#Peig sayers gravesite how to
#Peig sayers gravesite tv

#Peig sayers gravesite how to

Understanding and caring for someone through the dying process turned out to be an amazing experience and eased a lot of the fears I carried about how to do it right. If it hadn’t been for the wonderful visiting Hospice Team, myself and my family would have struggled on alone. The GP was keen for him to go to hospital. I knew he wanted to die at home and that it would be a tall order to deliver. So far, the only death I really had to think through was my own Father’s. There’s a right person for every caring role and situation. Then as Peig Sayers knew in her very being, we will each have to die. How each of us will eventually decline and will need support and care to live independently. How we are all temporarily able bodied until an accident, or an illness floors us. How each of us is vulnerable but we don’t know it until it’s too late. If you are still listening to my rant, I can go on and on about care as a “cradle to the grave” concept and care being a fundamental right for every citizen.

This is where we will have to invest for our future or the whole system will collapse. Caring since Coronavirus, is at last being recognised and understood as the real bottom line. Imagine mapping all of the services and agencies, the volunteers and good neighbours, the mothers, fathers, siblings and grandparents all of us who keep the show on the road, day in and day out. Then I’d like to see a big map with all of the service users and all of the needs set out for each county.

Health care workers, hospice carers, cleaners, cooks, childcare workers, home carers, residential home workers, teachers, teaching assistants, personal care assistants, counsellors it would be a huge list… bigger than I can even imagine right now. I’d love to see a big map of Ireland and instead of forestry or agriculture, I’d like to see caring roles and who does them, mapped out for every county. And the lower you go on the scale of job status, the more women are involved and the less they are paid. Women make up 80% of the caring professions. When I’m on my soapbox, I can be heard saying that caring is a completely gendered role in society. In case anyone is still interested, my biggest rant at the moment is about care.

#Peig sayers gravesite tv

Why do people who are zooming on TV show us their ceilings and their nose hairs? Why are shop keepers still wearing plastic visors when we’ve been told they are ineffective? Why do certain men drive like lunatics on the back roads of rural Waterford?įirst world problems I tell myself. Peig was only scratching the surface of a good moan compared to myself at times. I’m going to read her words again, and this time, embroiled in a pandemic, I think I will appreciate her more. As a teenage girl more interested in craic and lads, Peig’s stories went completely over my head. Had I known in advance half, or even one-third, of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn’t have been as gay or as courageous as it was in the beginning of my days.”ĭo you see what I mean? Maybe we are all starting to sound like her. I have experienced much ease and much hardship from the day I was born until this very day. “I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. But the gist of it is, I think I might be starting to sound like her? I have no idea if she is still on the curriculum.

WILL you ever forget Peig Sayers? Peig’s book was the bane of our lives, read “as gaeilge” from cover to cover for our Leaving Cert Irish.