It's Hard to Die in Springtime

Winner of the 2008 Molly Keane Short Story competition

For her it was bluebottles. For David Attenborough, apparently, it was worms.

One day she had heard the famous naturalist on the radio, explaining why he was an agnostic. He couldn't believe in a kind and loving God, he said, after seeing the suffering of innocent children in Africa, afflicted by a worm that burrowed into their eyes and made them blind.

Over the years, Josie's own doubts had grown. She regarded God's creation mostly with wonder, but also with some puzzlement. It wasn't all good, after all. Why bluebottles, for instance.

"They serve in the putrefaction process," her clever granddaughter Maeve had told her. "You may not like them, but they perform a useful job nonetheless."

"Not when they lay their eggs on my nice roast chicken."

If Maeve thought the chicken should have been safely locked away in the fridge and not left out on the counter, she was too polite to say.

"Well, anyway Gran, I don't think bluebottles disprove the existence of God. Not by themselves."    

But now Josie had to contend not simply with doubts and David Attenborough but also with the young men and women in the same ward as herself.

"It's a form of leukaemia," the consultant told her after all the tests. "A progressive form. Unfortunately, you've had it undiagnosed for years and now it's at quite an advanced stage."

What did that mean? But she couldn't bring herself to ask how long.

"On the plus side, Josephine," he said, "some wonderful new treatments have been developed. We'll give them a try, will we?"

He smiled at her encouragingly. She smiled back, wondering if she should inform him that no one had called her Josephine since the disapproving nuns at school. And what would he say if she started calling him Barry? On the other hand, all this talk of Josephine made her think that perhaps they were referring to someone else. Not her.

"Now then, Josephine," the nurse, different nurses would say when she came for her weekly blood test, all smiling that professionally kind, unengaged smile. "Let's see how we are today," thrusting the needle into a vein if they could find one that hadn't collapsed.

"You're too nice," her daughter Carmel said, when Josie came home, weak with fatigue. "You should make a fuss. It's not right that a sick person should be left waiting around all day on a hard chair. I've a good mind to come in with you next time and give them a piece of my mind."

"They're doing their best," Josie replied, wishing Carmel would let her stretch out on the couch for a snooze and not be bothering her with her outrage. "They're overworked. There must have been fifty people alongside me, all waiting. I can't expect special treatment."

"It's the system that's at fault, then," said Carmel. "You should write a letter to your TD, the one who always makes out he can fix things."

Josie sighed and closed her eyes. But Carmel wasn't finished.

"That's the trouble with you, Mam. You always try to please. You've tried to please people all your life and look where it's got you."

No one mentioned Thomas, Josie's late husband. A cantankerous demanding man who'd died of a heart attack some eight years previously, leaving his wife a legacy of peace and quiet, at least when Carmel wasn't visiting. Josie never said, but she was almost as intimidated by her daughter as she had been by her husband.

But now the disease had progressed to the stage where she needed to be hospitalised frequently. That was when she met the young women and men who had an aggressive form of the illness and that was when she started to wonder again about the goodness of a God who could grab lives so randomly before they had even properly started.           

"It's not fair, "she said to Maeve.

Her granddaughter sat back looking at her. Maeve with her short hair dyed – what was it this week, pink? purple? blue? In her little vest, puffed tutu of a skirt, black tights and heavy boots. Her multiple piercings.

"My God, what do you look like!" Carmel would explode.

Josie and Carmel's big oaf of a husband Leo would catch each other's eye. Josie thought Leo secretly agreed that Maeve looked rather fine. She certainly cheered up the ward when she came in.

"Who said it was supposed to be fair?" Maeve now asked her grandmother.

"That's true, but…"

"It's like saying ‘why me?' when what people should be asking is ‘why not me?'"

This was getting too deep for Josie.

"Anyway," she said. "It's very sad."

Several days after this conversation a new patient was wheeled into the bed beside Josie. She was a slip of a thing, who slept a lot. Come visiting time, Josie noticed how Maeve kept peering across at her.

"Don't stare," she whispered.

"I'm sure I know her," Maeve whispered back. "Isn't she that singer?"

"What singer?"

"I'm sure she is. The one who does all the Jacques Brel stuff."

Josie looked bewildered.

"She was on the Late Late show once. Talked about growing up in one of those homes."

Josie remembered vaguely. A voice like an angel's.

"No," she said. "That one was quite chubby."

"Grandma! She's sick, she's lost weight. Like you."

Josie didn't have it to lose and was starting to scare herself, she looked so skeletal.

"I'm sure it's her."

The nurses didn't know. They called the girl Margaret. Maeve was disappointed.

"The singer was Peggy something."

"But Peggy's short for Margaret," Josie told her, glad to be the one giving information for once.

"Really! That's great! I mean… It isn't great. It's terrible." Poor Maeve looked desolate and Josie patted her hand.

The next morning the girl in the next bed was a little more awake.

"My granddaughter thinks she recognises you," Josie said.

"Ah. Well maybe."

"She says you're a singer."

"Yes."

"That must be lovely."

"Mm."

"That's a silly thing to say. Sorry."

"No, you're right. It's lovely to sing. It's lovely to have people listen and enjoy. Only… I'm not sure if I'll ever sing again."

Josie was about to say "of course you will", then she remembered the bluebottles and the worms and the tainted blood pumping through both their veins. "Let's hope you do," she said. "At least, so I can hear you."

Peggy laughed at that, a tinkling sound. "I'll give a recital some night," she said. "Strictly for the moribund."

"What, dear?"

"The bedridden."

A smiling  young man came and visited the girl most days. He would wheel her out for a cigarette.

"I know I shouldn't," she said to Josie. "But what the hell! When they open me up after I'm gone, it'll give them more to talk about."

"That's very morbid talk."

"No, I'm leaving my body to science."

Josie was shocked until Peggy explained it to her.

"It's the last useful thing you can do. No one will want my organs for transplants but at least they can be used to educate new doctors. And it gets round all the religious quackery associated with funerals. I couldn't stand that. Some priest who doesn't know me spouting on about the after life, and being at peace and all that shit."

"You don't believe in God."

"I believe in life, not afterwards." Her eyes flashed.

She didn't have family, she told Josie.

"So there'd be no one to carry my coffin anyway." Just Ben, the smiling young man. "He's good to me." 

One time, when Maeve was taking Josie for a little constitutional along the corridor they met the pair coming back.

"Did you see his face?" Maeve asked.

Behind Peggy's back, pushing the chair, Ben looked ravaged by grief.

Later Peggy said to Josie, "I think we'd better have that concert tonight. I'm in the mood for it. But apologies if my voice isn't quite what it should be. With all the ciggies."

She got one of the nurses to help her stand up using a zimmer frame.

"Any requests," she asked the other patients. "Assuming I know the words."

She sang On Raglan Road, She Walked through the Fair, Dublin in the rare Oul' Times. Her voice was nearly as clear as Josie remembered it, but with an occasional heart-breaking crack. The six-bed room was soon crammed with patients from other rooms. The nurses clucked a bit, but not too much.

"I'm going to finish now," she said, "with a Jacques Brel song. He was a Belgian singer, a poet. He died of cancer."

The song, she said, was called Le Moribond, the man about to die. She glanced at Josie and winked.

"I'll translate, so you've an idea what it's about. He says to his friends ‘Goodbye. I'm going to die. It's hard to die in Springtime. But I'm leaving with the flowers, peace in my heart. I want you all to dance, to laugh like mad, when they put me in the ground."          

Peggy launched into the song, her voice cracking, her knuckles white with the effort of holding the frame to stay upright. Tears starting streaming down her face into the second verse and to the end, and down the faces of some of her listeners as well. It isn't fair, Josie said to herself, no matter what.

That night Peggy suffered a terrible nosebleed. They had to bind a thick cloth around her face to catch the blood that wouldn't stop. The following morning, Barry the consultant, arrived with his entourage and a grim expression. They pulled the curtains round Peggy's bed. Josie heard them muttering.

"They're moving me to intensive care," Peggy told Josie later.

"I hope it wasn't the singing brought it on."

"Speeded up the inevitable," she tried to smile behind that ghastly bandage. "Tell your lovely granddaughter from me to laugh, to dance, as long as she can. And you too, Josie."

"Dance!" exclaimed Josie.

Peggy winked.

Then the porters came and Josie never saw her again.

A week later, when she was being discharged – "For the time being, Josephine," Barry said with a merry smile, "I know you can't stay away from us for long." – Maeve broke the news that Peggy had died.

"No one told me," Josie said, indignant.

"It was in the papers. But the nurses probably didn't want to upset you."

Josie went not home but to Carmel's house in Drumcondra, with carers coming in while Carmel and Leo were at work. Maeve filled in when her studies permitted.

"Let's go for a walk," she suggested one bright March day.

"I can't, dear."

"In the wheelchair."

"Oh, I don't know…"

"It's lovely out. Do you good."

So Maeve took her, well-wrapped up, to the Botanical Gardens. The daffodils were at their best, dancing in the breeze. Fat buds of blossom were starting to burst open.

"It's hard to die in Springtime," said Josie.

"What? Grandma, you're not dying quite yet."

"My dear," said Josie. "It's the words of a song."

They sat under pine trees by the ornamental lake, gazing across at a tree that was already a mass of pink blossom, while overly tame squirrels came right up to them hoping for titbits.

"Maeve," said Josie after a while, "I've decided to leave my body to science."

A pause, then "Mother will hit the roof."

"She will. But I'm going to do what she's always telling me to do and please myself. It's all set up."

"OK, so. Great!"

"Will you tell her?"

"No, grandma!"

"Will you be there when I tell her, then, and back me up."

"Of course." Maeve chuckled. "Wow, gran! You're full of surprises."

They laughed together.

The wind shifted. A few stray petals fell from the tree and floated down onto the rippling water. Birds chirruped, ducks and moorhens dabbled.

"Hold my hand, dear," said Josie. And they stayed like that for a long while in silence, listening and looking.