Terry Prone: We search for the right words to describe the anguish at Creeslough but we won't find them

a view of the Applegreen petrol station in Creeslough, Co Donegal where 10 people died in an explosion on Friday. Picture: Joe Dunne 

Twenty-five years ago, the cancer diary was an astonishing arrival on our bookshelves. People’s tales of the Big C and their day-to-day experience of it. 

For so long, cancer was spoken of in whispers, as if out loud acknowledgement of its presence would make it more real, empower it in some way to be more vicious. Or maybe the reason for the silence was simpler. 

Maybe it was shame. Or guilt on the part of smokers. Or even the “it runs in that family” like domestic violence or alcoholism.

Cancer becoming a “normal” illness was contemporaneous with the cancer diary. The early versions were often published posthumously. All alike, those diaries, like Tolstoy’s happy families. All different, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families. Alike in the ritual institutionalising of the sufferer, whose life moved from “a little round of deeds and days” to an imperative calendar of tests and scans, surgeries and chemo.

The patient sucked into the language of the treaters, wandering between consultants’ rooms and X-ray departments with the rubber-aproned experts, the softly closing weighted doors, the warning countdowns before enjoined stillness. The puking and the purging. The hopes and setbacks.

The choices, one worse than the other, between pulling loose hair like an adult version of baby teeth, already frail in its scalp-grasp, or praying and saving, or shaving. Going back to work, then coming back out of work. Being complimented on slimness, then policed by the empathy-inept with advice on not losing too much weight.

The cancer diaries are too often a record of loss of control and diminution. But the most tragic of them illustrates an essential truth: that even a diagnosis where the numbers, whether of stages in the progression of the disease or of PSA scores, hand the sufferer the capacity to go through the atmospheres of dying before death actually happens. The Victorians knew the orderly comfort of “putting your papers in order.”

But it’s more than that. The gradual realisation that what seemed to be manageable may no longer be amenable to the reins of medicine is in itself a cue for a new understanding, for resignation, even, perhaps, for serene surrender to the inevitable.

No warning

Families and friends had no chance to go through those atmospheres of death in Creeslough. People several kilometres away heard the explosion and stood where they were, trying to work out what it might have been, knowing that whatever it was, the consequences were going to be catastrophic.

No warning. No time to sort anything. Just the exigent summons: come quickly, because you might be able to help. Come quickly even if you can’t help. Come quickly because one of your own might be there. Come quickly, no matter what the danger to you. Come quickly, the sirens in the background, the screams up ahead.

Ten red candles candles at St Michael's Church in Creeslough Co Donegal, for the victims. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA

Older people, hearing the guesses about a gas leak, remembered stories of matches lit in order to help find people in dusty darkness. The uninvolved were confused by the apparently coincidental, rather than causative, presence of the petrol station. 

But the involved — those who knew someone belonging to them were due to be in that petrol station or that shop — felt that leaden certainty that may be more helpful than hope, because it is so assured in its deadly prediction.

Within the hour, a magnificent array of early responders was in position, the bright-striped shining vehicles, the impromptu meetings by the side of the road, the instinctive necessary sorting out of chain of command.

The wounded were on their way to hospital while on the ground examination continued of loose but still attached metalwork with its sharpened threat, the walls severed along the choppy neat lines of brickwork. The big diggers coming in, the teams forming, helmeted, booted, big safety gloved hands ready. The comfort of activity, sweat forming under shiny protective jackets. Something to do. Anything. And an urgency to it, a sense that when darkness pulled in around them, it would mark a stage nobody wanted to reach, even if the big bright blaring cold lights were ready to vanquish that darkness.

Then the screaming whistle halted everybody, and the prior instruction sank in: “Shut up. Don’t move. Listen out for anything in the rubble. A cry. A subsidence. Anything that could indicate life.”

They stood in hope, sweat getting cold on their skin, and nothing happened to fulfil the hope. Nothing.

From shocking to tragic

The first deaths moved it from the shocking to the tragic. No names were shared. No identifiers of any kind. Just three dead. That was because parents and partners must be told before they hear or deduce the facts from media. They must be told by members of An Garda Síochána. 

Guards who knew, even on that glory graduation day in Templemore when they threw their hats in the air, that they would have to do this. Provide this face-to-face confirmation. Not one of the most dangerous tasks, but one of the toughest, nonetheless.

The walk up to a front door, rehearsing in their heads the sequence of identification, seeking permission and telling of the deaths. Waiting for the cry, the denial or the silent acceptance. Knowing some of the bereaved would actually express gratitude and sympathy to the two officers ending the family’s happiness. 

A garda brings flowers to the scene. Picture: PA

Gratitude and sympathy for them doing a horrible job. They had to do it in Creeslough this weekend. With more families as the death toll grew.

Three became seven. Then 10. And then came a change. A point where curiosity met the tight-mouthed headshake of certainty: nobody else was missing. Nobody else. Everybody accounted for. The paramedics no longer relevant. The nature of the labour changed at that moment, changed away from search-and-rescue.

Ten souls had been lost. There would be no more.

Now it was a case of moving the inanimate, watching the emergency services withdraw, the thumps on the back to departing colleagues instead of voiced goodbyes. One day earlier, they had been strangers brought together by the siren summons. Now they were bonded, bound by an unprecedented event.

The word was they had co-operated seamlessly no matter what jurisdiction they came from or what service they belonged to. The statements from each service mentioned the others. People reading those statements on social media nodded in approval. They needed to believe the responders exceptional.

In the search for significance, the need for heroism was paramount. Something to sustain, in the midst of a horror made worse by its randomness. Nobody to blame, nobody to punish, but maybe somebody to admire.

Today, Creeslough begins the move to the familiarity of the obsequies. Attending will be family, friends, and those people who know each other to see at the local garage convenience store; folk at the civil-nod level of acquaintanceship.

They will search for the right words. They will not find them.