I started driving cancer patients to hospital the year after my wife died. That sounds noble when I say it now, but it wasn’t noble at the time. It was survival. The house in Marino had gone too quiet. I could hear the fridge click on from two rooms away. I could hear the neighbour’s bin lid in the wind. I could hear my own thoughts, which were not doing me any favours.
A friend told me about a volunteer driving rota. “You have the car, Tom,” he said. “And you’re good with people.” I wasn’t sure about the second part, but I did have the car. So every Wednesday morning I drove from Marino across Dublin, collecting people who needed lifts to appointments at places like St James’s Hospital and the Mater. Some wanted to talk the whole way. Some sat silently with a scarf pulled up to their chin. Some apologised for being tired, as if tiredness was bad manners.
The first person who properly stayed with me was a man called Séamus from Ringsend. He was seventy-two, a retired docker, small and wiry, with hands like old rope. Every Wednesday at 8.10, he would be standing outside his flat in a brown cap, even in the rain, holding a Lidl bag with a bottle of water, a banana, and the same paperback western he never seemed to finish.
“Morning, chauffeur,” he’d say, climbing in carefully.
“Morning, your lordship,” I’d say back.
He had radiotherapy in St James’s for six weeks. The drive took us past the Grand Canal, through traffic that never moved as fast as anyone hoped, and he gave commentary on every street as if he had built it himself. He told me where there used to be dance halls, which pubs watered the Guinness, and which corners were best avoided after closing time in the seventies. When we passed the Aviva, he shook his head every single week and said, “Still looks like a fancy bread bin.”
I liked him because he didn’t ask me much at first. He let me be the driver, nothing more. But on the fourth Wednesday, we were stuck near Harold’s Cross, rain sliding down the windscreen, when he said, “You’re a widower, are you?”
I nearly missed the lights changing.
“I am,” I said.
“How long?”
“Fourteen months.”
He nodded, looking straight ahead. “My Joan is gone nine years. First two years I kept buying the biscuits she liked. Didn’t even eat them. Just liked seeing them in the press.”
I laughed, but it came out wrong. I had done the same with lemon yoghurts. My wife, Eileen, ate one every night. I kept buying them for months, lining them up in the fridge until they expired, then throwing them out like I was burying something small.
After that, the car changed. It stopped being a lift and became a kind of room. Séamus told me about Joan, about their daughter in Galway, about being afraid at night though he wouldn’t admit it to the nurses. I told him about Eileen, about how I still turned to speak to her in the supermarket, about how grief made ordinary places feel staged and false. We never made it sentimental. He wouldn’t have allowed that. If things got too heavy, he’d point at a cyclist and say, “There’s a lad with no fear of God.”
On his final Wednesday, I pulled up outside his building and he wasn’t there. That had never happened. I rang the bell. No answer. I rang his mobile. Nothing. I sat in the car with the wipers ticking and felt a dread I knew too well.
After ten minutes
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