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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