More than two years since she retired as State Pathologist, Dr Marie Cassidy is working on her first novel. She talks to Carissa Casey about life before and after retirement.

Most people assumed that when Marie Cassidy retired as State Pathologist at the end of 2018, she would continue working as a consultant on murder cases. She admits she found the idea tempting but she wanted to do something new. She deliberately didn’t renew her medical insurance so she couldn’t work on any cases.

“I didn’t really want to go down that road, mainly because I’d be doing a lot of work in Ireland and seeing former colleagues. You see so many people who retire and don’t go away. ­ They hang about and annoy the hell out of people. You wish to hell they’d just disappear so I think if you’re going, just go.”

­The first year she was busy writing Beyond the Tape, her account of her life as a forensic pathologist. She had moved with her husband to a new home near London, where their children lived, and renovating their new house also kept her occupied.

She still hadn’t figure out what she wanted to do next when “the pandemic hit and put paid to everything”.

“­That wasn’t a bad thing because it meant that I did have to stop and think, ‘What do I want to do?’ All I’ve done and all I know about is death. I’ve never done anything else for 30 years. It took me a wee while to realise that I don’t know anything else, I wouldn’t be any good at anything else.

So I’ve been encouraged to start another book.”

FICTION WRITING

­This time Marie is writing fiction, a murder mystery of course. It’s early days but she’s enjoying the process, even if it is challenging at times.

“When I was writing the first book I thought it must be easier to be able to make up something. I had to spend a lot of my career giving talks to people and I like to embellish things. When the gardai would complain that someone had leaked information to the press, I’d say, ‘Well, it wasn’t me. I’d have given them a much better story than that’.”

Free now from the strictures of being State Pathologist, Marie Cassidy is warm, lively and very funny. But she misses the work.

“I know it’s strange to say you love doing something which is so horrendous, but I got great satisfaction out of it. I always felt I was at least contributing something, even in my own small way. I always check the Irish news every morning, just to see what’s happening. I still do that and then I think, ‘­Thank god it’s not me being called out for that’.

She’s over and back to Ireland because she still has a number of outstanding cases.

She’s still required in court if a case she was involved in comes to trial or inquest. “It’s not that you just pack up your bag, get a gold watch and disappear off to do some gardening. You can’t walk away from it, you’re always going to be at the mercy of the courts in particular,” she says.

Many court cases were delayed because of the pandemic. She did attend two via Zoom but is happier now that she can attend in person. “Zoom is not really ideal for the evidence I’m giving. I like to see the whites of the jury’s eyes, in particular, when I’m trying to explain something,” she says.

DEALING WITH DEATH

For such an open, cheerful person, how did she cope with the horror of what she witnessed over the years?

By the time she became a forensic pathologist, she explains, she had already seen quite a lot.

“You know if it’s something you can deal with. You’re not going to have horrendous nightmares. It’s not going to trouble you seeing the things that you’re going to see. You learn very quickly that this is something you can cope with, it’s not going to affect you mentally,” she says. “I have seen that happen to some pathologists who have thought they were coping and find they were not coping. Sometimes you have to walk away from the whole thing but I found I could cope with it.”

It helped that during the early stages of a case, she didn’t meet the victim’s family.

“I’d only come across the family at a later stage, when the case gets to court or the case gets to inquest. By that time, they have some kind of understanding of what’s happened, although it’s still very raw. I can allow myself to feel like everyone else in the room. ­That’s the only time I can afford to do that. It’s not going to affect my performance.”

“So I can be like any other bystander and feel, ‘Oh my god, that’s an awful thing to happen to you as a family’. ­Then again, it’s their family, it’s not my family. I’m there with them and I can feel it, but like everyone else I can walk out the door and get on with my own life. You have to be able to do that.

You have to be able to park it. You can’t carry it with you.” Prior to meeting family members and feeling all that emotion, Marie was able to focus on the work at hand. “I had a role, a very specific role. I’m there because I have a function and I need to get on with it. You learn how to cope and what you can cope with.”

She is slightly bewildered by the phenomenal increase in interest in true crime among women, her fashion buyer daughter among them. “When I was doing the job, my kids had no interest in it at all.

I was the woman who disappeared off and came back and made the tea. As long as I made the tea that was fine. Now my daughter is fascinated by these things. I think, ‘You didn’t want to know when I was doing it. You thought it was disgusting’. And now I get calls from her all the time, telling me to watch this and asking me what I think.”

“It’s the same with forensic psychology. When I went into it, I was the only woman in the room.

More than half of them now are female and they’re very good at it.”

While not a big fan of podcasts, she is exploring the idea of launching a podcast which, given her background in true crime and its current popularity, makes perfect sense.

Marie Cassidy is far from taking a back seat in life since retirement. She’s still curious about the world. But after a lifetime of hard work and long hours, she’s enjoying having more time. “I’m surprised that I’ve been able to slow down after all those years.

Everyone kept saying to me, ‘You’ll never retire, you can’t do that, you’ve been going at a million miles an hour most of your life’. I thought maybe I was making a big mistake. But actually no, I’ve found that I can just stop and sit and think and do.”

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