This week the world learned of the heartwarming story of three Austrian nuns, Sisters Bernadette (88), Rita (82), and Regina (86), who have broken out of their nursing home and gone back home to their convent, where they broke in with the help of a locksmith, and now are breaking ranks after a lifetime of obedience to higher powers both earthly and spiritual.
‘Before I die in that old people’s home, I would rather go to a meadow and enter eternity that way’, said Sr Bernadette, pictured eating plum dumplings with Sr Rita.
This week too we learned of the results of the inquest into the deaths of Tony and Phyllis Gilbert who, for their own reasons, in their 80s took their own lives together at home in Kenmare in 2021. The couple left a tape recording, in which they told how they’d been together in life, and would likewise be ‘together in death’. Like the nuns, they took concrete steps and made a very definitive decision of how and where they were going to exit the stage, and most importantly, they had the physical capability to do it without outside help.
Somewhere along the journey towards civilisation, the decision was made that death happens when a doctor says it does, and not when the soul or the spirit loses the will to stay here on earth. (Here we are speaking of matters of the soul and not of mental distress, which is another conversation).
Over a few pints, almost everyone will have the cheery chat: ‘Will you take me out when I reach the point of X?’ Promises are made, probably broken, daughters and sons vow to hold down pillows and everyone laughs and doesn’t actually think it’ll come to that. These are ‘gallows humour’ conversations, but they happen all the time, with no bother at all.
At the same time, real and important conversations about the next chapter do not happen. The farming community is finally talking more and more about succession, but talking about it doesn’t change the fact that about half of West Cork farmers surveyed by The Southern Star don’t have wills. There’s no plan.
One would have to be living under a very big moss-covered rock on the outer edges of Beara to not know of a family torn in some way asunder by questions of the farm, who gets the house, an eldest son who ran to Australia years ago so he wouldn’t have to take it on, a sister who feels she was hard done by, a brother who’s left minding mammy while his life passes him by. Sonny, don’t go away.
It’s not acceptable anymore to pretend there are happy families behind every door, to continue this facade that we’re all from happy smiley families like in the posters, mammy and daddy holding hands with the young son looking out over a glorious field of barley.
That child may have dreams of being an engineer in Canada, or marry a Korean girl and live in Dubai, or head to Dublin and work for Facebook. Maybe he will want to stay at home, but can’t find a girl who’s willing to stand in a gap for the rest of her life with a length of Wavin pipe.
Will mammy and daddy be so accommodating when he makes the announcement that he can’t stay, or will they cry and guilt him into staying because they can’t consider letting go of the farm? Will this conversation come as a surprise, because they never sat down and actually asked the question: would you like to do this yourself one day?
There are some widely-publicised cases of inheritance issues gone badly wrong. But missing from the headlines is the quiet tearing apart of families who didn’t plan, and didn’t have the chance to compromise. Christmas dinners with fewer people at the table, birthdays passed by without remark, until the sibling they played with on the silage bales is nothing else than a number in a phone, and a funeral to attend one day. The nuns on the run are a lesson in forward planning.
