Marian Finucane (1950 – 2020) was admired for many interviews, but none more so than the one in 2008 with her dying friend Nuala O’Faolain. In 2011 she wrote for The Irish Times about that interview.
NUALA O’FAOLAIN rang me in March 2008 to arrange a lunch – we were good friends and had a running gag about birthday lunches, which could be had in any month of the year or in many months of the year. We met the following Monday in a busy restaurant in Dublin. She came in using a walking stick and dragging her leg a bit. Other than that, she looked terrific.
I first met Nuala O’Faolain when she was a contributor to a radio programme about convent education on RTÉ’s Women Today. This must have been in the mid-1970s. Unusually, the programme was prerecorded in the producer’s apartment, so we had some time before and after the interview to get to know each other.
At that lunch in 2008 we discussed the necessity of truth about dying, and how there should be no lies, no claiming false hope, which often only serves to isolate a dying person even further. Talking about death and dying, and the pain and fear of it, was not new territory for us. Nuala was godmother to my daughter Sinéad, who died, aged eight, in 1990. But Lord, was it hard – shocking – to be having that conversation again, knowing that, once more, the outcome was 100 per cent certain.
The interview was recorded in Galway, because that’s where Nuala was having radiotherapy. By that time she had lost her hair and was bloated from the drugs, but there was nothing wrong with her brain.
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