I'm not quite sure why I am blogging this, apart from the fact that I found it to be one of the most moving things I have read in a while.

It's an interview with a well-known Irish writer, Nuala O'Faolain, who was recently diagnosed with lots and lots of incurable cancer.

I find her attitude to be pretty close to how I think mine would be if I was in her situation. Why torture yourself with treatment that will only prolong the misery? I have watched someone very dear to me waste away over the course of a year. I wish he could have died without putting himself through the misery of trying not to. I think he only did it for those of us around him who didn't like the idea of our lives without him in it. We were selfish.

It's pretty long but very much worth reading. Excuse the punctuation and spelling errors, it's a transcript of a radio interview.

MF: Nuala O'Faolain you've been on the programme a number of times in connection with your writing and you wrote your memoir "Are You Somebody" in a way that it seemed it explained yourself to you and now you're doing this interview in a completely different context and I understand that it's to explain yourself to yourself as well as to us as well.

NO'F: Yeah, it must look as if I'm an awful divil for publicity altogether and, in a sense, since I wrote "Are You Somebody" and it reached what is truth to say was a huge response, I have in a sense put myself out there. And the interviews I gave back then 10 or 11 years ago are like one bookend in which I presented myself and lots of people didn't like me and lots of people did.

But one way or another it was company for me who happens to be a childless middle-aged woman.

Now I am actually dying and I have Metastatic cancer in three different parts of my body.

And, somehow or another, it helps me to set up the other bookend and to say to those people who were interested in me and did care about me to say to them 'well this is how it is for me now for what its worth'.

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