Paul Breen encourages everyone to take note of World Brain Tumour Day

Afterwards, his wife shared a story on social media written by their daughter, about how this awful illness consumes lives.

Reading that, I was struck by a single thought that has stayed lodged in my brain.

There should be an ‘F’ in cancer. No word in the dictionary deserves it more.

Cancer comes in many forms – almost as many as there are days in a year.

But this week, one particularly cruel variant takes centre stage: brain tumours. This Sunday, June 8, marks World Brain Tumour Day – a moment to remember, to grieve, and to act.

Launched by the German Brain Tumour Association in 2000, the day has quietly grown into a global call for awareness and support.

Words like “spread” and “grow” feel unsettling here – but that’s exactly what the momentum has achieved.

Around the world, people light candles, share stories, walk in remembrance, and raise funds for research and treatment.

In England this year, 18 charity sky-dives are planned, led by The Brain Tumour Charity – a group also behind March’s Brain Tumour Awareness Month.

Fundraising events such as Twilight Walks, where people move together through the fading light as night descends on daytime, remind us that even in darkness, there can be solidarity, love, and hope.

That’s much needed. Brain tumours devastate. They rob the world of its brightest lights, often too early and too viciously.

In Ireland alone, about 400 people are diagnosed with a primary brain tumour every year, according to the Irish Cancer Society.

Many of them are young, healthy, vibrant individuals whose lives seemed to stretch far ahead. Then this hits out of the blue.

What makes brain cancer so venomous is not just its sufferings, but its statistical realities.

According to the United Kingdom-based Brain Tumour Research Organisation, just under 13 per cent of people diagnosed with a brain tumour will survive beyond five years.

By contrast, more than 70 per cent of breast cancer patients, and more than 40 per cent of leukaemia patients, reach that milestone.

One of those bright young lights whose battle with brain cancer ended in darkness was the legendary Irish folk singer Luke Kelly, a founding member of The Dubliners.

One of the greatest singers of his generation, he died on January 30, 1984, at the age of just 44.

He had undergone two major operations after being diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1980.

Apparently, he’d first realised that something was wrong when he woke up in a hotel room, not able to remember where he was.

The decline that followed was swift, even though there were a couple of false dawns in which he thought that he’d be cured.

That’s another particularly cruel habit of the ‘C’ word that really deserves to be an ‘F’ word.

However, Luke Kelly had one brief moment of triumph over cancer, perhaps a moment when he gave the middle finger to the disease that was crippling his ability to perform.

Just a month before his death, he fronted a performance by The Dubliners on The Late Late Show.

A haunting performance, where you can see the ghostly look in his bandmates’ faces.

The other Dubliners later recounted their fear that he would forget his lyrics because he’d become so forgetful in those final months.

But he didn’t forget a word. He sang slow and measured, with a haunting perfection that seemed to draw from somewhere beyond pain.

It was not quite the same Luke Kelly, but for a few minutes, the old fire returned.

Brain tumours are often like that: they steal the person you love gradually, bit by bit, until only a silhouette remains.

And when they do take that final step, the grief is double-edged.

You mourn the loss, and you mourn the long, painful fade that came before it.

This is something I understand not just from reading or watching Luke Kelly on YouTube, but personally.

Brain tumours have come close to home. I lost a cousin to brain cancer.

A woman whose life, by any reasonable measure, was lived in full goodness.

My cousin Angela’s life certified the truth of Billy Joel’s line, “Only the good die young”.

She was just 37 years old when she passed away in July, 2002.

And in those short years, she gave more than many do in a full century.

Angela was a teacher, a mentor, a believer in Irish culture, Christian values, and quiet, understated kindness – sense and sensibility, I suppose.

From her earliest days in Brookeborough and Saint Mary’s Primary School to her later years of becoming a primary teacher herself in the town of Ballymoney, she carried a unique glow.

She treated her calling not as a job, but as a way to bring light into the lives of others.

She didn’t boast. She didn’t demand attention. But she left a mark.

In the letters her family received after her death, you could sense how deeply she had touched people.

There was a line in one such letter that stayed with me: “It was as if she had given a part of herself to every person that she met.”

Yet despite all of that goodness, a terrible illness came into her life just a few short months after she got married in her middle thirties, with a whole lifetime seemingly ahead of her.

And such arbitrary cruelty in the world makes us question everything, just as the actor Stephen Fry famously did on another Late Late Show a few years ago.

Still, even in a world that allows such suffering as brain tumours, there are reasons to commemorate, to celebrate, to walk in the dusk and fight this darkness.

Perhaps it’s not the endings of life’s journey that we should think of, but steps along the way.

And that is why World Brain Tumour Day matters. It helps us speak of the unspeakable and confront that ‘C’ word with the ‘F’ of a middle finger.

It reminds us of what we have lost – but also what remains. And as we walk into another June 8, perhaps we can walk together, not just in mourning but in hope of this terrible disease being beaten one day.

It’s a cause worth supporting, for legends such as Luke Kelly, and others such as my cousin Angela, who were extraordinary in their own way.

On June 8, spare a thought for those whose lives lit up the stage of the world all too briefly, but whose songs and spirits live on.

Paul Breen is an academic and author.