Michael Murphy on his diagnosis: 'Death has taken up residence in my blood'

In his taboo-breaking book At Five In The Afternoon, Michael Murphy wrote with brutal honesty about prostate cancer. Recently diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia he talks to Noel Baker from his new home in Wexford with the same trademark openness

Michael Murphy: "I think there’s a sort of a wisdom that has gathered over the years, to be more accepting of mortality and what I’m facing at my age". Photograph: Patrick Browne

In a lifetime of revelations, many of them his own, another arrived unannounced for Michael Murphy recently — he might be old.

The much-loved former newsreader and TV producer says it came not long after he and his husband, Terry, a founding member of the Rutland Centre, had relocated to rural Co Wexford from Dublin.

“There was a knock on the door shortly after we arrived,” he begins, “and it was a neighbour, Larry, who had arrived with two invitations for us to the annual senior citizen’s dinner in the village hall. It was the first time that someone had placed us in the elderly category.”

He gives a sandpaper chuckle: “By accepting his kindly invitation, we’d be acknowledging that the external designation was correct. On the other hand, as newly arrived blow-ins, we were generously being welcomed to the area, so it would be important to attend. We arrived in our natty urban attire of suit and tie to be confronted by a field of pullovers. Yet our new community treated us with such courtesy and convivial warmth that immediately we felt at home.”

Since Michael is now in his late 70s, getting that far along in life before being deemed officially old is quite a feat, but the anecdote also speaks to the seemingly protective attitude many of his new neighbours have towards him. 

Maybe this is because so many of us feel that we know him, at least in some oblique way, given his almost daily presence in our lives for so many years on news broadcasts; those smooth, even tones, hitting just the right notes whether the story was of a lotto win or a sectarian atrocity, the twinkle in the eye as he bade us good evening. 

Through his work as a psychoanalyst, maybe he knows us, or at least some of us, the commonality of experiences we go through — something extended even further through his recent slot analysing dreams on RTÉ’s Today Show. 

But if getting older is a privilege, the advancing years can also bring new challenges.

For Michael, this was his recent diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. As he recalls in the words of the consultant in the accompanying piece penned for this newspaper: ‘You have 10 years. We’ve entered a period of watchful waiting.’

“The bottom line is that death has taken up residence in my blood, if you want to put it that way,” Michael says. 

Typically optimistic, he points out that if he gets another decade of life, he will exceed the average life expectancy for Irish men. 

Nor is it his first brush with mortality: Back in 2007 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, of which he wrote in his 2009 book At Five In The Afternoon.

But this time, he says,”it’s very much different”.

“It was a complete shock,” he says of the prostate cancer, which led to a prostatectomy, “and I didn’t know whether I was going to survive because there was this ticking bomb inside.”

He later had two bouts of skin cancer, but seems sanguine regarding the latest diagnosis.

“I think there’s a sort of a wisdom that has gathered over the years, to be more accepting of mortality and what I’m facing at my age,” he says. 

“So I think that’s what it is. It’s acceptance. It doesn’t mean that life stopped two years ago. We sold our apartment in Dublin and bought a house here in Wexford, a beautiful house. It’s in deepest farming country, and for somebody to do that at 75 years of age shows hope in life. Life continues on, and it doesn’t mean that you start to shut down and begin a leave-taking.”

IN DUE SEASON

Michael Murphy: "When you tell a report about a terrible tragedy followed by somebody winning the lotto, you have to know how to change gear". Photograph: Patrick Browne

Now he has noticed the importance of the seasons and of community. 

Michael agrees that maybe all those years of being beamed into our living rooms, at a time when we weren’t completely distracted by our smartphones, means that many people feel like they have a connection with him already.

“They do,” he says matter-of-factly. “I remember standing in the queue at the bank to change the address on our account, and a pleasant woman immediately ahead turned around and addressed me. ‘You’re Michael Murphy, and I’m Felicity’ she said. ‘I know where you live. Do you play cards? We play twice a week at a house beside you... And does your husband play? You’d both be welcome to join us…’ So we feel very protected indeed by the community.

“Television is like an x-ray,” he continues, remarking that turning down the sound on people — particularly politicians — when they’re on the telly can give you a sense of who they really are, “that extra thing that the camera does”. 

He believes that his parallel career as a psychoanalyst helped him in his delivery of the news, as did his own past in religious life.

“I was in the Dominicans for a while, that’s where I actually began, the Order of Preachers” — and he’s laughing again — “so I preached the good news in another area.”

He won an educational scholarship to France to study psychoanalysis and then “got waylaid” in RTÉ, where he was in the same intake group as Pat Kenny. It was a good fit.

“Psychoanalytic skills certainly would inform the way I would have read the news,” he says. 

“In other words, when you tell a report about a terrible tragedy followed by somebody winning the lotto, you have to know how to change gear. So that empathic skill, certainly the skill of a psychoanalyst dealing with people informs the way you present. In order to sound intelligent, you have to pronounce words correctly, you have to use the educated speech of Irish people. I’m the only newscaster to have received an award from the National Association for the Deaf because I was so easy to lip-read. Certainly, the psychoanalysis would have helped and informed that.”

ONLY IN DREAMS

He is still on the national broadcaster, helping to decipher people’s dreams on the Today Show.

“They form part of any psychoanalytic session, and they give a good indication of what’s going on in the unconscious,” he says of what goes through our heads as we sleep. 

He admits that it’s harder to employ the terminologies of his Freudian or Jungian toolbox when he’s discussing people’s dreams on television sent in on email, but he is clearly delighted when people come back to him to say that his analysis nailed it. 

As to what those dreams are about, they can be linked to traumas but they can also be spectral, something noticed out of the corner of the eye during the day, but important for that person’s survival going forward.

“Dreams prepare people for the following day or the following month or the following year,” he says.

But what does he dream about?

“I can often dream about the newsroom,” he replies. “Normally that would happen 24 hours before there might be a message from the [RTÉ Today Show] studio in Cork. It’s almost a prefiguring, sometimes a notification of a time change.

“I had a brother [Kieran, aged 42] who died from cancer. And a dream I do remember was — it was just a very simple dream — the outlet of the shower being blocked with hair so that the water began to overflow. The filtering wasn’t working. So my brother had, before I knew about it, cancer of the kidneys. I’m a sharp dreamer, let’s say, they’re prescient.”

At this point, I tell Michael that I don’t want the next question to sound too hifalutin, before then proceeding to plonk myself down on the couch in pseud’s corner. So: Does he see his life as some sort of tale of modern Ireland, given his upbringing in Castlebar, the sexual abuse he suffered there as a child and referred to in his accompanying piece, through to his time in the religious, and then RTÉ, and securing a civil partnership and marriage through the generosity of fellow-citizens. 

I even employ the phrase “the river of Ireland’, to which he laughs, “there are beginning to be a few holes in the canoe!” 

Michael Murphy with his husband Terry O'Sullivan in Co. Wexford. Photograph: Patrick Browne

More seriously, as he writes of the many discussions he and Terry have had, “since neither of us would want to live without the other or could live without support, we also considered other options.”

Just last November MPs in Britain voted in favour of a bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales. He believes the issue should be discussed at a national level, as it has been in other countries.

“Terry has post-polio fatigue syndrome, which means that the polio gets progressively worse,” he says. 

“When I knew Terry first, we walked everywhere. We climbed mountains in Spain, all of that. So he is now mostly confined to a wheelchair. It doesn’t stop him holding onto a shopping trolley in the centre aisle of Lidl. In the recent census, for the first time I put down my relationship as carer. These changes are happening all the time. It’s important to discuss them and what we would like to do, how we would like our lives to continue until it’s no longer possible. As a psychoanalyst, I believe everything is a valid option.

“Assisted dying can be a logical step, and it should certainly be considered and discussed and, if necessary, made legal here. It happens anyway.”

There are other clouds on the horizon. Back in 2019, Michael said that he believed the passing of the referendum on same sex marriage showed how the country had “grown” into an inclusive republic. 

However, there are two great passions in life: Hatred, and ignorance. It’s the latter that is almost “celebrated at the moment”, he adds, “and it’s sensible to be watchful”.

But in the main, he says, “life continues on”, and so do his plans. 

With the consultant telling him he has ten years left, he plans to start a doctorate in 2025, to add to his three Masters. 

He is setting up a podcast on dreams and his poetry. 

He sees the move to Wexford as a homecoming, his ancestors having moved away from the county back in 1798 – but he is also looking to the future, such as the possibility that he and Terry may eventually move to warmer climes in Spain. 

Keep dreaming, in other words.

DIAGNOSIS, IN HIS OWN WORDS...

Michael Murphy: "The bottom line is that death has taken up residence in my blood, if you want to put it that way". Photograph: Patrick Browne

I entered the lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor. The notice said oncology ward.

A tall man in a mask, a woman with a red clipboard, and a youth: the three of them standing in the room. “We won’t be doing the lumbar puncture today – we’ll be doing it tomorrow”. This was at ten-thirty. I rang Terry with the news.

At five-to-one a nurse came in and said they were doing the lumbar puncture now.

“Where?” “Here. Turn on your side and get into the foetal position”.

Other voices behind me questioning whether this was happening.

The nurse said “She’s up there…” I pulled down the pants of my pyjamas.

A male voice said “I’m going to palpate your lower back. You’ll feel a slight sting when I inject the anaesthetic”.

I felt the needle go in, and then there was unbearable pain.

The nurse said, “You can hold onto my hand”.

Terrible pain. Pressure and pain.

A female voice saying “Put it in. More to the right. Take it out. Try it again…” And all the while overwhelming pain which never stopped, a thrusting at my back. The pain.

“We need more aspirate. Do it again. More to the left…” The nurse interrupted, “Will your partner be visiting you today?” What on earth? Through gritted teeth “I don’t know…” Insane from the pain which was unending. Utterly alone with the pain.

“Do you have a dog?” she tried again, perhaps to remind me of love.

“Yes – a chocolate labrador”.

The male voice asked, “What is the dog’s name?” “She’s called Toga” and I began to sob. After ten minutes of this torture, I couldn’t help it anymore.

“What are you feeling? Put it into words” the male voice commanded. As if this were a psychoanalytic session. I couldn’t catch my breath. 

The pain was continuous. After six further sobs I gasped “Helpless”. And then “Pain” almost as an afterthought. 

It was only later that I remembered a ten-year-old child in Castlebar forced up against a granite wall being abused by a man from out of the garage next door in the shrubbery at the end of our garden.

And as suddenly they were gone. I lay on my back and cried and cried, stuffing a fist into my mouth so nobody would hear the sound of my heart breaking behind those silent screams. Desolate. The sentence pronounced was to be for the whole of my life.

A woman, blonde hair, fawn cashmere sweater, calling at me from the doorway “I’ve seen your scans. The lymph nodes and your spleen are slightly enlarged. And you’re free to go whenever you like”.

The adjectival sense of having little worth or value, insignificant - is that what slightly means? Who was that woman? She didn’t even know my name.

It continues to feel like contemptuous indifference or disrespect. I suppose shouldn’t have cried. Unmanly.

When Terry arrived, he was horrified at the blood all over the floor. It was as if a brush had been plunged into bright red paint and then whacked everywhere so that the tiny droplets had radiated outwards from the bed. 

He called a cleaner passing by in the corridor who came in and began to mop the floor. I sat up and pulled at the green coverlets all around me soaked in blood. 

I got out and the cleaner said, “It’s you: you dripping…” Big drops of blood splattering the ground seemed to be coming from the wound in my back. 

The cleaner said, “I go up and call the nurse… It was now well into the afternoon, and I hadn’t been fed since I’d arrived the night before. 

A Caesar salad at the Radisson St. Helen’s would be welcome. When we passed the crowded nurse’s station, I indicated the tall, bearded young man to Terry. 

“He’s the executioner” I said: the man who carried the law or judgement into effect, pursued to the end - really to the death. The spontaneous designation surprised both of us.

The three weeks we spent waiting for the results of the hospital tests were terrorizing. We didn’t sleep very well. 

At intervals Terry and I talked through various scenarios which would depend on the length of time we were allotted.

They ranged from a permanent move to live near our friend Anna in the heat of southern Spain, to the possibility of sheltered housing close to Dublin hospitals. 

Since neither of us would want to live without the other or could live without support, we also considered other options. These steps in our thinking were progressive and discrete.

By way of consolation, I immersed myself daily in the demanding vocal music of Bach’s solo cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen: I will gladly carry the cross-staff, moving from the 1950 Dietrich Fisher Dieskau recording, towards the 2019 video of the mellifluous bass-baritone Matthias Winckhler singing with the Netherlands Bach Society. 

The cantata evoked the religious certainties of my youth, offering a familiar purpose for suffering and a navigational direction which once could take me home to a safe harbour.

The Consultant was encouraging. “Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is a slow- growing blood and bone-marrow cancer” he explained. 

“I don’t want to intervene now: at this point there’s no need for chemotherapy. Do the bloods in six months and come back and see me this time next year”. 

He answered the question before it was asked: “You have ten years” he said. “We’ve entered a period of watchful waiting”.

“What about the headaches and the terrible tiredness?” “You’re in your mid-seventies…” he reminded me.

In effect he was telling me to enjoy my life as much as possible, even though death has taken up residence in my blood. 

Our relief at the alleviation of the anxiety burden was followed by a voracious hunger, and we tucked into bacon and sausages, fried eggs and white pudding, beans and mushrooms, coffee and toast in the hospital’s central atrium.