By Cormac MacConnell

This story is not easy to tell because it is about the ongoing dying of my one and only sister Maura. And still it is easy enough to relate because of the manner in which the business is being tackled by her. I think ye will agree it is not a sad story at all.

Maura is the eldest of us. She was always close to our musician brother Cathal, a bond all the stronger because of their mutual love for Irish music, but infinitely more distant for many years from Mickie, Sean and myself and especially from our wives.

It is fair to say that she was always sharp of tongue, maybe more than a little shrewish in her own teens and twenties. There were years when she would fight with you at the drop of a hat.

More than once her adult brothers would have called her ruefully The Exocet. All of us felt the dint of her sharpness at one time or another, especially after she suffered a broken engagement to a man that none of us liked one little bit. Subsequently she remained single.

For years she managed the family shop after Sandy retired. After it closed down she continued to live with our parents in what became a legendary house of music, the hearth of a million sessions.

For a highly successful period she was employed by Fermanagh Tourism to organize music sessions on Lough Erne, booking leading musicians from all over Ireland to spend the weekend on lake cruisers, playing memorable sessions both aboard and ashore. She was also an avid music collector in those years, recording rare sessions all over the north and north east.

During the same period her brothers were raising babies and holding down jobs, visits home were less frequent and the wives, especially, were not so skilled at close-quarter verbal combat as their husbands, and so distances developed over the years. Meanwhile, the parents aged and Maura cared for them in their dyings, and cared for them well.

Later the family home was in the path of a new road, was acquired by the council, and Maura and her beloved dog Ciara moved to an apartment in Enniskillen. Cathal was a regular caller. The rest of us were not.

Twelve years ago Maura developed a small spot on the side of her nose. She did not have it attended to in time. It developed into facial cancer despite later chemotherapy.

Today she has no face left at all apart from the forehead, and it’s getting worse by the week. Maura was never a raving beauty, but she had the most beautiful green eyes I’ve ever seen. They are gone now too. She went blind a year ago.

Today, as usual, I telephoned and her lovely young carer Michelle answered the phone. My sister has a sore throat, said Michelle, and has lost her voice. Maybe it is temporary, probably it is permanent.

A lesser woman would be dead five or six years ago but Maura, though wishing to go, is still with us and, incredibly, enjoying every minute of it!

That’s really why I’m writing this personal kind of piece. My sister is dying with an edifying blend of black humor, dignity, grace, courage and, yes, the only word for it is craic! Imagine that!

A while ago, for example, there was the international story about face transplants now being possible. “I’m going to apply for a new face. You lot always said I was two-faced anyway,” she joked.

She always refused to cover her decaying face with a veil during the years she could go shopping herself through Enniskillen. “I went out this morning and frightened two soldiers and 10 tourists,” she said.

She never mastered emailing but said she had an email address, maura@stillhere.com and has a couple of t-shirts with that address on it! She has a multitude of callers and friends to the apartment.

I was with her for a fortnight in summer when Michelle was on holiday and I was swamped with callers. Nobody notices her absent face after the first minute or two, so vibrant is the atmosphere in the place. Celebratory always.

She has a mother daughter relationship with young Michelle, who even comes to her on her leave days, who recently bought her a pair of knee-high winter boots, who is very special indeed, a small treasure.

As a brother who long held the view that his sister could have borne herself with more grace in her youth, I am now overwhelmed and deeply moved by the grace with which she has faced these latter years. She has donated her music and family archive to the authorities and her body to medical science. She says that she’ll be baffling medical students for years!

She listens to sport on television, especially soccer and rugby and, in synopsis, is happy. Unbelievable but true.

She’s 66 this year and, like all the others of the past decade, it may well not be the last one for maura@stillhere.com.

Now the wee favor. Wherever you are, if you have a postcard close by send it to Maura McConnell and Michelle, Apartment 12C, Market Street, Enniskillen,

Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. She always loved getting postcards from faraway places. Michelle will be able to read them to her after breakfast and they’ll have great craic over any you send.

And if the sender is male Maura will have great fun with her callers in the evening. “I had a love letter this morning from a fellow in Chicago!” Or something like that.