Aisling Rogerson is comfortable in silence. When I ask her about the last weeks of her late husband Manchán Magan’s life, there are long pauses during which she gathers the right words to describe the experience. Tears slide down her cheeks. “Sacred, it was utterly sacred,” she says. “I would not use that word often in my life but the experience has given me permission to use it in a really meaningful way”.
Rogerson is sitting on a sofa in a room above The Fumbally, the cafe and community space she owns in Dublin 8. She is reflecting on the last few profound months of her life. It is two years since her husband, the beloved writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan, was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and nearly two months since he died in her home nearby.
She is aware of the privilege she and both their families had in being able to have him die at home, praising the hospice care team and night nurses. It involved, she is keen to stress, a lot of challenges, “it wasn’t the easier option”, but it was “beautiful and healing”. After another long pause, she describes those days. “Falling asleep beside my soulmate every night, crying our way through the days together, knowing we’re just getting one night closer to saying goodbye. It was the most beautiful thing in the world and what it did for our families – it brought us together in a way that was unimaginable, really.” She adds that being at home “gave everyone [in the families] the chance to be involved”.
Her husband’s final moments transformed her understanding of life. “Of course we are all made of spirit, of course. Look, it’s just gone. And now what’s this? It’s a body, when you witness that, and thousands of people see it every day. You see that final breath, and then the body goes still and silent. It’s just so clear in that moment what we are made of. This is just a vessel. And every expression of this vessel is the soul and the spirit.”
She’s reflecting deeply on what to do with that understanding. She says it makes sense to look back to our ancestors and to the past for spiritual guidance and the wisdom that has been lost. “We have lost the connection to it … but it’s so strong and it’s so powerful that when you see it, you think, ‘Oh, now I just understand life that bit better’. We can easily forget it, or we can set an intention to not forget it and that’s where I am right now.”
We talk about how Magan’s death, funeral and month’s mind resonated deeply with people, leaving space for a different kind of mourning. That mourning, both private and public, involved all kinds of rituals and unexpected elements, including acorns handed out at the church; indigenous elders from Canada; the Dingle Druid, and specially crafted funeral choreography. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s dancing in the church was one of many highlights - the President’s uniformed aide-de-camp was even seen joining in at one point. All of this was intentional. Before he died, Magan told his wife that in his leave-taking, he “wanted to be representative of a different way”.
“I think that Manchán’s greatest gift in his passing was just this permission to everyone to go there,” Rogerson says. “It’s like we’ve been skirting around this for ages. Everyone is looking for something at the moment … religion has failed us. So what do we have? Let’s go to the roots of it all. And it’s nature and it’s spirit, and he just embodied that. He made it accessible to the everyday person. Like I said in the eulogy, he was a straw-bale house-builder, but he wasn’t a hippie … there’s only a certain type of person who could have brought close to four thousand people to the Hill of Uisneach, on that incredible day [his “month’s mind”], with that weather.”
This week, Magan’s book 99 Words for Rain (and One For Sun) was awarded best Irish Published Book at the An Post Irish Book Awards. It is now shortlisted for Book of the Year, which will be decided by a public vote. Given the outpouring of emotion across the country after his death, it’s a firm favourite to take the prize. Rogerson has a large box of handwritten cards and letters she has still to go through, messages from people touched by her loss.
When we meet, she is thinking about the speech she will make when she accepts the award on his behalf at the televised event, and preparing herself for that inescapably public moment.
For the last 11 years, 41-year-old Rogerson enjoyed a private relationship with Magan, who was 55 when he died. They were a deeply loving if somewhat unconventional couple, him living on the 10 acres of land he had rewilded in Co Westmeath, her a Dublin-based European Studies graduate running a thriving food business in Dublin.
“It was a relationship that very much fed us both in its spaciousness, but that spaciousness also created challenges … we were just lucky enough to be people who were able to look at ourselves and learn from any mistakes that we made.”
Their wedding was hastily organised a few weeks before Magan died. She borrowed her wedding outfit, white trousers and shirt, from a friend. “The idea that you’d be getting married and that you’d be dropping him back to the hospital in a wheelchair at 8pm on your wedding night and then walking out of that hospital alone …”
But she smiles remembering the way the hospital room had been decked out by staff, with a ‘just married’ banner on the door and ‘his n hers’ garlands hanging from the hand sanitiser dispenser. A ‘celebration trolley’ featured two packets of Tayto crisps, non alcoholic prosecco, a Gateaux log and assorted minerals. “We had the best craic the two of us in that hour. Miraculously, Manchan was able to take off his brace and we danced to Messy by Lola Young.” She puts the song on her laptop and sways to the music, lost for a moment in the sweet memory.
I thought I was a fixer. But I have been shown in numerous ways in the last few years, not just with Manchán, that I am not in control
— Aisling Rogerson
Since his death, she has spoken powerfully both at his funeral in the church at his former secondary school, Gonzaga, and at the month’s mind at Uisneach. She is a natural communicator, but not someone used to a public role. “My life has been profoundly changed and I’m being catapulted into versions of myself that I’ve been waiting for, that I knew were coming, but I’m being fast-tracked,” is how she describes this development. “I was the invisible partner for 11 years, as a choice. That was the preferred situation.”
Last summer, when it became clear that Magan was dealing with rare and ultimately terminal neuroendocrine cancer, she remembers Googling “Manchan partner” “Manchan wife” to see what the internet had to say about her. She was pleased to discover the internet had no notion that Rogerson was the writer’s significant other. “It was like AI was scrambling for the answer, and it wasn’t there,” she says smiling. “It threw up all these pictures of Manchán with different women.”
Rogerson is no longer an invisible partner, and as his widow, has become a main character in Magan’s story. What has that been like? “I have impostor syndrome in abundance, standing up on a stage collecting an award for him. There is a push and pull thing. Like, I tell myself, stand up there and be proud. And also I’m asking myself: are you ready for that? Do you want that? Who do you want to be? Am I Manchán Magan’s wife? Or am I Aisling Rogerson? And who is Aisling now? All those lovely, big existential questions.”
Inevitably, she says the Aisling Rogerson of six months ago “is a different person to the one sitting here today. And in the tumble-drier with that is all of the grief. My brain, when I wake up in the morning, is a minefield,” she says.
Fortunately, she is getting help with this. “I have two therapists now, not one but two,” she smiles. “One who is more of a spiritual guide and the other, who I’m starting with next week, who will be more nuts and bolts.” She talks again about the moment of Magan’s death and what it taught her. “My intention is super clear,” she says, before correcting herself. “It’s not actually super clear. I take that back. It’s so murky and unclear.” She is laughing again now. “It’s unclear, but it was so clear in that moment, let’s just put it that way. That’s why I have a spiritual therapist and a nuts-and-bolts therapist. It’s because I’m trying to make sure that I hold on to that clarity.”
She is grateful for all the rituals they went through in the days before Manchán’s death. By phone from west Cork, death doula Liam McCarthy led them through a ceremony designed to show Manchán that they were ready to let him go.
With friends and an experienced guide, Rogerson laid out, cleaned and dressed Manchán’s body herself, something she had not known was possible until McCarthy raised it. She wants people to know that this is a possibility. “If you have somebody there who knows what they’re doing, and they can guide you and help you, it’s actually amazing and beautiful and sacred.”
All of these rituals were helpful and healing. “In terms of being OK with death and saying goodbye, we had done that … I feel like my grieving process was half done by the time we got to the funeral … that’s why the funeral was so joyful, because we got to do all the bits before.
“I do believe the greatest healing we can give ourselves is just joy. I am someone who has gone through most of my life thinking I can fix things. I thought I was a fixer. But I have been shown in numerous ways in the last few years, not just with Manchán, that I am not in control.”
She is “honoured” to be the new “custodian” of the land in Westmeath, most of which is wild. The part Magan cultivated is, she says, “fertile and abundant”. There are “fruit and walnut trees, a Spanish chestnut, a polytunnel, there is so much in the ground and so much that will go into the ground”.
In the past, she used to try to encourage Magan to tame the land. Not any more. “My ideas of aesthetics are changing … I look at a patch of wild brambles or nettles and just see the beauty.” What will happen to that land? “That’s what I need to make space for in my life now. I’m in this transition moment of trying to untangle my threads … to free up some space to welcome in what Manchán left me in terms of both the land and then also this, still murky, idea … we still have some work to do together in my lifetime and I don’t know fully what that is yet.”
An expressive communicator, Rogerson is thoughtful and considered, putting hands to heart when she wants to convey deep feelings, laughing loudly and long when she’s tickled by something. “We did a lot of growing together,” she says of her relationship with Magan. “That’s not going to stop. I’m still in a relationship with him. It’s not that I don’t think I’m ever going to find anyone ever again, but whoever that person is, is like, they’re going to be entering into a relationship with me and Manchán.” She’s laughing as she discloses this, but she is also deadly serious.
For now, she’s thinking about what she’ll say when she accepts Magan’s award for his book. At his funeral she made a public commitment to learn Irish, so she has plans to spend time in the Gaeltacht in the new year. She wants to say something in her speech about how the book represents that intention. “But what I’d really like to get up and say is how we all know he should have won awards for the other two books,” she says, with a rueful smile, in a nod to 32 Words for Field and Listen to The Land Speak.
Of Ninety-nine Words for Rain (And One For Sun), she says: “It deserves the win. Of course it does. It’s a simple book about words for rain, but it’s also much more than that because it’s representing him, and he was representative of something far greater. He was plugging away at this message for the last decade and it’s very much understood right now, and the award is recognition of that.”
[ Ninety-nine words for rain in Irish: could it actually be true?Opens in new window ]
If some things remain murky, this much is clear: we’ll be hearing more from Aisling Rogerson in the future. “I’m not intending to try to take on Manchán’s words or become a disciple of his message, but I do know that in some way I am going to keep the flame alive.”
