her to stand up straight. If she lifts her right arm too high, it hurts. Then there are the tubes and the three surgical drains. Attached to my mom were three long tubes which then attached to what looked like little plastic grenades. Every day, I’d help drain the bloody fluid from them and record how much on a chart. Two have been removed, now there’s only one drain left, attached to a tube from a hole under her right arm. And then there’s always the fear that the cancer may return. Yes, her cancer was removed, but maybe there was some that the doctors couldn’t find and it could scare us again. It could invade my mother’s body once more. It could invade anybody. Which is why I’m begging: get yourself checked out. Find out your breast density. Do self-exams. Please. And it’s not just women. Men can get it too. SO if you’re a guy and you’re wondering why I tagged you in this, there’s your reason.So please. My mom discovered her cancer before it had spread into her lymph nodes. She got lucky, because she found the lump by accident and because her doctor made her get an ultrasound. She learned just in time that her negative mammograms had missed the cancer.
Many women, just like my mom, never even check their own breasts, even though they have been told over and over. It is so important to know what our breasts normally feel like, so we can notice when they change. So please take the steps to know your breasts. Know your body!
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on that day, he would have been wearing his pressed suit, with medals and poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners gathered respectfully at the Cenotaph where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. I cannot think of the First World War without also thinking of Enniskillen, so as we prepare to commemorate the one hundred year anniversary of the Battle of the Somme – in which my grandfather fought – I am also remembering those old men gathered in remembrance at the Cenotaph in County Fermanagh.
