Some subjects are just not easy to write about.
One's mortality, for instance.
How many times over the years have I heard parents of severely disabled children express their worry about what will happen to their child once they themselves 'depart this stage"?
I am minded of this by an article in the Irish Independent and the distressing story of a Mum and Dad forced to give up looking after their daughter at home and to put her into residential care because the funding is no longer available for her to be cared for by them at home and attend a day centre each day.
Inevitably, it seems, the Independent journalist blames 'the cuts': "'Idiotic' cutbacks force family to place disabled daughter in care".
Aside from the obvious question about whether this in the long run will save the Irish Government any money at all, the cost of residential care being what it is, there is something else.
I was 66 when my daughter moved out of the family home and into her own home with two other young women. She was 29. That was 18 months ago. She comes home to us every weekend. It has become increasingly obvious to us, her Mum and I, that since then our capacity to care for her full-time had we continued to do so, would have become almost impossible.
Siobhan Powell is 29 years old. Her Mum, Johanne, is 59.
Clearly, the breaking up of the family home on the basis of the cost of transport to a day centre is an absurdity and a cruelty, the sort of which is all too frequent.
But the day is relentlessly coming when the family will have to manage things differently; when Siobhan may have to live elswhere than the family home. It is the same for all of us: Timor mortis conturbat me.
The issue here is not "the cuts", as "foolish" as they are but the apparent lack of any process to manage transition from where the whole family are now to where they will, in due to time, perhaps shortly, need to be.
Such matters are managed no better in Ireland, it seems, than in the UK.
