Textling #101

A tribute to

Mag Friel

I know hardly anything of Mag’s life before she fell ill in 1993. We were witnesses to each other’s ‘now’. There are clues though: when I sent our shoes to the #MillionsMissing protest, Mag selected a pair of dainty black Velours stiletto heels with pointed toes. Imagine her staccato gait – upright and stable! Last year, while Cannes was in the news, she wrote: “May 1991 sailed to Cannes on my partner’s yacht, hoping to complete on 5 million film deal we’d worked on for 4 years. May 2017 achieved my goal of having bed sheet changed, first time in months. Heaven. Happy ME Awareness Day. Love and eternal hope for us all. xxxxxx”

Memories of who we were before M.E. seem almost fanciful when we need all our energy to make do. Mag’s fortitude was striking. Her life shrank to the very basics of survival, and still she rifled through day’s pockets for wee pleasures.

The lack of funding for biomedical research and the disparagement of the M.E.-community enraged her. She faced complacent institutions and their indifferent, even contemptuous representatives with unceasing anxiety, and was let down in countless ways. Two beloved long-term care-givers worked hard to balance the scale and tended to Mag’s needs with boundless empathy and precision. Their insight into M.E., learned on the job, does them proud. If only it were easily transferable. If only people wanted to know.

Audio when I can