Watching Ciara Mageean confront her mortality was the most compelling TV and I hoped one man was watching
Love, the emotion no tumour can touch, wafts across the terraces of Ciara Mageean's features, a young woman summoning profound, beautiful words to detail how a cancer diagnosis uproots everything you thought life to be.Mageean is speaking as only those who have been jolted into confronting a terrifying new reality - changed circumstances announcing that what remains of the days might be no more than a momentary breeze blowing through the trees - can.Speaking of her partner, Tommy, the silence between the words are filled with an ache so acute it might cause a mountain to bend over double, winded by its elemental force."I always envisioned growing old with Thomas, that I would get to see him age like a fine wine and get speckled bits of grey through his hair, and the reality is I don't know if I will have that. I find that really tough."Reflection comes in torrents from Ciara, an Olympic athlete, a European gold medallist just two years ago, a 34-year-old ambushed in her prime years, her Socratic wisdom sauced by a natural-born competitor's sharp-edged determination.As this steadfast Irish woman ponders mortality, maybe the hardest of all subjects to confront, she speaks with raw eloquence, a ballet of emotions dancing across her psyche.There is the acid rain of fear, of course there is, ("I was diagnosed with cancer last May...you think, 'Oh my God, am I going to die?'") though Mageean is substantially sheltered from its corrosive power by umbrellas of resolve and self-deprecating humour.And by the impenetrable warehouse walls inside which her vast reserves of courage reside.But towering above everything else, as we listen to a remarkable and inspirational woman, there is love.Unbroken. Unbreakable.Love of family, love of the very idea of being alive, love of the exquisite beauty of existence, a love that feeds a hunger to take the ingredients every waking minute provides and muster from them the banquet of life.Ciara speaks with something of the eloquence of her Ulster brother, Seamus Heaney, about the possibility of an abbreviated future."I keep seeing beautiful things and can't help but wonder will I have an opportunity to see them again," she says at one point with rheumy-eyed lyricism.But even after being chosen for this most cruel taunt by fate, even at the mercy of the malignant unseen, the languages of self-pity and victimhood are ones in which Mageean declines to achieve anything remotely resembling fluency.Humble and upbeat, she really is something."I won't give up. I'm not going to give up. I don't know when the end of the journey will come, but I know that sure as hell I'm going to enjoy every path along the way."It seems unusual for me to say that I feel lucky, but like some people don't get the chance to know how long they have left. They might go out and get hit by a bus."Whereas I'm given a chance to go, okay, it might be a couple of years, it might be more, depending on how the treatment goes, so I suppose it gives you an appreciation of the everyday," she says.READ MORE: RTE viewers hail 'inspirational' and 'seriously impressive human' Ciara MageeanCiara is smiling now through the tears, sunshine after rain, her expression a lovely rainbow of hope.This week's Uncharted with Ray Goggins is among the most charged, unvarnished and compelling pieces of television imaginable.Mageean is an extraordinary presence, electrifying the screen with the forcefield of her personality.In between bouts of chemotherapy, Ciara joins Goggins and Dublin's multiple All-Ireland winner Michael Darragh Macauley on a gruelling 250km endurance challenge from the Pacific to the Caribbean, cycling, running and kayaking through dense Costa Rica rainforest and trekking through rugged, crocodile-infested terrain.Amid the superb solitude, this daughter of Portaferry considers the changing texture of her existence in conversations that get to the very nub of what it is to be shadowed by nature's most insidious serial killer."Me and the girls always have plans for our big 40th birthday and I'm like, 'will I be there to celebrate the 40th birthday with my friends?'"And it's rally hard, because as much as I can, I want to be me."She is manifestly her, a deeply impressive individual, and by shining a light on her vulnerability is as if she is opening the window to some secret chamber of her heart.A friend of mine who was assailed by cancer once told me the worst part for him, somehow more piercing even than the pain or the fear, was the absence of wild, untethered, spontaneous laughter, the kind that bends you over double with joy.The kind that confirms that you are alive.In his arresting Impac Award winning novel, This Blinding Absence of Light, Tahar Ben Jelloun touches on the same subject while documenting the lives of political prisoners in Morocco held 24/7 in absolute darkness in tiny, filthy subterranean death chambers."Our merriment was often forced," says the novel's narrator, Salim, "a kind of nervous stutter.READ MORE: Ciara Mageean: 'I keep seeing beautiful things and can't help but wonder will I have an opportunity to see them again'"The laughter of despair has a colour, an odour...but we missed beautiful, honest, scandalous, ringing laughter, the laughter of life, pleasure, health and confident well being."Though confident well being has been thieved, though anxiety must inevitably squat beneath her ribcage, Ciara, as Macauley applauds, declines to be defined by her sickness, to permit it to contaminate every conversation.Her laughter is authentic and miraculous. She is, as Goggins says, while rooting in his library of words for the finest compliment he can summon, "a wild thing."Though there are spasms of anguish, this is not a woman with a flag of surrender among her baggage, nor one likely to succumb to the gravity of despair without first sending every piece of fight within her into battle.When Goggins marvels at Ciara's resolve, it is not one of those moments concocted for the cameras. The rapids of his admiration are as authentic and fast-flowing as those they have so recently negotiated in their kayaks."People in the best of their health and their best shape would not be able to complete this week. And she did it in between chemo. Incredible like," he says, shaking his head in wonder.Cancer is a body and soul ravaging bastard. Insidious, indiscriminate, devoid of empathy, sociopathic, hateful.If there are families in Ireland who have not felt its spiteful claws take a grip on their everyday lives, they are in a blessed minority.Which is why DJ Carey falsely presenting himself as a victim of this terrible sickness felt like such an affront against decency, an act of unimaginable greed and insensibility, a flourish of repellent deceit that triggered universal fury.I found myself wondering if the fallen Kilkenny hurler was looking on from his prison cell at the footage from Costa Rica, at a staunch, true woman walking on through the storm.For the viewer the emotions surged and fell, as if clacking along some temperamental elevator shaft, one that left you by turns marvelling at the power of the human spirit and then heartsick at the unfairness of life.Mageean, simply by being herself, offered momentous lessons in courage and humility and class. It was a siren call for those of us who too often surrender to defeatism, or take the glorious walk of life for granted.Like Rhasidat Adeleke or Kate O'Connor, Ciara ought to be putting the finishing touches to her preparations for August's European Athletics Championship, preparing to defend the 1,500m gold medal she so audaciously seized in Rome two years ago.Instead, the music of competition has given way to the awful silence of uncertainty, to not knowing what lurks around the next corner.And still her primary thoughts are not for herself, but for those who live in her heart.Ciara's anthem remains one elevated by love.At times, her selflessness is mind-bending: "I feel like it's nearly easier being the person who has the illness. That going to treatment is in my control. How I cope with that post-chemo slump is on me and I know I will make it through."But it's my partner, Tommy. He has to see me feel sick. Or my parents, whose little girl is ill and they can't do anything about it."And so whatever torments of the spirit buffet her, Ciara sails on, a rare sirocco of courage keeping her mainsail strong.There she goes, a warrior woman with the sword of love drawn, understanding the battle ahead will be daunting, yet unbending as she walks resolutely towards the fight.Want to see more from the Irish Mirror? Making us your preferred source on Google means you’ll get more of our exclusives, top stories and must-read content straight away. To add Irish Mirror as a preferred source, simply click here
