A memoir that’s a playbook for parents with cancer

How about this for a list of writers: Claire Keegan, John Banville, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Mike McCormack, Marian Keyes, Colum McCann, Joseph O’Connor, Dermot Bolger. This who’s who of modern Irish literati will appear at the Write by the Sea festival later this month.

Alongside these established writers, reading her own composition at the Kilmore Quay event in Wexford, will be Brenda Drumm. ‘In Heaven There Are Beaches’ is Brenda’s short story which won the memoir section of the festival’s writing competition. The mother of two from Belturbet will have the honour of reading the piece at the event.

“I hadn’t actually thought about being on the same roll of honour as some of these writers, so that is both terrifying and exciting in equal measure,” she says on the phone.

The short story is taken from her much longer memoir which she is currently working on - “don’t ask me when I’ll finish it”. Its intriguing title is the name of a poem her daughter Emma wrote for Brenda in 2018. She received the poem by email as she was returning from a work trip abroad.

“It flows from that moment of me getting this extraordinary poem from my daughter in the middle of Ciampino Airport in Rome with all the busy-ness of travel life all around me. It deals with the difficult subject of what it’s like to live with an incurable cancer, while trying to be a good mother and also trying to manage how everyone around you is feeling, and has felt about what you have gone through; and by default what they have gone through while you’re dealing with the awfulness that comes with treatment, and the ongoing mental load of knowing that you live with an incurable cancer.”

Brenda has a remarkable story to tell. That she has shared a small portion of it through this short story almost seems to have surprised her.

“I don’t enter competitions I don’t know if I’ve entered a writing competition before and I’m not sure what attracted me to ‘Write by the Sea’,” she says suspecting the word limit of just a thousand words was a major factor.

Having promptly forgotten she had entered, she was pleasantly surprised when first long-listed, and then short-listed over the summer.

“Honestly I thought it would stop there - that was enough of an honour for me to make the shortlist,” she recalls. “It offers me encouragement now to push on.”

Head of Communications with Mercy International Association (MIA), Brenda has always been literary adjacent at least. She’s an avid reader – a love rooted in the encouragement of her parents, Michael and Margaret Drumm in Belturbet, and her Longford grandmother Mary Drumm who she regarded as “a great storyteller”.

In school this passion was encouraged by her Convent of Mercy teacher Sister Finbar, and her English teacher in Loreto College, Mrs Cahill.

“I would go through books at a ferocious pace. I always had the books for the year ahead read before the school had started,” she recalls.

Working in communications, she writes what she describes as “factual and sometimes functional” pieces. Therefore it’s natural she has to overcome her own reluctance to sit down in the evenings to write – even if it is creative writing. It’s only through attempting memoir that she found a form that felt authentic.

“I always think my short stories are terrible,” says Brenda who now lives in Newbridge Co Kildare.

“I feel that my fictional characters are a bit rubbish and they’re not believable. Whereas when I’m writing memoir it’s about me. It’s not a vanity thing, but I know that what I’m writing is real, and it’s true. There’s maybe therapy in committing some of this to paper and letting it fly.”

This reporter wasn’t aware of Brenda’s cancer journey when initially calling her. Caught off guard it’s difficult to know what to ask and how to phrase it without being insensitive. The Celt clumsily offers, ‘’Your diagnosis was 18 years ago, this sounds quite promising?’

“Well ultimately there’s no cure for what I have and there’s a possibility it will come back again. A lot of younger patients living with blood cancer are rewriting their own rules around it and there’s a lot of new treatments and regimens so I’m just unlucky to have one of the types of cancers for which there’s no cure.”

Medics have done all they can, beginning with “one serious significant round of treatment” that saw her take “a year out of life” in 2007.

“I was lucky enough to respond to everything that they threw at me,” she says of her lengthy remission.

“The way I look at it is that 18 years is a long time, it’s a significant jump when it comes to medicine and drugs so I feel that I’m very lucky to be leaning in past my 18th year in remission and I’m a person whose glass is always half full, so I would live with hope.

“My ambition in life now, one of them, is just is to grow old, to continue to experience the milestones with family and friends, and for myself, that I never thought I would get to do when I was told I had this particular blood cancer that was incurable.

“I’ve had an incredible 18 years. I’ve said yes to things that I possibly wouldn’t have said yes to if I wasn’t concerned about running out of time.”

While Brenda responds to questions of cancer unflinchingly, she probably understands the Celt’s momentary discomfort. Imagine being at the centre of this story, having confronted such a bleak diagnosis, and negotiating seemingly horrible conversations with loved ones. That was a factor in Brenda committing to her memoir. She hopes “down the line it might offer a kind of a playbook” for other parents.

“You can end up having easy conversations, which sounds really strange, when the kids are younger and you can go, ‘Well I have these cells etc’. But as the kids get older and understand things more you start to have to have a lot more in depth, difficult conversations about the what ifs? And why isn’t there a cure?

“So maybe some of what I commit to paper in this memoir might be of use to somebody else who is looking for a kind of a playbook for how you deal with being a mother who has all of those roles that are attached to the word mother, but who finds herself all of a sudden just dropped into the middle of this catastrophic diagnosis.

“I think that’s what attracts me about this, I just feel I need to commit some of this to paper and to let it out. And even if it’s just five people read it, it’s five people who might find it’s of help.”

Asked to put yourself on that stage reading her story - how will she keep it together?

“I’ll do my best to be professional and to deliver it the way it’s meant to be delivered and shared, but I cannot say there won’t be tears of emotion and joy on the night and sure look maybe a few people in the audience will join me in that.”