Singer Christy Dignam, in a wide-ranging interview on life and death, has said that he can look back on a full life with his family and much-loved Dublin band Aslan.
The 62-year-old singer entered palliative care last January and has spent the last few months at home in Finglas, where he is being cared for by his family.
A moving and honest interview, recorded in the house he shares with his wife Kathryn, aired on The Ryan Tubridy Show on RTÉ Radio 1 today.
Christy is spending his final days in his house where there is a medical bed set up in the living room. "It's a conveyor belt up to Heaven," he said. "I'll come in here and that'll be the end of it."
However, he insisted he is not religious and has not turned to God as he faces death.
"I was sitting here one day a few weeks ago and I was looking out the window and this fella walked by, and I thought to myself, 'I'll never do that again. I'll never just go for a walk...' and that sent me into a spiral and I thought about all the things I won't do again.
"It's like you're heading into an abyss. I wouldn't be hugely religious. Logic gets in the way. But I believe we're all spiritual beings in one sense or other.
"I remember there used to be an old saying - that 'religion is for people who want to go to Heaven, spirituality is for people who have been to Hell'. And I really identified with that."
Christy said: "Just fear, nobody wants to die. When I first got diagnosed, I remember praying I was like, 'Please, just give me 10 more years'.
"And that 10 years are up now and you're kind of saying, 'I know I only asked for 10 but you couldn't throw another 10 in there could you, yeah?'"
Sounding noticeably weaker, Christy recalled the day he was told he had cancer.
"I kept getting these chest infections and they gave me antibiotics, but they didn't seem to be working so I got an ambulance one day when I could hardly breathe and they did a load of tests.
"Then they sent me to Beaumont for a couple of biopsies and they told me it might be bad news. There might be two cancers - amyloidosis is one of them and multiple myeloma is the other or it could be neither.
"I came in the next day, and they told me, 'You've got the two of them' ... Initially, I rejected it and I said to your man, 'You go back to Trinity and get your degrees because you don't know what you're talking about'.
"Anyone who has got a cancer diagnosis will understand that, but I remember about five years prior to being diagnosed, I had to go out to the hospice in Raheny and there was this 17-year-old kid there and he was dying, and I went out and did a couple of songs.
"When I was on the way back home, I got a phone call off his sister and she told me that the chap had died just after I'd left. I started thinking he had 17 years of life, and I was 50 at the time."
Asked if he pretended his illness wasn't happening, he said: "Initially, I was so ill I couldn't avoid confronting it. It hit me in the face, but when I got a handle on the medication and stabilised the whole thing, I'd live as if there was nothing wrong with me and if something debilitated me, I'd deal with it that day. That's the way it's been."
He also admitted that things had not been going well for Aslan in the last few years and that they were turning into a band "I didn't want to be in".
"I ended up doing a solo album because I think the lads would be happy just to plod along and just keep doing Crazy World and I wasn't really getting anything out of that anymore. So, the band were drifting apart, and I noticed a couple of the crew were starting to leave.
"We had a guy called Sven who used to manage us, a Norwegian dude, and he had a timber farm in Norway, and he offered to fly over for the weekend to see us play live, but he was killed in a fire.
"They were scorching the earth near his place in Norway, but the wind turned towards his barn, and he was trying to put a break line down and he had a heart attack. He was sitting in the smoke for 20 minutes and that's what killed him.
"That was devastating to me because I really got on with this guy."
Despite his recent misgivings about Aslan, Christy added that he had no regrets about the band. "No. I had a brilliant life with them. When it was good, it was absolutely amazing."
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
