I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

In 1969 the car pulled to the side of the road, and Aunt Rosemary got out. She wore a nurse’s uniform. She skipped between the sandbag pillboxes from which soldiers levelled their rifles at either side of the entry to the Tyrone and Fermanagh Hospital. 

The next time I saw Rosemary was in 1977.  She and my grandmother came to stay with us in Calgary for a month or so.  Rosemary was in a wheelchair, and her eyes often sought the ceiling in a gesture of terrible bliss.  I heard the hiss of my mother’s whisper, telling my father it was not suitable for them to stay with us. I dreamed that Rosemary had parked her wheelchair at the top of the stairs, trapping me in the basement.  

I saw Rosemary for the last time 1982, when I spent the summer in Omagh. She was like a heap of pillows in the corner of the kitchen, eyes pinned to the ceiling, able only to grunt. My grandmother served me a wedge of apple tart, and fed Rosemary a piece, gathering the crumbs from her chin with the spoon.  She talked to her the whole time she fed her, and the timing of Rosemary’s grunts seemed to indicate that she was following what my grandmother said.

Rosemary spent the rest of her life in a hospital bed in the Tyrone and Fermanagh, locked in an unresponsive body, unable to see, to speak, to move.  My grandmother sat by her bedside every day, chatting to her.  After my grandmother died, Rosemary spent another 20 years alone in that hospital bed. Although I never saw her, she was aways present to me as memento mori, as proof that the worst, the unthinkable, could befall us; as proof that the heavens knew no mercy, and suffering no bounds. I thought about what it would be like to be alive in a body that was dead, and what was going on in her mind after all these years.  She died alone in Omagh in 2010 while I was in China, and my father, the last remaining member of her family, was in Canada.  

I didn’t think about Rosemary again until the neurologist asked me if anyone in my family had MS.  I had come to see him because my body had been diminishing, and no one could tell me why.  In less than a year I had gone from 110 to 67 kg. My body was a horror show of sagging skin, bulging joints and taut cables.  My mobility was going, and I could at best shuffle along, propped up by my grandfather’s shillelagh. I suffered relentless pain on the right side of my body. I still hoped, though, that I could recover.  

The neurologist pointed out the lesions in my brain and spine on the MRI, and told me that this damage could not be repaired.  He said I was incurable.  MS is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s own immune system attacks the coatings of the nerves.  The Chinese call it the Viking disease, because it mostly befalls people from countries with little sunlight.  It was raining heavily as I drove home. I didn’t know how I could tell Lin and Davey, my wife and my son.  I was meant to protect them, but now I was broken. It outraged me to be stricken down so arbitrarily, and so finally.

Once I had the diagnosis, my symptoms coalesced into a single entity. I was repulsed by the sight of my body, and went to great lengths to avoid seeing it. I locked into a death stare with the ceiling when I showered. The terrible, intimate pain never let up for a moment, and was most acute when I lay down to sleep. I didn’t know how I could live with ceaseless pain, but I had no alternative.  I was cornered.  It hurt to lay down, to sit and to stand. I would never feel comfort again. I became so weak, barely able to put on my socks. So much fell on Lin’s shoulders, and I was overwhelmed by regret.  I had wanted to spoil and protect her, and now I was good for nothing but suffering.  I did not see how I could be a father to my son, contracted as I was into the selfish distraction of my pain.  I couldn’t play with him, laugh with him, run with him. I shuffled around Dangan on our daily walks and felt jealous of the joggers who passed us by, so positive and bright in their healthy, pain free bodies.  I let my hair grow long, and tried to stay away from other people.  We had no friends, no family, no support. 

I squirmed in pain, heart cinched in remorse for months, and then decided to block everything out, and finish the books I had been working on for years. Since my mother’s death, when I was 18, I had felt a need to hold onto the past, to save it from disappearing. My writing was extended self inquiry, propelled by the misguided assumption that I could somehow produce a true self through narrative, that by analysing my past experiences, I could uncover the formula that created me, make something solid and coherent of all the gusting thoughts. I always wanted to make amends to my mother with words. 

It was times of COVID, and my wife’s sister was dying of cancer in China.  She’d had her leg amputated at the hip, but she was still dying. With the dubiousness of air travel at that time, Lin decided that she could not leave Davey and me here in Galway, and feel confident that she would be able to return.  She chatted to her sister on WeChat daily while she died.  To sustain herself, Lin engaged with Buddhist teachings, and urged her sceptical sister to chant Namoa Amitofu.  She was surprised to find that I had The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.  I had been seeking correspondences to Yeats’ mystical system in A Vision.

We didn’t have a clear understanding of Buddhism yet.  We thought it was a religion, and not a coherent method for self liberation from suffering. Lin read Sutras and listened to the excellent teachings of an online monk.  After I completed my morning writing, we would walk the dog in Dangan, and she would explain what she was learning.  I began to read the Sutras also, and found there the full flowering of the ideas that had always drawn me to literature and philosophy.  I had always been a humanist, and now I found in Buddhism humanism supercharged.  

I finished the books, and didn’t even bother looking for a publisher: I just put them up on Amazon, without the OK of any gatekeeper.   It felt as though I had been living with a bag on my head all the years I had been working on these books, and only now could I take it off.  I had gathered all my pain into these books, and carefully woven a voodoo self out of cloud strings.  When I threw it up on Amazon, I cut the ties to this self, this pain, this remorse, and let it drift away.  That me was gone, and I was someone new.  I don’t care how these books fare: I care only about being free from suffering, escaping the mind that has so long tormented me.  

I wonder if over all those years locked in that hospital bed, Rosemary discovered meditation on her own, the bliss of surrender to emptiness; or was she tormented by serpents of mind until the very end.