‘The only hope our son has now is prayer’

A PAIR of brown eyes stare, unseeing, at the hospital ceiling. A father leans over his brain-dead son and points to a graze on his chin.

“I nicked him there this evening when I was shaving him,” he says to his wife.

He kisses his son softly on the cheek and apologises for the clumsy cut. “Sorry Denis, I didn’t mean to cut you. I love you very much.”

The father is John Franklin, the shaving of his son an almost nightly ritual since Denis was left for dead in the early hours of a Sunday morning, a year ago this month.

The best of Denis Franklin’s then 20-year-old life was beaten out of him by a group of youths in Cork city centre last February 17. Victim of a seemingly random attack, he was jumped and kicked to a pulp as he made his way home from a 21st birthday celebration.

Originally from Pallasgreen, Co Limerick, he had moved to Cork to study chemistry at Cork Institute of Technology and was living in Bishopstown. It was the first time he had lived away from home.

Sitting by his bed in Limerick Regional Hospital at the weekend, his mother Josephine said he was going to spend that fateful weekend in Limerick, but opted instead to stay on for the party in Cork.

“The next thing I knew there was a policewoman at my door at 3am Sunday morning asking me if I had a son in Cork called Denis. When I said I had, she said he had been assaulted and that he was in hospital in Cork.”

Josephine immediately phoned her eldest son Michael, 31, who lives in Midleton, Co Cork, and he went straight to the hospital. She was brought to Denis’s bedside by relations. John Franklin a breeder of greyhounds, was in Britain, on business, eating breakfast in Birmingham, when he got a call from his youngest son.

“Thomas (aged 11 at the time) rang me at 8am and told me Denis had been attacked. I wasn’t too alarmed at first. But then he said ‘Mammy’s gone to Cork’, and I got worried, so I rang my brother Peter, a farmer in Pallasgreen. He said ‘You have to come home, he’s critical’.

“That flight home was the worst few hours of my life. I couldn’t get a flight straight to Cork so I flew into Shannon and my brother drove me to Cork. I was in some state when I saw him.”

When he did see Denis, he was in intensive care in Cork University Hospital, on a respirator and plugged full of tubes.

“The doctor told us he had never seen anyone suffer as much as Denis had suffered and still be alive. He went through so much after they beat him up and left him collapsed on the pavement. And they, his attackers, hopped into taxis and Denis was left here, none of them rang an ambulance.”

Denis was found by gardaí, in a pool of blood, and rushed to CUH, the casualty of a fight among youths that had broken out on South Main Street, continued down Kift’s Lane and onto Grand Parade.

He spent two weeks in intensive care and remained in CUH until September, his parents doing a 140-mile round trip most days to be with him. Michael and his 25-year-old sister Elaine, who also lives in Cork, kept up the vigil. John, 18, Martin, 17, and Thomas made regular trips. When he was able to breathe on his own, he was transferred to Limerick Regional, closer to home.

The tragedy has destroyed his own life and turned his family’s upside down. John and Josephine, who should be enjoying retirement, spend every evening with their son.

“It’s very hard to come in and look at him like this every night. Our life is centred on his bedside now and maybe forever and that is a tough life. The consultant told us he could live like this for another 30 years. I don’t want to see him die,” John says. “Nobody could understand what it does to you to see your child like this unless it happens to your family. Even when you lie in bed at night, you can’t forget what he looks like in his hospital bed. Sometimes he opens his eyes and it’s so natural looking that you’d think he’s ready to come home with you.”

John used to go to the greyhound track every night before Denis was attacked, but he hasn’t gone since. It is obvious, from the way he speaks of Denis, that he was hugely proud of him. He loved his tall son, a great source of pride that he, a small man, could have produced such great height.

“He’s 6’2”, it was unreal, the size of him coming in the door. And he was a fine hurler. You’d have to admire him coming out onto the hurling field. He was a real sportsman and when he was marking a small chap, he’d never go too hard on him.

“After the attack, Br Philip Ryan, Denis’s trainer when he was involved with the Limerick minors under-age, rang us and said ‘he was a gentle giant’, and that’s what he was.”

Now, when John spots the empty football boots lying around at home, he cries inside. “One time I said ‘I’ll never see him walking up that path again’ and that’s heartbreaking. But please God I will.”

Josephine misses him coming home at the weekends. She used to bring Denis fishing to Lough Gur when he was growing up. And he used to fish the nearby Mulcair River.

“He’d stand for five hours on a stone in the Mulcair, at dusk he’d fish with the white moth. During the summer, he’d go up to Lough Derg from early in the morning ‘til late in the evening. Then his mother would pick him up. He was as happy as Larry doing that.”

A photograph of Denis is pinned on the wall at the end of his hospital bed. He is a handsome young man, sallow-skinned, strong-jawed with dark hair and eyes. The photo was taken shortly before the attack, a passport photo in preparation for going on a student visa to New York for the summer with friends. His visa interview should have taken place two days after the attack.

His parents pass around other photographs. “There he is, in the background at his nephew’s christening, he stands out, he’s so tall,” they say. Family photographs, smiling faces, Denis’s brothers and sister have a lot to cope with now. Thomas, his father says, would cry on his brother as he lay in his hospital bed, from time to time. The baby of the family has a picture of Denis over his own bed at home.

“It makes me lonesome when I go into Thomas’s room and I see that photo of Denis. It’s very hard,” John says. He worries about his younger sons and when the time comes for them to go to college.

“I wouldn’t want them to go near a city centre ever. There’s evil in cities.”

Martin, a fifth year student at the Abbey in, Co Tipperary, now occupies his brother’s bedroom. They all have their own way of dealing with the tragedy and Josephine says they are all stressed. Denis’s 21st birthday on August 25 last was a tough time.

“We were in the hospital and the staff had offered to make a cake, but it didn’t seem right at the time. Denis was very stressed out. So we just prayed for his recovery to St Faustina, apostle of Divine Mercy, whose feast day is also August 25.”

Prayer. The driving force behind the Franklin’s hope for their son’s recovery and what keeps them sane.

It stops John from being bitter about what happened. No one has been charged in connection with the attack, but John has been offered the names and addresses of his son’s attackers but he doesn’t want to know.

Belief. It keeps them going when doctors have given up. Their son has had pneumonia, a clot, haemorrhaging from his stomach, pressure sores. Diagrams on the wall of his third-floor hospital room, where permission must be obtained from the nurse in charge before entering, show how to place Denis on his back or on his side. He is fed through the stomach from a drip filled with multi-vitamin drink Jevity. Morphine fed at intervals allows his distorted body to cope and sends him to sleep. You know he is awake when he opens his eyes and sometimes he makes small sounds and seems to smile. He is being fitted for a wheelchair.

But only a miracle will bring him back to life. John and Josephine know this. And so they pray the rosary every night over their son’s limp body. They ask others to pray the prayer to The Lady of All Nations so that some day they’ll get their boy back.

Parish priests have blessed him, parishioners have prayed for him, strangers have written letters and sent prayers of support to him. His room is full of holy pictures and mass cards. There isn’t a night that Josephine and John don’t cry and pray over their son’s hospital bed: “It brings it home to you, what Our Lady must have suffered when her son was crucified and abandoned, left to die. The only hope our son has now is prayer. I’m banking on it and with the help of God, Denis will walk out of here. As long as he’s alive, there’s hope and we’re glad that he’s still with us.”

A father’s prayer. That some day his son will get up and walk again.