I KNOW THAT, LOVE: In Honour of Mary Moore

 

Dawn broke beautifully over a white-frosted Mervue, the sun shivering through naked trees. Fog rising further out in the fields, diffusing a soft light.

Evelyn drove me to Shannon for my return trip to Hastings. After two weeks away I know it’s time to get back and, however much I fantasize about retirement, I know it wouldn’t suit me at all. Not yet!

Mary Moore’s funeral kept me home a few days longer – five days! It was an honour to be the priest celebrating her requiem. Her death has startled us her contemporaries. And it brought us together. It made us think. Especially since she is the second of our generation in Mervue to die within the space a of week.

It has, of course, also awakened the feeling of loss in relation to our Maura. Her death almost twenty-five years ago. Mary was seventy-one years old, as Maura would be if she were here now. They were school mates; friends and I was part of that friendship especially in our teens when I spent many happy times in Coynes house. Delia, her warm and beautiful mother sitting by the range in the kitchen. Delia sitting on the flower box by the front door. Nicco her Dad whose funeral I also celebrated as a young priest.

Mary Coyne became Mary Moore when she married Tom and continued living with her new family in the house where she grew up.

Some were born to stay. Some were born to go away.

Quite a number of our contemporaries were born to stay in Mervue. The Monsons were all born to go away. I went away in 1972 at the age of seventeen. But I keep coming back.

Mary was born to stay in Parnell Avenue which will never be the same again without her. Mervue will never be the same.

I remember the tone of her voice, the heartiness of her laugh. There was a purity and an innocence about her. Innocent in the best sense of that word. This was the image of God in her. A woman without guile. What you saw is what you got.

She also took you as you were.

I’d meet her on my way down to the shop when I’d be home for a break. She’d come up and kiss me on the lips. A pure, innocent, sisterly, Godly kiss. The kindness of it. The tenderness.

“Howya Love” she would say, and she would respond to my words with, “I know that,  Love!”

Love was never far from her lips, the love that was deep in her heart! She brought that love to me in Hastings when she visited two years ago when she was on her way to Egypt and a cruise on the Nile with her cousin Maureen with whom she had the best of times. It seems that Mary was always up for a good time socially, an aspect of her adult life that I was not part of. May she now have the best of times in heaven.

It all makes you wonder what it’s like when we get to the other side, something I am very eager to know.

It is my great privilege as a priest that I had a part to play in preparing her for her departure from this world.

I was walking down Parnell Avenue Saturday morning, January 6^th, on my to get the bus into town. Stopped to chat with Fred Diviney and then cut him short when I saw Tom Moore come out of his house, getting into his car. Mary had messaged me in December to say she would be in hospital for Christmas, so I was anxious to know how she was. The news was not good.

So, I went next day, with Tom’s permission, to visit her. The family were gathered around her bed and then they left us alone. Her breathing was laboured, and she was on a ventilator.

“I can’t fight this anymore” she said. “I know I’m not going home and I’m not going to the hospice. This is it.”

I asked if she was afraid, and she said no but that she didn’t want to leave her family. Tom. Her fine strong sons and daughter, beautiful grandchildren, the eldest of whom I baptized fifteen years ago. She was very proud of that.

With her permission I anointed her, prayed with her. We prayed together.

“When we were teenagers hanging around Parnell, we never dreamed that we’d be in this situation. Just you and me in this way” I said.

“We did not, love” she said and cried. I kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye.

“Bye love” she said.

Word came the following Friday that she had died quietly during the night. There was a cold grey silence over Mervue then, an astonished silence, a silence that made you think.

Neighbours gathered for the removal and funeral Mass. We are now old and ageing neighbours with a sense of belonging to each other even when we only meet rarely, even when we no longer recognize each other. But we have a shared history, a proud history that is written in our hearts and memories, written in the walls of our houses, on the footpaths we have tread, the streets, and Greens where once we played. I somehow understand and know myself better in moments life this. Mervue, an integral part of who we are, no matter how far away we may go. We are Mervue and proud of it in the best sense of that word.

We buried Mary with her parents in Claregalway under the shadow of the ruined Abbey that still retains a sense of majesty, with the midday sun seeming to perch on top of its tower.

Burial brings a sense of closure, completion, consummation like that of Jesus on the Cross where all of this suffering finds some sort of meaning. Into your hands I commend my spirit. We are privileged to be part of that consummation, even though the pain of loss will run deeper in her family when everything attempts to return to normality. Normality marked by the absence of one so beautiful. God be with them to console them.