Читать книгу Siobhan's Miracle - They Told Us She Had Weeks to Live. Then the Most Amazing Miracle Happened - Ellen & Derek Jameson - Страница 7
ОглавлениеSiobhán’s life is spelled out neatly in Dr Clair Wills’s obituary in the Guardian, but diplomatically she omits any mention of the extraordinary Damascene happening at Lourdes seven years previously. As stepmother of Siobhán’s husband Peter, I was alongside her on that cheerless February day in the French Pyrenees and again when she passed away peacefully in Belfast on Easter Saturday, 7 April 2007. My memories of the occasion are poignant.
The noonday sun was shining brightly in a cloudless blue sky outside the window of the young patient’s room on the third floor of the Cancer Centre at Belfast City Hospital. The last rites had already been administered. Siobhán Kilfeather gave one last deep sigh. Peter hugged her and I held her hand as she slipped away after a mercifully short battle with cancer.
The sun was still shining when we laid her to rest beside her mother in a small graveyard in the shadow of a hillside in a village called Hope in Shropshire. Johnny Cash sang ‘We’ll Meet Again’ over loudspeakers at the funeral in Shrewsbury Cathedral.
Dr Siobhán Kilfeather was Professor of English and Irish Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast, a graduate of Cambridge University and Princeton University and a former tutor at Columbia University, New York. In August 2007 she would have turned fifty.
Constance, the image of her mother, with her thick, deep brown, wavy hair and piercing blue eyes, celebrated her twelfth birthday at her mother’s bedside on 5 April 2007. The younger child, Oscar, handsome, tall, football-loving, would turn ten in September of that year.
Siobhán did not cry ‘Why me?’ or rage against the cancer which cruelly ravaged her body between Christmas Eve 2006 and her death the following Easter. Siobhán knew she was living on borrowed time. Thanks to her gentle Irish charm, faith in God and belief in a mother’s love, she had entered a holy pact with the Blessed Mother of Jesus. Her fervent prayer had been that she be granted time to see her children grow to an age where they would know and remember her.
By her devotion and faith, she won an extra seven years of life. That was how long it took from the time doctors first warned they could not guarantee her survival until eventually the cancerous melanomas which ravaged her body took her life.
Those seven vital years began as we knelt at the feet of the statue of the Queen of Heaven in the shrine at Lourdes.
‘Hail Mary, full of Grace.’ Siobhán chanted the first line of the universal prayer to Mary. Then, with hands outstretched and eyes full of fire, she beseeched the statue. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ she prayed aloud, ‘you know better than anyone on earth the love a mother has for her children. Surely you won’t deprive my babies of their mother. They need me. I beg you; find it in your heart to give me more time. Let me see them grow up a bit first – then I’ll be ready.’
Siobhán and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes. We lit candles in the flower-filled grotto where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous 150 years ago.
It was February 2000 and the Pyrenean weather was still bitterly cold. Although she was tired after our flight from London that day, by evening Siobhán declared she was well enough to walk in a candlelight procession with thousands of other pilgrims celebrating the Feast of Our Lady.
Before her illness Siobhán had been a vibrant, energetic young woman who loved walking and keeping fit. Now she walked painfully slowly and her breathing was laboured. The cancer had reached her lungs. She took my arm as we struggled to keep up with the other worshippers moving reverently through the grotto gardens in procession, praying the rosary and singing hymns.
We took comfort in the familiar and much-loved words of the hymns to Mary, Queen of Heaven, Ocean Star and Hail Glorious Mary from our Catholic schooldays. Suddenly Siobhán turned to me and with complete conviction declared, ‘I felt a shift inside my body today. I believe the cancer has left me. Mary has answered my prayer. She says I am to be allowed some more time with my wee ones.’
In those dark and uncertain days Siobhán and all who loved her would have settled for any extension to her life, which had been under threat since the cancer was diagnosed a year earlier. Seven years would have seemed like a lifetime – but that is what she was granted.
The following day I followed Siobhán into the freezing-cold waters of the plunge baths where nuns with strong hands and gentle hearts helped the faithful immerse themselves in the healing waters.
Siobhán walked purposefully down the stone steps to immerse herself. I followed, trying to hide the shock that swept over me as the thin, modesty-covering gown she had been provided with slipped from her shoulders. I had never before seen her operation scars. Now I shall never forget the livid wounds on her back where surgeons had twice removed cancerous growths.
We flew home from Lourdes on Sunday and two days later Siobhán and her husband Peter were due to attend the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, where she was to undergo what she had been told would be ‘very aggressive’ chemotherapy.
