Monday, June 2, 2014

Barry Clifford: From the book: Twenty One Years-Hunginton's Disease

Their parents had an unknown amount of children. What is known is that they gave up all of them to reformatory schools all over Ireland and they were numbered to be at least fifteen of them. Most were not aware of each other’s existence. Their Mom and Dad had been encouraged to copulate and multiply in the best tradition of their faith and to hell with the consequences which proved prophetic. 

Blindly they did so even with more than a hint that something was gravely wrong. Huntington’s disease then contorted and wasted their mother’s body as their Dad kept passing his seed, which was now a poisoned chalice, on to a body that was all but dead. As more babies followed, no one wrote anything down. The nightmare was not at its beginning and it could have no end as long as the heart beats in them for this is a hereditary disease: A killer with a name, an identity, but no known cure.


For Tommy, Dennis, and Tony Coyle, no one would tell them or their siblings, or the many children they would later have between them, that a killer tracked and coursed through their ancestry. Only their parents and their doctor knew. No history was traced for them or us for no other doctor came here to visit, except once in the eight years I was in this place. He did not stay long and never came back. Decades later, by the time the disease was identified by other doctors to them, at least to the ones they could find, they were in their thirties and had already taken out many of the Coyles. The ones that still lived with the disease prayed that they would die.

Barry Clifford

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