I cannot stand that mans writing style.Visual vommit.
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I broke down in tears reading that.
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So did I
Just back from an AIF up for the match lunch with Roy, TomĂĄs Meehan, Dara OâCinneide and Martin McHugh as speakers.
Roy LOVES Hego. Expect more garlands over the winter
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Ah lovely
Keith Dugganâs final Sideline Cut column today.
When sport fully takes hold and gives us tingles and shivers - isnât that all we can ask for?
In his final Sideline Cut column after 20 years, Keith Duggan on how sportâs greatest gift is bringing out the child in us
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A young Kerry fan celebrates during the All-Ireland SFC Final against Galway at Croke Park. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho
Sat Jul 30 2022 - 06:00
One night in 1989, the disc jockey and stadium announcer Tommy Edwards was at the cinema with his wife waiting for the show to start when he heard a few bars of synthesizer music and experienced a lightning strike of inspiration.
The Chicago Bulls had been tinkering with darkening the house lights since the 70s and introducing their team to music. But the teams were generally awful, the music never worked, the crowds showed up late and there was always the danger of spilled beers and tumbles when the auditorium went dark.
But now the Bulls had Michael Jordan. And Edwards discovered Sirius, the dark, gorgeous synth instrumental which opens Alan Parsonsâs 1982 album Eye In the Sky. Edwards sat at home playing the record and practising an introduction later made iconic by the gravel-voiced Ray Clay âAnd now âŠâ
It took a few seasons before the pregame guaranteed an absolute full-house by tip off â which was the main aim. But as Jordan made the strange transition into the most famous athlete on the planet, the intro became an essential part of the mythology. Its power is derived from the ominous beauty of the piece of music and the daunting charisma which Jordan radiated. The Bullsâ introduction might have been a marketing ploy but it required no budget or convolutions.
Jordan has been out of elite sport for almost 20 years but the recordings of those introductions have not dated. Itâs the oldest trick in the book: turn off the lights and let the imagination do the work. And it presaged the move towards rehearsed polished introductions and entertainments at sports stadiums across the world â and countless have borrowed Sirius.
The presentation may be more slick and polished, but nothing will touch the Bullsâ idea. It was the perfect crossing point of sport as fabulous entertainment and real, authentic experience â which is a very tricky, elusive balance. You watch it again â these old, long finished games and still: it gives you the shivers.
And isnât that all we can ask for from sport?
Weâve always been fortunate in this country to have a century of tradition through which Ireland has been in thrall to Gaelic games. It was, of course, far from a perfect tradition, promoting an active hostility and suspicion of other sports and remaining a male preserve for decades after it might have. But it has moved and learned and shape-shifted and opened its doors and has retained its miraculous balance of amateurism and sense of local identity which generates a depth of emotion which cannot be faked or fabricated.
Kerry fans celebrate during the All-Ireland Final. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
And so, the spirits raced through Croke Park last Sunday when Galway and Kerry pushed one another to the edge. Those few seconds of anticipation and the surge of uncontainable crowd noise before the throw-in were as good as it gets. But then, on the road up that morning, a man had decorated his tractor in the Galway colours, parked on an overpass not far from Moate and, with his children, saluted the passing cars on their way up to the city. It was a lovely, simple gesture and as much a part of the occasion, the day, as the noontime gatherings around Dorset Street. It was a reminder that Ireland is still a land of eccentricities and all the better for it.
There remains something extraordinary about the depth and solemnity of effort behind elite Gaelic games for what will remain, for the vast majority of players, an unrealised idea. Few will get to play in an All-Ireland final, fewer still win it.
But what a glorious distraction. Isnât that the point? Isnât the joy of being transported to a place where you feel fully alive and temporarily shorn of the inevitable day-to-day worries and concerns. It doesnât have to be the fancy stuff or the big days. And it doesnât even have to involve winning. The game keeps changing and yet the game will always be the same.
Galway players including Damien Comer and Dylan McHugh celebrate as manager PĂĄdraic Joyceâs horse Chavajod comes in last during Tuesdayâs Galway meeting at Ballybrit. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
On Monday evening, the defeated Galway football team made their way home. It might have been a sombre conclusion but as PĂĄdraic Joyce acknowledged later, the homecoming proved to be an uplifting event. The bonfires were lit. The people turned out on one of those dank west of Ireland July evenings. And the team and supporters became indivisible and in his words of thanks, Joyce began to turn his thoughts to next season.
Right now, that seems a far-off thing. Meantime, there will be the big glittering distractions â the football nights in England, the winter rugby afternoons, the late-night broadcasts out of football fields and basketball arenas in America. And there will be the best stuff too â the excruciating few miles you plod through alone, the morning swims, the team you coach still losing but maybe something that makes their eyes light too. The million tiny victories!
Those come boxed in many forms.
Armaghâs Stefan Campbell and manager Kieran McGeeney celebrate the victory over Donegal in the Ulster SFC Final at St Tiernachâs Park in Clones. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
For years, the press box in Clones had among its guests the resident Donegal Democrat columnist âThe Followerâ whose closing line on a particular Donegal win which stirred his blood remains unfathomable and unbeatable: âAs Marie Antoinette, BanrĂon na Fraince, said: AprĂšs Moi, Le Deluge.â
Who knows what that means? And who cares?
On one of his last visits, The Follower sat on a blazing summer day of an Ulster final, a Dairy Milk and Club Orange close at hand, delighted that he had been able to conquer the steep hill past St Tiernachâs one last time. Heâd been attending these games for decades but surveying the scene now the field, the teams parading, the faces in the crowd, he couldnât contain his delight. He was like you or me when sport fully takes hold and gives us the tingles and shivers. He was like a child.
Sideline Cut has been running since 2002 and this is the final column in the series. Keith Duggan will shortly take up a new role within The Irish Times. Many thanks for reading.
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Smashing
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Duggan is fantastic.
What is his new role?
Deleting all the Tom Humphries articles from the archive.
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An absolute gem of a writer.
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I see The Times have removed the Ireland section from their daily news. Was never much in it, but it means I probably wonât renew it when itâs due again.
They cut a load of staff recently
I see Denis Walsh (previously of the Sunday times) has a column in the Irish times today,
Always thought he was decent on the âGAA beatâ
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Iâm only seeing this now - condolences on the loss of your Dad. He seems to have been a gent. The light of Heaven to him.
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Thanks Boxty
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Good piece here on the historic power bond markets have held over governments. If only Kwasi and Liz were paying attention in 2010
Political rulers can never outwit the bond titans
As a student of economic history, Kwasi Kwarteng should have known traders have called the shots since Napoleon, writes Jill Treanor
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES COWEN
Saturday October 15 2022, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times
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For hundreds of years, bond markets have been one of the key driving forces of momentous events. They helped secure the Duke of Wellingtonâs famous victory at the Battle of Waterloo by raising the funds to get the troops on the ground. The American Civil War and the 20th centuryâs two world wars were fought as a result of finance raised through bonds. And when Covid gripped the world, governments issued trillions of pounds of bonds to fight the economic war caused by the health emergency.
Nathan Rothschild, the biggest player in the European bond marketâs early years, wielded so much power that he could reputedly dictate which government ministers were hired, or fired.
In these past few weeks, the bond market has struck again, in effect vetoing the unfunded tax cuts declared by Liz Trussâs government and forcing the sacking of their architect, Kwasi Kwarteng.
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While there may no longer be one key Rothschild-like figure, bond investors did for Kwarteng en masse by driving down the price of UK government bonds â known as gilts â and in turn forcing up interest rates on everything from mortgages, to company loans, to Britainâs ÂŁ2.3 trillion of state debt.
The markets simply did not believe that the UK, under Kwartengâs stewardship, was stable enough to invest in at the previous rate of interest on bonds. His position had become untenable. Truss acknowledged after his departure â straight off the red-eye flight from Washington, where he had cut short his trip to the International Monetary Fund â that his mini budget had gone âfurther and faster than the markets were expectingâ.
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Kwarteng, despite being a proud classicist, appeared to forget a key lesson from history: bond markets matter.
Bonds allow governments to raise funds from investors to cover expenditure that cannot be paid for by taxes. They pay investors a coupon â a rate of interest â for the lifetime of the bond and their price moves inversely to the yield, which is a gauge of borrowing costs. In turn, these investors set the rate at which governments borrow, providing a health check on the economy. When bonds are attractive to investors, the surge in demand pushes up the price and forces down the yield, or rate paid, on bonds. That is a sweet spot for any government.
But the converse is also true. âIf buyers lose confidence in you, then your cost of borrowing is not entirely in your control,â said Vivek Paul, UK at the BlackRock Investment Institute.
The jump in gilt yields since Kwartengâs mini budget has sent mortgage rates rocketing â in the expectation of further increases in the Bank of England base rate to stabilise the economy amid fears of soaring government borrowing.
Simon French, chief economist at investment bank Panmure Gordon, has warned that house prices will crash over three years. Now, Trussâs government has undertaken a series of U-turns on the mini-budget tax giveaways in an attempt to revive a sense of prudence to Britainâs reputation with bond investors.
She is not the first to have had a budget brought to heel â bond markets tamed the ambitious spending plans of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. His campaign manager James Carville ruefully quipped: âI used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope ⊠But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.â
A decade earlier, economist Edward Yardeni had coined the phrase âbond vigilantesâ to describe the investors who sold American treasury bonds in the 1980s in an attack on the Federal Reserveâs policies.
Historian Niall Ferguson has charted the power of bond markets back even further. By his reckoning, at the time of Waterloo in 1815, Rothschild was as important in the battlefield victory as the Duke of Wellington. Why? Because he had backed the bond issue that funded the British war effort.
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During that 23-year war between France and the other powers of Europe, Britainâs debt burden had doubled to the same size as the economy, as measured by the value of its output, or gross domestic product (GDP). Now, after the government spent ÂŁ376 billion to support the population in the Covid crisis, that debt-to-GDP ratio is back again at that level.
According to Ferguson, Rothschildâs influence was so enormous that, at the time, the MP Thomas Duncombe warned that âthe credit of nations depends on his nod ⊠Ministers of state are in [his] pay.â
Some 200 years later, that message will be ringing in the ears of Kwarteng, who had to contend not with one big player, but a vast array of investors â from pension funds in Britain to big houses overseas. Ferguson said last week: âThe Truss government forgot that, when the market sells gilts, it is expressing a view about the future probabilities of inflation and default. Foreign sellers are also expressing a view about the future exchange rate of sterlingâ.
The jump in gilt yields since Kwasi Kwartengâs mini budget has sent mortgage rates rocketing
IAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES
Bond markets had been important for funding wars. Britain was a big issuer of war bonds â it used them to pay for the First World War, and these bonds were only repaid 100 years later in 2014, when George Osborne was chancellor.
In his trawl through history, Ferguson also found other war efforts where bond markets have proved crucial. One instance was the American Civil War, some 50 years after bonds played a part in financing the Battle of Waterloo.
The southern Confederate states, fighting the states in the north, had issued bonds linked to the price of cotton, the mainstay crop of the area. When the price of cotton rose during the early part of the war, it pushed up the price of bonds â but they fell in value after cotton supplies came in from other countries.
The effect on the southern states was ruinous. They issued more money to pay their debts, which fuelled inflation.
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To this day, bond investors hate inflation. Why? It makes the interest rate they receive for the investment less attractive. Yardeni spotted this when he started to talk about bond vigilantes in the 1980s.
âWhat I noticed is that financial markets had become rather important in regulating the economy,â he said last week.
âIf the assumption was that inflation might be making a comeback â because central banks werenât going to be tough enough [in raising rates] â then the bond vigilantes would intervene and raise bond yields to the point of slowing the economy and bringing inflation down.â
After the 1992 election that swept Clinton into office, bond yields had been rising at the prospect of a free-spending Democrat arriving in the White House, and the Federal Reserve had also tightened interest rates faster than the market had foreseen.
Bond markets tamed the ambitious spending plans of Bill Clinton in the 1990s
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Contrary to expectations, Clintonâs presidency became associated with a period of solid growth and low inflation. By the end of the 1990s, America was actually running a budget surplus for the first time since 1969.
Yardeni said that by the end of Clintonâs presidency, the bond vigilantes had âgone to sleepâ. Low inflation through the decade that followed kept them content â though the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 meant central banks suddenly became buyers for bonds during quantitative easing (QE) programmes.
This might explain the violent moves in markets. âEvery time a central bank engages in large-scale bond purchases, it is artificially depressing the market rate. In our current inflationary circumstances, interest rates have to rise â the only question is by how much,â said Ferguson.
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Yardeni recalled how aggressive bond investors returned as the price of Greek debt plunged during 2010 amid fears about the countryâs spending plans. Ireland and Portugal were soon caught up in the mayhem and bailouts had to be organised by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The bond markets had spoken and austerity measures became fashionable.
To Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, what happened then is a wake-up call for any government. âThis is the most poignant example of what happens if you neglect your public finances and the potential importance of bond markets,â he said.
Yardeni pointed out that in the UK, just as in the US and continental Europe, bond yields were also rising as a result of an inflation rate at a four-decade peak.
âThe bond vigilantes are in the saddle and riding high,â he said.
Albert Edwards at the French bank SociĂ©tĂ© GĂ©nĂ©rale said the vigilantes had been asleep until inflation emerged, after being âlulled into a slumber by the soothing lapping of waves of secular stagnation and the froth of QE washing gently against the shoreâ.
âNow, all that has been drowned out by the sound of gilts screaming in agony as the tortured public sector finances have awoken Rip Van Vigilante â and he ainât happy,â said Edwards.
But who are these vigilantes? Unlike in the time of Waterloo, the bond markets are made up of a wide range of investors, and they are harder for one player to dominate.
One of the investors is Pimco, founded by former professional poker player Bill Gross, who has caused problems for chancellors in the past. In 2010, with the eurozone facing collapse, Gross warned that gilts were âresting on a bed of nitroglycerineâ as the economy tried to pull out of the banking crisis-induced recession. Yet governments have to tread a line. A year later, he told Osborne that his austerity measures risked pushing the UK economy into recession. Pimco said last week that it was avoiding big positions on gilts. The market itself has spoken in unison through the gilt sell-off.
Jim Leaviss, chief investment officer for bonds at M&G, said: âThere was no âshadowy cartelâ of bond vigilantes. âItâs just simply what bond markets do when there are expectations of more supply or higher inflation,â he said.
âUnfortunatelyâ, Ferguson said last week, âthe lesson of the 1970s â another rough patch for gilts and sterling â is that you can lose credibility in a week, but it takes years to regainâ
I say âweâ, but it was mostly my wife, Leah, by a long shot. Catastrophe, the TV series I wrote and starred in alongside Sharon Horgan, got picked up for a second series before the first one even aired, and it didnât occur to me to take a break before beginning work on the second one. We just dived right in, and in my work fever I let my family simmer unattended on a back burner.
Of course, there were moments of beauty and togetherness, and Eugene and Oscar were loving and proud brothers to Henry, who smiled and babbled at them and was just generally a delightful and smooth little nugget we all loved to kiss and squeeze and make laugh. A house with three boys can seem like a ramshackle zoo on the edge of town: loud, dangerous and terrifying to the observer. Henry sensed that being the smallest animal in the zoo, heâd have to employ alternative tactics to get noticed. And he did. He was impossibly sweet and calm and lovely, so you were just drawn to him. It was a smart approach, and it worked.
I think about my son Henry as a little baby, and I think about him as a toddler. I think about the expressions he used to make, and his hands and feet and legs. Itâs wonderful and it hurts. I think about Henryâs hair every single day. Despite my own full-body coat of fur, Leah and I exclusively produce bald babies. And just as he started to grow hair, they found the tumour in his head.
Henry got sick when he was 11 months old. When he vomited at Eugeneâs fifth birthday party, we didnât think anything of it; he was our third kid and weâd cleaned up enough gallons of puke not to be fazed. Iâd been feeding him blueberries, so there were maybe 15 or 20 recognisable blueberries in there. A few too many blueberries â whatâs the big deal? Party on.
When Henry vomited two more times the next day, we started worrying and I took him into A&E. The doctor got the idea Henry might have a urinary tract infection. We left with some antibiotics, on the understanding that theyâd call us and tell us if a UTI was the culprit. It wasnât.
Over the next couple of weeks Henry kept vomiting so we brought him to our local GP, where he promptly vomited on the floor. He gave us an appointment to see a gastroenterologist. That doctor gave Henry an antiemetic and told us to monitor him for a while and come back if things got worse.
Henryâs vomiting intensified. My baby was getting smaller, and I would start crying whenever he threw up. I would try not to cry in front of his older brothers and fail, and theyâd ask why, and I would say it was because I was scared. By this point we knew we were going to get some kind of bad news; we just prayed it would be coeliac disease or a twist in his gut that could be surgically fixed.
On April 26, 2016, Sharon and I won the Bafta for comedy writing and the very day after that, a doctor told us Henry might have a brain tumour, and scheduled the MRI that would confirm it. That conversation, understandably, is seared in my mind. And yet so many of the days, months and years that followed are obscured by a fog. Grief drove a bus through the part of my brain where memories are stored. After the MRI, Dr Anson confirmed that Henry had a large tumour in the back of his head, near his brain stem. He delivered the news calmly, and ended by saying a paediatric brain surgeon would come to see us within a few hours. We sank inside ourselves. The heaviest pain in the world. I felt like I had suddenly quadrupled in weight, and an oily, black whirlpool began to swirl where my heart had been.
Dr Anson said we could go and see Henry, so we left his office and headed down a flight or two of stairs. Along a corridor, Leah found an unoccupied breastfeeding room and went inside and started screaming. I held her.
When we were able, we left that room and walked out of the building and across the street to the one Henry was in. Henry was just waking up, and Leah tenderly hugged and kissed him. I wrapped myself around Leah and Henry. He looked at us, tired and confused. He had turned one less than two weeks before. Sitting with him in those hours after his MRI, after we found out about the tumour, we werenât thinking about the next year of his life; we could only think about the next few days.
Eventually a brain surgeon from Great Ormond Street Hospital came to the private hospital and introduced himself to us. He was a nice, calm, quiet guy named Mr Elsawi. He said we were going to get to know each other well, which was both comforting and upsetting. He told us that Henry had a tumour the size of an apple near his brain stem and that he would open Henryâs head in a few days and try to remove the tumour. We digested that news and a little while later, Henry and Leah and I were taken to Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Upon our arrival, Henry was admitted and given a bed in their brain and neurology ward. We were shown to a shower room where all three of us could fit in, and Leah showered with Henry, holding him. I took their picture and in it, beautiful naked Leah is cradling beautiful naked Henry under the warm water and the expression on his face is one of pain and fatigue you would normally associate with an old man.
In those first few hours at the hospital, we met doctors and nurses whoâd seen Henryâs type of tumour before. They were calm, purposeful. We were disorientated and in shock. We held him and loved him and got ready for the big surgery a few days later.
We spent the four days leading up to Henryâs surgery in terrified anticipation. The surgery would take all day, so Leah and I got a hotel room close to the hospital. At the hotel we were so crazy and scared and holding each other so tight, we actually wound up having sex, twice, a few hours apart.
I realise it sounds insane to say that we had sex twice while our one-year-old had brain surgery across the street. I would normally omit that very personal fact, which might horrify some people, but I am sharing it primarily for the benefit of other parents who might have been through something similar and were terrified and crying and nearly hyperventilating with anxiety. I guess we were just so scared and wanted to be so close, and the horror of what was happening around the block didnât erase the fact that we loved each other, and sometimes that love manifests as sex, even in the absolute worst of times.
After 13 hours we were told the surgery was done and we could see our beautiful baby boy. We kissed him and told him we loved him. Elsawi said that he had removed all the tumour he could find. Henry had a vast number of tubes and wires attached to him and going in and out of orifices, and cannulas going into various veins. A few days after the surgery, we were allowed to carefully hold Henry on a pillow. Heâd have to be gingerly lifted out of his bed by two or three people, making sure none of his lines and ventilation got tangled, but we could hold our baby boy again.
The weight of him in my arms was heaven. The ability to kiss him, to put my lips on his tummy and his shoulders. His ears werenât yet freed from the bandages, but I would get to kiss and nibble gently on those soon too. He was quite knocked out from the surgery. He did start to wiggle about and respond definitively to all our stimuli, however, and was very awake and alert after a week. Things like crawling or cruising, however, were gone for a long time, and would need to be relearnt.
The big motherf***er was that he had lost the ability to swallow. They told us he might regain it in time. In the days following Henryâs surgery, Leah and I moved into housing next to the hospital that is provided for parents whose kids are in the paediatric ICU, or âPICUâ.
It often felt like we were falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion with each successive piece of bad news we got. One day, we were going through the notes on Henryâs surgery and learnt that the nerve that allowed him to hear with his left ear had been severed, and the nerve that went to his right ear was damaged.
Discovering weeks into hospital life that, on top of everything else, he was deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other was emblematic of the whole vicious experience; a terrible knock-on development with massive consequences that was buried among everything else to the point where weâd almost missed it.
After two months in the ICU, Henry moved into one of the hospitalâs cancer wards. He was getting chemo for several months, going through cycles of treatment and recovery that left him by turns sick, exhausted and desperate to play games like any other one-year-old.
Henryâs first hairs fell out and he was bald again, and I would hold his head and kiss it and feel the warmth of it. It was such a pleasure to do that. When he grew hair after the chemo, we didnât cut it and, oh my God, it was so beautiful. I loved to put my fingers through it and comb it behind his ear and just ⊠I get mad when I think about how beautiful he was. His hair, his face, his eyes that were such a bright blue. It makes me angry that people wonât get to look at them. Those eyes were two of the most glorious things Iâve ever seen and it offends me that theyâre not there for people to gaze into.
Once the nightmare of his diagnosis and surgery and disability and chemo and all that entailed became our norm, we did our best to be a family that was spread over two hospitals and our home.
Leah and I made an active decision to protect our marriage, day in, day out, throughout Henryâs illness. The way this manifested was simple. Leah and I would go on a date once a week, even when Henry was in the ICU. It didnât have to be a fancy restaurant with a tablecloth. It could be a walk around a park, holding hands. It could be breakfast near the hospital. But we had to look at each other and touch each other and check in and see how the other one was doing. Then we carried that communication through the rest of the day, touching, speaking, just listening to each otherâs voices.
I hesitate to give advice, but I have to say that if youâre ever in a situation like the one in which my family found ourselves, do not forget to love, touch and look into the eyes of every other family member regularly. Early during our time in hospital, I started to think of us as five fingers of the same hand. Every finger is important, even the crooked and/or hairy ones. There is a temptation to only pay attention to the patient, especially if theyâre a young child, but you ignore other family members at your peril. I canât speak for my Henry, but Iâm willing to bet he was happy that Leah and I took good care of the brothers he loved so much, and each other.
After seven months in Great Ormond Street Hospital and seven months in Whittington, we were desperate to get Henry home. He had just turned two. We hadnât dared assume heâd have a second birthday with the prognosis heâd received, but that day came.
When he moved home in June 2017, he exploded even more furiously into life. It meant seeing him interact with us in a way he hadnât for so long. Playing with the toys his brothers played with, lying in our bed with us, flying around the flat on the little scooter heâd mastered. He loved going to the park and playing catch with dogs, dancing wildly to Sia and Justin Bieber with his mom, and playing with his brothers, whom he was crazy about, and who cared for him so lovingly. Henry smiled all the time. And if he opened his mouth when he was smiling and showed you some teeth, thatâs when you really knew you had him.
Having Henry at home was terrifying at first. We had to turn his bedroom into a specialised hospital room with some sizeable machines, including an oxygen concentrator, feed pump and assorted monitors. The first couple of weeks felt like running a half-marathon. But we did it. And after the initial fear subsided, we loved it. We were home together, under one roof. We could spend the whole day together, from waking until sleeping, as a family. It felt good and it felt right.
In September 2017 he had another MRI to see if any cancer had returned. The big boys didnât have school that day, so we brought Eugene and Oscar along with Henry and his carer, Angela, when we went into Great Ormond Street to get the results. I remember walking into the room and thinking it had more people in it than normal. Rather than launch into the results, his main oncologist, Dr Mitchell, asked how Henry was doing. We said he was doing great. Really progressing with physical therapy. Cruising beautifully and crawling quickly upstairs, leading us to believe that walking might not be far off. He was very happy to be at home.
âWow,â said Dr Mitchell. âWell, I asked because I am sorry to say that the MRI showed that the cancer has started to return.â Henry played obliviously, beautifully, on the floor. My stomach filled with stones. They told us they felt there were options, like more surgery and radiation, but we could talk more about that after weâd digested the bad news. I donât remember anything else about the meeting. We shuffled out of the room to the area where Angela was waiting with the two big boys. Our eyes met hers, and she knew. We all cried.
Leah understood before I did that there could be no more treatment. I am so grateful that she is so smart and so strong. We decided to stop Henryâs treatment. We were told we could expect him to live for three to six more months.
We told Eugene and Oscar, who were four and six, that Henryâs cancer had come back and that there was nothing more that could be done. They asked if he was going to die. We said yes. We were in our back garden, where the three of them played together. The three boys, whose health and vitality I used to consciously marvel at and be grateful for before Henry got sick.
One night, soon after, I told one of Henryâs night carers, Rachel, that his cancer had returned and that he was going to die. She yelled, âOh no! Oh, Henry! Oh, Jesus Christ, no!â She recoiled from the news like Iâd hit her. âNo, no, no,â she continued. âYes, yes,â I thought. Her response was like water in the desert to me. Rachel was from Nigeria and a mom and a devout Christian. Maybe one or more of those factors explained her response, I donât know. But it beat the hell out of a lot of the responses Leah and I were getting from people when they heard the news. Many people are afraid of you when your child is dying. I preach sympathy in lots of situations, but not this one. Perhaps because my sympathy wouldnât do anything. Life, and death, will kick their own door down soon enough; I donât really know that a lecture from me on how theyâre a coward would help. So, Rachel, thank you for gasping in pain and sadness when you learnt Henry would die. In the years since, I think of it often as the absolute best response I received. It helped me, Rachel. Yes, scream it from the rooftops. My beautiful baby boy is going to die.
It was so f***ing confusing seeing him bound around so happily, functioning at the highest level of his life, physically and mentally, knowing he was going to die. I felt absolutely insane. We went to the park all the time. I signed on to do a fourth and final series of Catastrophe in the future, so I knew Iâd make money again at some point. Henry played with his brothers and little buddies. Weâd cry with our friends and family and his carers.
We had a guy who did animal birthday parties come over and bring tarantulas and turtles and weird little mammals. Henry was overjoyed. We took baths and the five of us routinely crowded our tiny shower and laughed, played and splashed. He glowed with joy, and so did we.
And so 2018 arrived. It was on the morning of about January 9 that Henry didnât seem to totally wake up. He seemed sluggish and he held his head at an angle, indicating pain. We called the palliative care team at Great Ormond Street and they came to our house. The doctor confirmed that his sluggishness and discomfort probably meant that the tumour was growing and creating the problems that a large foreign object in a childâs head is known to do.
She prescribed morphine and gabapentin to help with his pain. The morphine was a bright red powder that I would mix with water and then load into a syringe, which Iâd then attach to his feeding tube to administer. Iâm glad it was bright red. The thing you put into your dying child to dull his pain should be bright red, like a flag or a flare or a fire truck racing to a disaster.
Morphine and gabapentin work, so he would relax and we would hold him. He got slower each day, as though a dial was being turned down. A big Lego Duplo ice-cream cone became very important to him, and he liked to hold it in his hand all day. Rather than wait until he seemed to be in pain we were told we could give him his medication on a schedule, so there would be little or no pain any more. I dissolved the bright red powder in water and gave it to him, day and night. I lay with him, and Leah held him and danced with him. His brothers read to him and played with him.
Henry began to open his eyes less and less. He held his little ice-cream cone. He was dying.
He was unconscious. I made sure to keep up with the red powder. Our moms took the boys to dinner and some sort of winter light show in a nearby square so we could be with Henry.
Sending them out the door was excruciating, as we didnât know if Henry would be alive when they returned. We told our night carer not to come in that night. We lay on either side of Henry on the couch. We carried Henry out to the back garden so he could be under the stars and in the night air one more time before he died. Leah took a bath with him, and I sat on the floor next to him. He was so beautiful and so smooth and so perfect. His hair was pretty long, as we never cut it once it grew back after chemo.
Our boys returned and Henry was still alive. Then it was just the five of us in the house. Five people who loved each other and needed each other. Henry opened his eyes and looked into Leahâs eyes around five the next morning. Then he died.
I am so happy Henry died at home. I am so happy that he did so in the arms of his beautiful mother, who loved him desperately. I am so happy that he lay between us afterward and we could kiss and hold him and stroke his beautiful long, sandy-blond hair. I am so happy that shortly afterward, his brothers Eugene and Oscar came up and cuddled with him and kissed him and were not afraid, because they had been so intimately involved in his care over the last two years, in the hospitals and then at home. Henry knew happiness and curiosity and love and brotherly squabbles every day that he was home. And that absolutely included his final days. His death was good. We kept Henryâs body at home for most of the day. They were some very precious hours.
People who loved him visited. A doctor came by to confirm and record his death. Oh Christ, he was beautiful in death. In his little pyjamas. We kept the windows open so he could stay cold. I told the loud builders next door that my son was lying dead on our bed and we had to keep the windows open, so please stop work for the day. They did.
When youâre a parent and your child gets hurt or sick, not only do you try to help them get better, but youâre also animated by the general belief that you can help them get better. It might not be the wound-cleaning you personally administer or the medicine you yourself pour into their mouth â you might have to get them to a nurse or a doctor who has the right equipment and skill set â but you believe that itâs you who will get them to the right place, via car or taxi or, God forbid, ambulance, and that, once there, youâll sit by their side or maybe hold them in your lap and theyâll get what they need. Add a little time to mend, heal, rest, and youâll soon have an exciting story to tell. Thatâs not always the case, though. Sometimes, the nurses and the doctors canât fix whatâs wrong. Sometimes, children die. Whateverâs wrong with your child gets worse and they suffer and then they die.
After they die, their body begins to decompose and later itâs zipped into a black bag and taken away by an undertaker in a black van. A few days later, your child is buried in a hole in the ground or cremated in a furnace that incinerates their body into ashes, which you take back to your house and put on a shelf. You wish you could take a kitchen knife and stick it into yourself near one of your shoulders and pull it down and across to the hip on the opposite side of your torso. Then youâd tear apart skin, fat, muscle and viscera, and pull your child out of you again and kiss them and hold them and try frantically to fix what you couldnât fix the first time. But that wouldnât work. So you sit there like a decaying disused train station while freight train after freight train overloaded with pain roars through you. Maybe one will derail and explode, destroying the station and killing you, and you can go and be with your child. Would that be so bad?
Why do I feel compelled to talk about it, to write about it, to disseminate information designed to make people feel something like what I feel? What my wife feels? What my other sons feel? Done properly, it will hurt them. Why do I want to hurt people? (And I do.) Did my sonâs death turn me into a monster? Thatâs certainly possible. It doesnât sanctify you. Things get broken. Maybe itâs because I write and perform for a living that I canât help but try to share or communicate the biggest, most seismic event that has happened to me. The truth is, despite the death of my son, I still love people. And I genuinely believe, whether itâs true or not, that if people felt a fraction of what my family felt and still feels, they would know what this life and this world are really about.
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