The Meeja, again

I screwed up. Hardly surprising, given the horrible conditions, and nobody will notice, but nonetheless. It's never a good feeling.

It's been raining for days, and I've been post-Christmas hibernating, gradually disappearing under the piles of seasonal detritus (books, DVDs, packaging: soft plastic, molded plastic, cardboard everywhere. Not to mention the food). Today's one and only task was to clear the rubbish out of the house and the car. The final related errand was a trip to Oxfam Home on Frances St.

The one way system in the Liberties was confounding, so I ditched the car halfway between my house and the shop, and walked to Francis St in the rain. Arrived, with 2 coats on, drenched, with a soggy box full of soggy tat. And the nice beardy man in the shop is being interviewed by a lady and a man with a very large camera. The lady sprang on me, delighted; the spongy bit of her microphone says 3. They're filming a fluff piece for tonight's news about charity shops. Oh shite. Do I mind if they film me arriving (again) with my box of tat? They have lots of shoppers, but no donors. Sigh. When will this be on? I don't want my Aunty seeing me on the telly giving away all my Christmas presents from the last 3 years. Ok.

I walk down the steps again, still dripping, with a box of junk that I've never owned. Hand it over. That's great, now can we interview you? You know, the irony is, I work for Trocaire. Ho ho ho and out with the mic.

I made a show of myself. I said daft things like "it's all for a good cause", and "we bought our wardrobe here." Here was the perfect opportunity to express, articulately, in the guise of an ordinary Irish person, the importance that international development has to me. Here was my chance to use the meeja as a worthwhile mouthpiece, to talk about the connection I feel with my counterparts in Africa, to explain how important I think it is for Irish people to continue to fund development aid, even in recessionary times. And what do I do? I open my mouth and say exactly what I would expect any eejit on the telly to say. Utterly dumbfounded, I blew my chance.

It will air at 5.30 on TV3 news tonight ("and finally...") Hopefully nobody will see me. Oh god. Hopefully nobody from work will see me.

Stories of Africa, stories of dignity

Lately I've been regularly running into questions about how to tell stories, and of whose stories to tell. My good friend Bryan Mukandi in a recent blog gave the perspective of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, who gave a talk to Ted.com about the danger of the "single story" of Africa which makes people in the West unable to empathise with African problems because they have such limited, immutable ideas of what African problems are.

Apart from writing prize-winning, Oprah-friendly, book clubbish novels about African lives in all their joys and complexities, how can we make people leap from that single story to something more reflective of reality? Adichie's experience of being Nigerian in the US was that what people expected of her was some mix of grinding poverty, tribal dancing and mysticism, and a Lion Kingish relationship with nature. Not universities, pop music and hair dos. I'm perfectly familiar with this limited view of Africa: I'm more than a little prone to it myself, since at this time of year my favourite song, for all its political incorrectness, is still Do They Know It's Christmas.

Working for a development NGO, I encounter the problem of the single story regularly, and I'm not always satisfied by how we address it. Enough with the negativity: here's where I think we got it right: three audio-visual stories from Sierra Leone told in the words of the individuals who received our help. What's lovely about these stories, I think, is how transparently they show rural African life in all its simplicity and complication.
If I could only achieve one thing as a result of working in "development" for a living, (and I'm not convinced I can even do that much) it would be this: illustrate to Irish people how communities in the rest of the world are not unlike communities here. That means messy, close-knit, politicised, bitchy, determined, self-interested and endlessly resourceful. Is that more negative adjectives than positive? Well, I'm fairly cynical. That's pretty much how I view humanity, but it's also what I love about it.

The Sierra Leone stories got me thinking a lot about how badly we usually communicate something as simple and as incommunicable as Rural African Life. I found myself in a series of email exchanges, with wunderblogger/ wunderkind Jane Ruffino, and with miracle filmmaker-photographer Michael Kelly Kelly. Michael Kelly made a beautiful video about a community Trocaire supports in Malawi recently, which achieves much the same effect as the Sierra Leone stories, and so makes me equally proud. Which brings me to what I'm really thinking about: more than just African stories, but stories generally, stories that are hard to tell, and hence, oral history.

I've spent this evening wandering the internet guided primarily by Jane and Michael, and half memories of my own, looking for tales that are similarly dignified and motivating, that can make us connect with the lives of others. I was incredibly moved by this one: a Ugandan man who had been abducted as a child, told with spirit and hope through (his own?) child's illustrations. I was touched by this story of a teenage mother in New York: beautiful photos tracing the difficulties of a girl who thought that she had no alternatives when she got pregnant, because this may be her only opportunity to have a child. I was enchanted by this tale of a lesbian woman who confronts the fact that her family is racist, that the Klan is part of her own personal heritage.

The idea of oral history isn't exclusive to the audio-visual media. It's ancient, and one of its best proponents (thanks so much to Jane for this insight) was Studs Terkel, an American broadcaster who broadcast interviews with the ornery people of Chicago for more than 45 years from 1952.

What these stories have in common is that the subject of the story controls the tale. So often, particularly in the NGO world, we won't let go of that control. I'm guilty of it myself; so delighted by my own desire to storytell, to wordsmith, that I can't allow my ego recede into the background. And I am conscious that I've told Nana's story over and over, but I never worked out the technology to let her tell it herself.

I'm a fan of The Hub, a forum for sharing videos about human rights; but I think it highlights a problem that we in the development/ human rights community run into all the time. In our advocacy, in our campaigning, but most of all in our fundraising, we're pretty urgently required to communicate how awful life is for poor people everywhere. (This is true whether you're the Simon Community in Ireland or Unicef in the Ivory Coast or Amnesty International talking about Zimbabwe). It's not always constructive to give the voice to individuals, who invariably find themselves sorting out their own problems. And yet, to overcome the single story, that's what we need to do.

And that's what I'm most interested in doing right now. I don't often do this, but on this occasion, I'd really like to ask for comments on this (overlong) blog post, and more importantly on the links. Am I on my own in thinking that these are the stories, the insights, that might change the world?

The meeja

On Sunday, our doorbell rang unexpectedly. This doesn't happen often: neighbours tend to knock, and friends phone before dropping in. The only people who use our doorbell without advance notification tend to be kids doing nick nacks. We don't always answer.

On Sunday, Simon answered. It was two researchers from RTE's Prime Time Investigates, weathered Irish male types, poorly dressed for the nasty conditions in thin fleece jackets and no raincoats. Poor chaps, I thought. They were calling door to door to gather information about crime. They had heard "heartbreaking" stories, they told us, about "what's called petty crime, though it's anything but petty".

I don't respond well to these moments; I rarely remember what I think or why when confronted by the meeja. We gave them a small bit of information and pointed out the neighbours they should talk to. Later I sent them an irritable and more informative email.

There is crime in my neighbourhood, and it's maybe naive to add "there is crime in every neighbourhood", because probably it is a bigger problem where I live. But I am infuriated by the thought of the national broadcaster pouring its ever-diminishing investigative resources into the tale of how ordinary decent people are terrorised daily in Dublin 8. From our brief doorstep chat (they haven't responded to my email), I gathered that the spin these guys will put on their story is this: "the economy is going down the drains and now, driven to desperation, working class youths are resorting to preying on the innocent residents of (name streets) for the few bucks needed to fuel their drug-addled lifestyles."

Forgive me for getting ahead of myself, and I promise to apologise publicly and even maybe eat a hat if I'm wrong. But I'm pretty confident that I'm not. I suggested to the chaps that they talk to some of the longer standing community activists in the area, to social workers and even (imagine!) the gardai. The fact is that what disaffection there is in this neighbourhood is deep seated, it never went away since the heroine epidemic in the 80s, not even as the economy grew. There is no decent community policing in the area (I don't believe there's any in Ireland, certainly not in urban Ireland), precious few services for young people, and no connection between the gardai and the social services. So you can talk about petty crime, and innocent victims, and reigns of terror. And in so doing, you can reinforce the perception - a pretty dominant one - that Dublin 8 is peopled by drug dealers and thugs. And as long as people think that, the marginalisation and disaffection continue.

Incidentally, here's our experience of crime, in three and a half years living here:

• Our house was broken into once, all our shiny technological stuff nicked. The back door was open - but that doesn't make it ok. We got everything back on the insurance too - but that also doesn't make it ok. It's a shit thing to do, and nobody should do it. I felt neither victimised nor terrorised though (partly because I wasn't living in the country at the time. Ahem).
• This August, my car window was smashed, randomly and viciously. That same evening, a large number of windows were smashed in the immediate vicinity, and my friend was chased down Cork St by a big gang of kids. Very very distressing. Nothing like this ever happened before or since, not even at hallowe'en.
• Last week, my car door was unlocked for 5 days, and my ipod visible on the dashboard. Nothing touched.
  

I dunno, crime happens and it's shit and of course Something Must Be Done. But I have no confidence in RTE, or those two nice men going door to door on a filthy Sunday afternoon, to tell a story that will shed any light on the reality of living in a mixed neighbourhood of social deprivation in the midst of an economic downturn. Silly me though. Why would I think they wanted to?

Kathleen Carroll, RIP

Nana died on Friday the 6th of November.

This is a post to mark the fact, to complete the story that I started here. I have always been a fan of the Irish Catholic wake and funeral, in spite of my own sturdy atheism. Over three days from her death to her burial, we had the opportunity to reclaim something of the woman that her stroke had stolen from us. For 9 whole months, we were unable to miss her because nominally she was still with us. Our discussions about her centred on the hidden code (imagined or otherwise) behind her blinks and head movements, the adequacy of her medication, the quality of her care. I can barely express the luxury of days on end devoted to talking about the real her: her tastes, her interests, her exploits.

I didn't mean this to be a long post, but maybe there are one or two things I should recount.

I brought Simon to the Muintir Na Tire hall, to show him where I had spent hundreds of evenings as a child. One of Nana's old friends told me that without her, the hall would never have been built. She and two allies had raised the money to build a community hall (they were convinced that the town needed it), secured the site, and then backed the purchase with their own homes. This in 1950s Ireland; the two allies were men, while Nana was not, and didn't own the house that she mortgaged for the Muintir Na Tire hall. I doubt my granddad had a say in the matter. I am charmed and astonished by her determination; when you look at photos from that period she's a smiley Irish housewife in ugly dresses and hair fixed with curlers. But she made things happen.

Playing cards was one of Nana's great pleasures later in life, and over the course of the weekend the house filled with her card buddies. People come to funeral houses ("corpse houses", they're called in Roscrea) for so many reasons: when our mother died my siblings and I identified a category of "die hard funeral junkies" who came for the company, the sandwiches and the tea. One of the most touching visitors was one of Nana's cards partners. Billy is in his 80s, and doesn't drive; so not only was Nana a treasured partner, she was also his lift to cards 4 nights a week. They were great friends. Billy broke down and wept like a child at the door of the room where Nana was laid out. "She wasn't just my friend," said this conservative old country man, "she was my best friend".

Nana only took up cards (she played 25, mainly) after my grandfather died. Danny was a great man for the cards, a great man for the pub too, and neither was appropriate for his wife. He used to tell her that she wouldn't be able to play; she'd be no use. Nana wasn't one to protest - she accepted the things she couldn't change, and this was a strong willed man - but after Danny died 17 years ago, she learned to play, and she developed a whole new lease of life. Said one of her partners, she was a far better player than Dan ever was.

I spent much of the weekend manning the phone, keeping my aunt insulated from the pathological bores and the nosy. One man phoned from his home Miami Beach in Florida - neither a relative nor a particularly close friend - and told me simply that he had to phone to tell us how much my grandmother would be missed. Without her, he said, the community life of Roscrea would be much much poorer, and traditional music would never have gained a niche.

The tributes of others reaffirmed the cruelty of the stroke in wiping out such an extraordinary woman. But more than that, they reassured us that out of 88 exceptional years, 9 horrific months were nothing more than a blip. And I felt I got my Nana back.

Driving (part II)

So I passed my driving test on Friday. Then I proceeded to spend the next 3 days driving.

First, I drove to Roscrea, for the guaranteed gratification of sharing my news with my aunt. This is a prodigal daughter situation: like most adults in the developed world, my brother and sister have been qualified drivers since their early 20s and nobody has ever found this fact remarkable. Since it's taken me 32 years to get around to the feat, I am lauded like a Nobel prize winner. Honest to god, my aunt burst into tears when she saw my little car without the L plates. She barely batted an eyelid when I was conferred with my first class Masters degree.

From Roscrea I drove to Cork on Saturday, and spent Saturday and Sunday driving driving driving.

It was something of a rite of passage, my weekend on the road, albeit a well belated one. I am so used to arriving in Cork by train, rushing through the rain to the bus stop, losing shreds of time throughout my weekend to half hours waiting for various types of transport or for my lift to arrive; newspapers and bags of crisps consumed in waiting rooms or on low walls in the countryside; desultory shops mooched around. Now I am my own chauffeur, and I can pack my weekend with as many visits and trips as I choose, limited only by my absence of a sense of direction, and exhaustion at night driving. Over and again I would pat the dashboard of my little car, congratulating us both on our remarkable achievement. After decades of motor disempowerment, I had joined the ranks of the true citizens of this country: the drivers.

When the dizzying exhileration passes, I'll have to weigh this situation rationally. Driving's not cheap, and it's only getting dearer in the coming budget. I have also put in 32 years being a smug eco-git, considering myself better than my colleagues because - by force - I took the train to work. The text I got from my boss when I announced my news said it all: "the real test is if you keep taking the train to work". In such a long time as a non-driver, I learned to navigate Ireland by cadging lifts and negotiating public transport. It was slow, frustrating, and even infantilising (I always felt somehow childishly dependent because I couldn't drive myself places) - and yet I have always had this deep belief that we must move beyond dependence on cars. I was proud of not needing a car.
Now that there's an alternative, we'll see how serious I was about that. There is a difference after all between not needing something, and simply not having it. So now I have a car, what do I do with it? I was allowed a one weekend binge, now I have to find out how to be a responsible driver.

Housework: Quitting facebook links

This is just to say I won't be linking this blog to my facebook account any more. So if you were coming here via there, or more likely just reading my little outbursts in my facebook notes, I'd thank you to come here from time to time instead: www.stillnotdriving.blogspot.com
It's an inane name for a blog, and besides no longer strictly relevant, but there you go. You can subscribe to an RSS feed, or just wander round from time to time to say hello.

All things considered, I think it's for the best. Do keep reading though, if you did before.

Stories about Nana

Would you believe I don't have a single digital photo of her? It's high time I added photos to this blog, and I should certainly add one of Nana, in the fullness of health - but it'll be another little while.

My aunt, Nana's daughter, has outlined the details of the funeral that's inevitably coming. There will be no prayers of the faithful, no bringing up junk that used to belong to the deceased, and most of all no standing up on the altar and saying nice things about her. In this, Nana and Aunty Anne (let's call her) are in complete agreement: both veterans of midlands funerals, they have had time to decide and discuss what their ideal situation is. And it involves a minimum of memorialising: the priest needs to get home for his dinner.

When my aunt told me this, I smiled, which is what I do when I disagree completely with something that I know has nothing to do with me. I want so much to memorialise Nana. Happily, I have the whole internet to myself, and can do what I like here.

There's a single thread that runs most compellingly through my 32 years of memories of my grandmother: her community activism. When I was little, spending the summer in Roscrea, she would bundle my sister and I into her car after tea and set us up selling sweets in the Muintir na Tire hall while the Feis or the bingo or whatever it was went on. She was chairperson of the local Muintir na Tire committee until she retired about 15 years ago. Retirement allowed her to throw herself into fundraising for the Roscrea sports and leisure centre (she ran a second hand clothes sale in the music hall twice weekly for about 8 years), and looking after the old folks in the nursing home across the road. The wife of a die-hard Fianna Fail man, she considered herself above politics, but she was a powerful actor in the community, knew what she believed was important, and had a skill for seeing to it that funding found its way to these priorities. Charming and gregarious, teetotal but perfectly comfortable in male company, I saw her convince many a power-broker to do her bidding: a consummate product and manipulator of parish pump politics.

Professionally, I'm now a follower of civil society, participatory democracy, active citizenship. If we weren't separated by a generation gap that amounts to a cultural divide, and now the insuperable barrier of her stroke, there would be robust rows to be had with the woman about what she prioritised, how and why. I think she probably had those rows with my mother - also the type who sat on every committee going. I am not so concerned about the inherent conservatism, even bigotry, of my Nana's views: I'm just bowled over by her commitment to play a role in the world she inhabited throughout her life.

When I was in 6th class, I was elected to be the chairperson of our departing-from-primary-school class committee. It's still one of the moments in my life that gives me the greatest flush of pride (I should point out I didn't canvas or anything: the poll was organised without adult support, with no primaries or speeches). But I remember going down to Roscrea that Christmas, and Mum telling our family there. Nana was even prouder than I was. She said I was taking after her.

I hope I can.

Nana

Seriously, if this being linked to Facebook is boring you, please tell me. Apparently you can remove me from your newsfeed, but I haven't worked out how. And I don't want to be mass de-newsfeeded.

My Nana is disappearing in slow motion. Week on week, it's easy to doubt one's perceptions that there's any real deterioration: when people ask how she is, we all shrug and say "ah you know, no change". But there is a change.

Days after she had her stroke, nearly a year ago now, I visited her in the ICU with my brother, my sister and my aunt. She was spaced out and plugged into various tubes and machines, but she was unmistakably herself. Her face drooped on the right hand side in that characteristic strokey way, but she smiled, she grasped our hands willingly, and responded to us with recognition in her eyes. We took this as the baseline from which she would recover. Instead, she's receded ever further away from that point.

There's a story about Nana's gradual devastation, my experience of the last 10 months in which I've watched tiny changes erode imperceptibly at her presence; this story is gentle and horrible, and shocking when you reduce it to a single sentence: A severe stroke left us uncertain whether Nana would speak again, 10 months later she is drooped and silent in a chair in a nursing home, barely able to open her eyes, and completely incapable of any speech or movement.

There is also another story, about my family's unexceptional experience at the hands of care services in this state, both public and private. I don't know if I want to engage in Joe Duffy-ish bile against the health service. I don't for a second think that if we lived in Sweden, Nana would be back to her old self, driving her friends to cards every other night and muscling to the front at funeral processions. The stroke that hit Nana before Christmas last year wiped out a lot of her cranial functions. But I feel that as a family, we - most especially my aunt, Nana's primary carer - have been treated with indifference and disdain. And really, is it necessary to make such a traumatic situation even more undignified, even more insecure?

One of the things I find most difficult is the way this slow process of indignity and dependency strips away the extraordinary true memory of my Nana's 87 healthy years. I'm blogging about her for the first time, as a ruined thing; yet when I google her name it turns up about 3 valid pages of references to her in the local press. My Nana is my inspiration. And it's nobody's fault that now she's been reduced to somebody that she herself, were she in full possession of her faculties, would pity. What point is there in blame? It's all just epically, humanly cruel and tragic.

I wonder if it's wrong to blog about such an outstanding woman in such a negative way. Does it further strip away her dignity? I will redress it soon, with a post that presents her in a way she might recognise. The story doesn't begin or end with a ruined woman slumped in a chair.

Autumn in Dublin

At a time of great wailing and gnashing of teeth, not to mention finger-pointing and blame mongering, I just want to say that I'm having a great time. Dublin in the Autumn is bleeding deadly. I did a quick tally of stuff I've caught in the last month (during which I was away for 10 days), and this is what I came up with:

Dirty Projectors in Whelans
Edvard Munch exhibition in the National Gallery
Paki Smith exhibition in the Douglas Hyde Gallery
Pixies in the Olympia
The Crumb Trail in Project Arts Centre
Gas in the Ark
The Blue Dragon in the Belvedere Theatre
Radio Muezzin in the Sam Beckett Theatre
Project Brand New, in Project
A Woman in Progress, in Project
Smyth/ Marshall/ Sanders in the National Concert Hall

I admit I'm a bit lighter of pocket: not many of these things were free. And there was a theatre festival on, so it's a natural time to be a little more culturally proactive. But there were easily as many things on that I wanted to see and didn't get to. Most of these outings led on to parties or carousing with random collections of people I don't often see (everybody has babies now).

I've dug out my winter coat, located the fog lights on my car (I started driving in the Spring, and hadn't needed them until now). The streets smell of impending bonfires, hoarded pallets and tyres, chipper chips in brown paper. Summer's long gone. But I'm coping admirably, and I'm coping because right now, Dublin is just so much fun.

Thanks

Thanks so much to Bryan for the lovely plug. It's far too kind, and wholly undeserved. But massively appreciated.
I'll do some housekeeping on this blog tomorrow, and also a proper update. I may also stop linking this to facebook - unless you tell me not to - as I hope to update more regularly. I don't want to find myself spamming nice people.

That's all. Night now.

Wordless

In the last two months, I've travelled to three post-conflict countries. It sounds cold and meaningless, "post-conflict". What I mean is three countries that are known in Ireland (if they're known at all) as shorthand for horrific violence and brutality. Rwanda, Burundi and Sierra Leone. Countries where, in the very recent past, reports were of ordinary people hacked to death with machetes, women systematically and repeatedly raped and gang raped, children abducted and drugged to serve as soldiers, to commit the same acts of unthinkable brutality. There is something mythical about the horrors that are recorded: of individuals forced to identify their own family members, their own partners for slaughter, or else be slaughtered themselves. Places I read about less than ten years ago as the most medieval versions of hell, an ecstasy of suffering.

You'd never know to visit them. I had such a lovely time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone: they are so beautiful, people so welcoming; it was so hard to imagine what I had read about in books. I see so little, I understand so little.

I spoke to a colleague about this, she said the same was true in Somalia. "The thing is, you look around, and everything seems normal. People are in the market, they're laughing, they're arguing about the price of oranges, and you think it's normal. And you have to keep reminding yourself that nothing is normal at all."

In Sierra Leone and Rwanda, I met with so many people, and I tried not to stare at their visible scars. I am a lousy reporter, because I can't dream of asking people about their experience during the war: I have no right to. After years of doing this work, so that now I'm introduced in meetings as the "expert" (on governance, or democracy, or monitoring and evaluation), I still have no idea how to fathom collective trauma. I chatted to groups of people about their work, about local government and national policies, and it was nice, interesting, relaxed. Momentarily in a meeting, I would indulge my own imagination, wondering what my interlocutors had suffered, who they had lost, what they had seen. Then I would blink. The same dusty office, the same posters, the same conversations as I have everywhere else in Africa.

When I came home, some of my friends asked me if I would blog about my experiences. But there's so much about the countries I have visited that I don't understand, so little that I saw and could report back fairly. I look through the window of a 4x4, and I'm looking through the lens of countless newspaper articles, tv documentaries, prejudices and assumptions. I simply cannot fathom what life is like, even for the middle class colleagues that I visit in some traumatised countries.

One of the reasons I want to take up blogging again is because I like writing about my work travel. But on this occasion, certainly in Sierra Leone, my trips have left me lost for words.

Driving

Some years ago I set up this blog, and I called it Still Not Driving. It was my way of defining myself in shorthand: I may be technically an adult; but I still haven't gotten round to the most basic aspects of adulthood. I don't even know how to drive a car.

I haven't blogged much in the two years since I returned from Honduras, but I've driven a lot. This morning, as I shut my car door and carried in the compost bins I had just emptied, I thought to myself how much I enjoy being a grown up. Although I still don't have a driving license (in Ireland, in spite of recent legislation, this is generally considered a mere technicality) I no longer feel that Still Not Driving effectively captures the essence of who I am or where I'm at. I have an idea that I'd like to start blogging again, so suggestions about how to rebrand this dusty corner of the internet are welcome. And thanks to Seoidin for the encouragement.

Why did I suddenly stop being a non-driver? Well, thank you for asking. It's a good question, because it does catch you up neatly with my last 9 months or so. At Christmas, my Nana had a stroke. It sounds like an insignificant fact: old ladies have strokes all the time, and it seemed pretty decadent to still have a grandparent at my age; although I've always felt it was the least I deserved, not having had parents for a very long time. Nana was 87 at the time (a damn good innings as she herself recognised), but a very young 87, the sort of 87 that still volunteers to help in the old folks home. The stroke was immense, and wiped her out. For the last 5 months now, she's been in a nursing home, wordless and paralysed, peeking out at the world from behind an inaccessible face that only occasionally betrays her extraordinary character.

Travelling by train to the hospital in Mullingar, I felt inept and useless. I had packed two suitcases with all my belongings for Christmas, and I planned to truck around the country as necessary blagging lifts and navigating public transport. I felt like an inadequate family member, a burden on the others, ever the youngest, ever the needy. I wished I had a car.

Skip forward 9 months, and now I have a car. This is one narrative of my transformation from non-driver to driver. It's been great fun, and in spite of one failed test, I'm confident that soon I'll even be a legal driver. All the worry, the sense of ineptitude, has dissipated, and now I discuss roads and manouevres with all the other people who used to bore me. I drive to Roscrea every two weeks, and hang out with my family.

I think of this as the story of how I responded to my Nana's sickness. But in another way, it's the story of how I finally grew up.