Last month, for the first time ever, I visited a hospice. I have visited people in hospital hundreds of times, but had never even seen the outside of a hospice. One of my favourite cousins on my mother’s side had taken ill. She told us many years ago that she had cancer that was “incurable but treatable”, the kind of disease that people die with rather than of. I didn’t get much more detail than that for a familiar, simple reason: she didn’t want to talk about it. She and her sister were born here in London, moved back to Ireland in the 1970s and had lived there ever since.

From sometime in November 2024 she started feeling weaker and was admitted to hospital less than two weeks before Christmas. Initial hopes that they might be able to treat her, and that she could return home, were short-lived: the cancer had spread. Within a few days the planning was for “end of life care”. She was still speaking and conscious on the weekend of Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 December. I flew from London to see her on Tuesday 17 December. While I was in the air she was being moved from the hospital to the hospice. The Aircoach that I took from Dublin Airport stopped at the hospital (St Vincent’s), but the driver went out of his way to drop me as near as he could to the hospice in Blackrock. He offered more of a taxi service than a bus service. Earlier in the journey, driving through the centre of Dublin, he dropped other passengers much closer to their hotels than they would have been if he limited himself to the official stops. At the end of the journey it was just me and the driver on the bus, talking mainly about his time in West London.

My cousin was conscious when I arrived but was no longer able to converse. A nurse was taking a swab. Patients at the hospital, in the ward she had been in, had tested positive for Covid and a specific strain of flu. I was advised to wear a mask. My cousin’s breathing was shallow and laboured. I figured that she was unlikely to infect me with either virus.

Her sister, having slept very little during the previous week, and relieved that the place at the hospice had become available, went back home to sleep. I thought that I might be staying there, the same place I stayed for their mother’s funeral in 2019, but she wasn’t really up to receiving visitors. I stayed in the room with my cousin for an hour or so. I have visited a few private hospitals in the UK. For five years my work (in IT Training) took me to one of the better-known such places. The hospice felt much the same: calm, spacious, well-equipped. Much more like a hotel than an under-resourced public hospital. A favourite cousin on my father’s side had offered to help if I was stuck for somewhere to stay, and he and his wife put me up. We had a very enjoyable evening, despite the unhappy reason for my visit.

I had arranged to go back to the hospice around 10.30 the following morning, but received a call at 7.30am suggesting I get there as quickly as possible. I was there by 9am and spent the next seven hours in the building. I was booked on a flight back to London that evening and for a while in the afternoon it looked like my cousin could leave us at any time. She did not regain consciousness. The morphine was doing its work. There were no final goodbyes.

A priest visited and stayed for over an hour. I had some lunch before he arrived. I was expecting to take a trip to the Burger King in a nearby shopping centre but checked out the hospice canteen and ate there. It was much better than I expected. While eating my fish and chips an old college friend called from London, on WhatsApp. We had not spoken for many months and I was struck by his timing. If I had still been in the room with my cousins I might not have answered but we had a brief chat. He was undergoing a course of radiotherapy for prostate cancer. He had had prostate surgery a year earlier, which was news to me, and this was the follow-up.

I recommended the canteen to my healthy cousin. She had her lunch “to go” and ate in the room with her sister and me. We chatted. One thing I learnt about her was how much she likes the song “When You Walk in the Room”, a #3 hit for The Searchers in 1964. It reached #1 in Australia. I had added it to my repertoire in the spring. She especially likes the rhyme of “want” and “nonchalant”: “I pretend for a minute that’s it’s me you want / Meanwhile I try to act so nonchalant”.

When the priest arrived my cousin was concerned that she would not be able to take Holy Communion. She had eaten less than an hour earlier. He waited until they were sure that an hour had passed. The three of us were gathered around the bed for prayers, decades of the rosary, Communion, blessings. I wondered whether to rearrange my flight plans but I stuck with them and was on the way to Dublin Airport by 5pm. I was there in such good time that I was offered an earlier flight home but I stuck with my original booking. I felt superstitious about taking a different flight. At the airport I did have a Burger King meal, and a couple of pints at the bar: a Guinness and a Smithwick’s Red. I wanted to check the quality of the Guinness. A friend had heard that it has a reputation for being particularly good. It’s good enough, but not out of this world. Not worth booking a flight just to try it, you know. The Smithwick’s Red was in honour of my brother, who I thought was a big fan of it. I learnt over the Christmas period that he isn’t: it’s the regular Smithwick’s that he favours.

Over the last year, as first mentioned in this piece, a group of us who were at school together have had occasional meet-ups, over beer and dinner. There was one scheduled for that evening, at the same pub in Hammersmith where we gathered in February, starting at 6.30pm. If people had stayed until 10pm (as was the case at earlier gatherings) I would have been able to join them, at least briefly. I messaged just after 9.30pm, as the Piccadilly Line approached Boston Manor Station. They had already vacated the pub. I headed straight home instead.

My cousin died at 4.10am the following morning, Thursday 19 December 2024.