He asked me at the airport, ‘and what, prey tell, brings you here to Ireland, what is the nature of your visit exactly?’ ‘A death in the family’, I lied.

‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry for your loss, terribly sorry. Go on ahead then’.

What? What made me say that? She isn’t dead! How could I retract my words now. Well she’s not dead yet, but we are expecting it at any moment, I think? I couldn’t say that, could I? And I didn’t want to go through the details of why, on this quick, secret, side trip to Ireland, why I was here for just two nights. ‘And all the way from Australia’. He’d really think I was making it up then, wouldn’t he.

I wasn’t, really. I just couldn’t say ‘holiday’ or ‘business’ – What do you say? Fleeting side trip, I’m supposed to be in Vienna – but want to see my cousin, because I know she is dying? Cause, she may not die of course, she may well be one of the survivors one hears about. To say that she is already dead, is that being selfish? Looking for sympathy – or avoiding an unnecessary confrontation with reality?

If he’d watched me go through customs and out to the waiting crowd, he would have known that I was using preemptive text (just from my mouth anyway). The woman that waited for me, was indeed dying. There would be death in the family. It just hadn’t happened yet.