Joyce Fegan: Keelin Shanley gifted us a much-needed dose of reality

To journalists, Keelin Shanley was a colleague with integrity who generously ensured their work appeared on her Morning Edition programme for RTÉ.

Every now and then a story comes along that wakes us from our taken-for-granted autopilot.

Maybe you knew of her, maybe you didn't, but whether you did or not doesn't really matter. What matters is her story, and the ordinariness of the life she was living - until she wasn't.

Her life was familiar.

To journalists, Keelin Shanley was a colleague with integrity who generously ensured their work appeared on her Morning Edition programme for RTÉ.

For current affairs junkies, she was a Prime Time host and then a Six One anchor.

But she was also a daughter, a homeowner, a friend, a sister, a reader, an aunt, an employee, a wife and a mother. And she too, like many of us, had her favourite spot in Ireland - Achill Island.

What's yours?

This week, a documentary about her death from cancer and her life, 'Keelin Shanley: Faraway, Still Close' aired on RTÉ. Watching it, felt like eavesdropping on the intimate, ordinary and extremely recognisable moments in a person's life.

In a world where we can share everything on social media, this portrayal of a life left Instagram in a ha'penny place.

Audio recordings from private conversations between Keelin and her husband Conor Ferguson played out to scenes around their home of a busy kitchen island, packed bookshelves and a photo of her on a New York subway platform.

These conversations were occurring right at the end of her days. The truth serum of her impending death made them powerfully poignant and viscerally honest. These were the kinds of intimate conversations you might only have with your partner from under the safe privacy of your shared duvet in the dead of the night. The hushed tones and sparse words actually say a lot and mean even more.

Conor said how her believing in him had been instrumental to his life. It wasn't a platitude. It was a carefully considered sharing to insure she knew exactly what she had done for him, before she passed.

There was the reminiscing of their time in New York together and "that blue skirt" she wore all summer. There was the memory of how they first met in the eclectic scene that was Grafton Street of the 1980s. There was their courtship, Keelin's three years abroad post-college and her return to Ireland upon which she knew exactly what she wanted to do for work and how she went about getting there - she trawled through the TV listings of the RTÉ Guide to find every homegrown show she could apply to. Conor recalls her clarity of mind and certainty of action.

Then there were their babies, first Lucy, next Ben.

"And then just like that Keelin was in love all over again," recalls Conor with a photo of Keelin holding baby number two, Ben, just a few days old. They are the kinds of words you might only tell a sister or a close, close friend, not because they're deeply private, but because they're deeply personal, because they mean too much to share with every Tom, Dick and Harry. But here they are, in this documentary, for all of us to see, for us to recognise in our own lives.

Keelin died right before the pandemic hit, on February 8, 2020. It is Covid-free TV. Now, as we're preoccupied with mask-wearing and safety protocols, in-advance social bookings and the day-to-day of it all, her story reminds us of an ordinary Irish life pre-Covid.

It was an ordinary life.

Keelin died right before the pandemic hit, on February 8, 2020. It is Covid-free TV. Now, as we're preoccupied with mask-wearing and safety protocols, in-advance social bookings and the day-to-day of it all, her story reminds us of an ordinary Irish life pre-Covid.

She might have made groundbreaking documentaries and was paid to hold power to account, but the flesh of this story is its ordinariness.

There are pier walks, talk of home work and uniforms, trips on the Shannon with those big orange buoyancy aids and shared family swims in the Atlantic off Achill - not paltry replacements for foreign holidays but much-wanted trips out west.

Around one in 10 of us will get cancer in Ireland. It's the nation's biggest killer - accounting for 30% of all deaths. Its statistical stranglehold on us makes Keelin's story even more familiar to many.

Nowadays, many people do not die from cancer and while it has brushed off our lives infecting those we love, it has left just as promptly - but never really to be forgotten.

In 2011, Bronnie Ware, an Australian carer who tended to the terminally ill published a book after a blog post she wrote went viral. The post was entitled 'The Top Five Regrets of the Dying', based on her experience and conversations with the people she cared for in their final days. Her 2011 book had the same title.

"I wish I hadn't worked so hard", is one of the five regrets. And it's not really about work, but more about time, people wished they had diverted more hours to their loved ones and less to their jobs.

"This came from every male patient that I nursed," wrote Bronnie, "they missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship.

"All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence," she added.

Another is: "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings". This regret came with bitterness and resentment. And there was also the top regret of: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me".

If these are the common regrets of the dying, chances are good they might also be the closeted regrets of the living too.

For coming up on two years now we've been in "surge capacity" and "flight or fright" as the psychologists say, but then Keelin's story comes along and brings us back to earth and reminds us of pre-pandemic life.

To some her life might have been extra ordinary, but zoom out the lens and you'll see a woman who just wanted to live, who wanted to swim in the sea, to blow out candles on birthday cakes, to talk to her husband and who wanted to retire, read the paper and watch her kids grow up.

If the living share regrets with the dying, chances are also good we share their wishes too.

'Keelin Shanley: Faraway, Still Close' reminds us that our ordinary lives are lives really worth living.