I made another new friend recently. It was set up by my daughters, a kind of friendship blind date with the mother of one of their best friends. “You’ll get on with her,” they said. “She’s like you,” they added. I think they meant it as a compliment.
It turned out they were right. We did get on. Jennifer is a straight-talking and extremely stylish Australian woman who has lived here for years. We’ve been on two outings so far, both times to the Glass Mask Theatre on Dawson Street in Dublin.
If you haven’t been and you enjoy theatre, I can highly recommend that place as a great night out. It’s a tiny theatre at the back of the Bestseller Cafe, opposite the Mansion House, a cabaret-style venue, where the audience sits at small tables while watching the show.
You can order charcuterie and wine and coffee, nibbling on refreshments while watching the actors perform. They produce new writing there, sometimes dark, often funny, always original box-fresh plays.
We often say we could get knocked over by a car tomorrow, but never really expect it
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This one night, as the sequinned Christmas party hordes milled around the city centre, we went to see Playground, a preview of some plays the Glass Mask Theatre will be putting on next year. It was our second friendship date. The last time had gone well and so we decided to do it again. We ordered hummus and sourdough and settled in.
During the interval, we got talking about mortality. It was probably me that started the death chat. I’m on a bit of a mission to normalise these conversations so shooting the breeze on a drizzly Friday evening before Christmas about the inevitability of every single one of us croaking it at some point suited me fine.
Jennifer turned out to be a good person to talk to about death. She has thought about it a lot. She tells her children that when she goes, whenever that may be, that they must celebrate her. “I’ve lived a great life,” she said. “I’ve lived it exactly how I wanted”. I could tell she meant it, too.
We talked about the importance of going through our days with the awareness of our inevitable demise. About how we never know the day or the hour. “I mean,” Jennifer said, scooping up a bit of hummus with a piece of sourdough. “I could walk out of here tonight and get knocked over by a car.”
“Exactly,” I said, and regaled her with my recent near-death experience with a Luas out near the Red Cow Inn. “I could have been squished by a Luas but I wasn’t,” I said. “No you weren’t,” she agreed.
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We watched the brilliant young actors workshopping intriguing excerpts from new plays and when it was over we went out into the rain-soaked streets to get a taxi. Jennifer had ordered one but we couldn’t find the driver, even though the app said he had arrived. It was 9.20pm, we were both delighted that we would get home in time to watch the Late Late Toy Show with our families.
I turned away from her, and walked across the street to see if the taxi was parked across the road and just as I turned I heard a loud thud. When I looked back, I saw Jennifer lying on the street. She had been knocked over by a car.
The next couple of hours were spent waiting on the side of the road for an ambulance that never came, while several extremely helpful gardaí sprang into action, investigating the incident and keeping us company. Jennifer couldn’t walk, but we didn’t think her ankle was broken. It felt, she said, like a bad sprain.
We sat on the pavement and watched the night go by. I took my coat off and put it around my new friend. I wondered what Patrick Kielty was doing.
It was only much later, when we eventually decided to make our own way home in a taxi - a guard said there there were 50 people ahead of us waiting for an ambulance - that I remembered what Jennifer had said earlier in the theatre. “You said you could walk out of there, and get knocked over by a car,” I reminded her. We marvelled at this. About the chances of it.
I mean, we often say we could get knocked over by a car or a bus tomorrow, but we never really expect it to happen. But of course it could. That’s the whole point. And in Jennifer’s case it did.
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It’s been a bit like that lately for me. Knowing I need to think about death and being presented with situations which facilitate exactly that. Near the Red Cow Luas tracks or in a therapist’s chair or at a friend’s deathbed or with those recently bereaved. Or in the back of a taxi with a new friend who could have been squished by a car coming around the corner on Dawson Street, but who wasn’t. Or by a good friend thoughtful enough to send me part of a TS Eliot poem The Dry Salvages. One line sang clearly to me: “You are the music while the music lasts.”
“Small ankle fracture and sprain, have to wear a boot and crutches,” my new friend Jennifer texted the next day after a visit to the clinic. “But I will live.” We’ll all live. While the music lasts. No harm in remembering that. No harm at all.
