Letter to the Editor: Self-isolation a luxury that will spare the pain of death
On Sunday, March 22 — Mother’s Day, I took a walk up to Clonminch Cemetery in Tullamore to visit my mother’s grave.
Not a regular habit of mine, I must add, as I don’t even participate in the annual Cemetery Sunday service.
However, this time, for some reason or other, I felt compelled to visit her grave and the grave of my extended family members.
I’m sort of putting the visit down to the current Covid-19 challenges and the potential life-threatening impacts this pandemic can have on families if we don’t follow the simple guidelines issued by the health professionals which are broadcast daily and printed in newspapers.
While I was reading the names on the headstones I was starkly reminded of a story my father told us as children.
He often told us of the time he had to carry his sister Angela home from Birmingham in his arms as her body was emaciated from the ravages of the virus of their time — tuberculosis — more commonly known at that time as ‘consumption’.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that Ireland’s greatest public health problem in the first half of the 20th century was, by all accounts, tuberculosis.
The 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s was a terrible time for families in Ireland as thousands succumbed to TB.
From 1939 until the year I was born, 1949, more than 43,000 deaths attributed to tuberculosis were recorded. Four of my aunts and one uncle died of TB in No 2 Chapel Street, Tullamore.
They were: Bridget Roche, died April 17, 1927, aged 22 years; Alice Roche, died April 23, 1930, aged 18 years; Bernard Roche, died January 24, 1934, aged 18 years; Joan Roche, died July 19, 1934, aged 14 years, and Angela Roche, died March 11, 1940, aged 21 years. May they rest in peace.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) tells us that TB has not gone away.
There were more than 10m new cases of TB diagnosed around the world in 2017.
According to the WHO, TB remains one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. I wonder if my aunts and uncle had had the luxury of ‘self-isolation’, as we do today, would they have died?
Today we are asked to follow a few simple rules in order to minimise the impact of the coronavirus.
So please follow instructions and hopefully you and your loved ones will be spared the terrible pain of losing someone close as a result of this terrible pandemic.
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