Tom Kirwan

July 2019

The neurologist moves his chair to the left, adjusts the height so that his eyes are level and 3ft away from mine (as recommended) and says

“I’m afraid to say that you have motor neurone disease.”

I look over his left shoulder to see Alice holding back tears. I think of Spike Milligan’s intended grave stone “I told you I was ill.”

November 2019

In the midst of election news, Alice delivers me to the monastery in my wheelchair and I am left looking at a familiar wall.¹

I think of Rick in a favourite film “of all the walls in all the world…”²

and whilst I should be considering “nothing”, the political news that we were listening to in the car cannot but arise,

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”³

 The anxieties provoked by the radio news and the fears arising from the diagnosis mingle and coalesce as I direct my thoughts within:

“What rough beast is this, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”³

Notes

1. Bodhidharma is reputed to have brought Zen Buddhism to China. In Rules for Meditation in Morning Service are the words “…although Bodhidharma transmitted the Buddha Mind, we still hear the echoes of his nine years facing a wall.” This references the Zen practice of meditating while facing a wall.
2. A rephrasing of a famous line from ‘Casablanca’.
3. W.B Yeats published a seven poem sequence in a book called The Tower in 1928. Many of the poems in the sequence had been published in earlier works. The sequence was called Meditations in Time of Civil War. The full poem can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

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