PICTURE my dad, settling down in his armchair, a mug of tea balanced on one knee, two ginger snaps on the other, the glasses halfway down the nose and the old broadsheet Irish News spread out between his two hands.
There’s nothing like age to find you moving the paper back and forwards, tilting your glasses up and down to get the reading angle just right.
Rustle, rustle goes the paper. Shhhh, can you hear the soft plunk of a ginger snap dipped lightly into a cup of hot tea?
He’d always flick to the death notices first.
“Do you know who’s dead?” came the voice from behind the paper. It was in the days before passedawaydotcom.
There’s me on the sofa, rolling my eyes. O callow youth. Sneer, why don’t you. Now it’s my turn to hang out with my mates in the valley of the shadows.
My eyes are drawn with odd magnetic force to death notices. Inevitably, I know somebody or somebody’s somebody. In town, my footsteps forever turn to the Holy Shop for a card.
“Do you know who’s died?” I say from behind the paper... my son performs the generational eye rolling.
It’s an odd itch. The first thing I check is a person’s age. The bar jumps as you grow older. Eighty six? A mere stripling.
Only people under 50 say: “He had a good innings.”
What is sobering is the good that some people pack into a short life. Close to home, I think of old friends and colleagues who died far too young and who packed so much creativity and laughter and love into their lives.
My obituary might read: “She had a great love of gin – heavy on the Bombay, light on the tonic.
“She would kill to get to the cryptic first on a Saturday night.
“She tossed the odd bit of change to the man with the scabby three-legged dog outside the Mace.
“She lived to 90... never wrote the book.”
My friend once attended a retreat in a monastery in the Catskill mountains outside New York. Everyone was wakened in the middle of the night and all stumbled into a hall in the darkness where someone banged the bejaysus out of a huge brass gong and cried: “Wake up, wake up to your one life.”
That’s a lesson.
In this journalism lark, you meet lovely people and really awkward horrible ones who are great fun if you don’t take them seriously.
I get to write people’s obituaries. We don’t do that at the last minute unless it’s a big surprise.
With great discretion we chart the lives of the great and the good – cradle to the grave – and keep them safe and under embargo until the day said person meets their maker.
Picture me, trip tripping down the stairs in work, spotting a celebrity sitting in the foyer and hitting the mental checklist in my head. Tick, done her – ker-ching, like a cash register. And that person is sitting blissfully unaware that even as I’m nodding hello, I’m waving a fond farewell in my head.
Some obituaries stay with you. American nun Sister Mary Totah was 5ft 1in with a twinkle in her eye. She was damn smart, as her obit in the Times made clear.
”Wow,” an abbot once whispered after cross-questioning her. “Imagine living with that little stick of dynamite.”
A retreat in a Benedictine community in 1984 cast such a spell on the young Mary that when she returned home to America her sparkle prompted friends to wonder had she got engaged.
Nine months later she returned to England to join the convent. At Heathrow passport control they asked, “How long do you plan to remain in England” and she replied: “Forever, I hope.” She ended up with the other suspected illegal passengers.
She was a toughie too. Saturdays were for cell cleaning. It wasn’t optional.
The Telegraph obituary for Lady O’Neill, wife of one Terence O’Neill, paints a portrait of grace.
When in 1991, three masked burglars broke into her home, they put an iron on her lap and threatened to heat it unless she told where the silver was kept.
One burglar apologised and tried to keep her comfortable... presumably he set the iron to synthetics.
He rang the police to come and untie her after the burglary and even sent her a Christmas card.
The silver was never got... but Lady O’Neill was a generous woman and didn’t hold it against him. He was “a nice young man,” she said. Now that’s generous.
