My favourite uncle died this week.
This is him walking the wooden monkey who lived in my childhood home, and it is pretty much classic Seanie. He was a legend.
He’s one of four uncles (on my dad’s side) but the others I have literally only met a handful of times, the five times I’ve been to Ireland. Seanie came to visit every second Christmas from before I was born… He knew me, and my husband, and my kids. He stayed in my home. He walked our wooden monkey.
He encapsulates what an uncle is, to me. He was funny and sardonic and intelligent and a great conversationalist. He kept to himself, happy to read and accept a cup of tea if you were making, equally happy for the kids to play around and on top of him. When we were kids, we would wake him after long nights drinking with my dad by jumping on his bed. As adults, we were slightly more respectful…
Seanie lived a fascinating life: leaving the seminary in Rome because the trainee priests weren’t taking it seriously enough (!) and instead teaching English in Zambia, Botswana and Tanzania his whole career, before returning to Ireland and his extended family in his later years.
His Parkinson’s made the last few years difficult, and difficult to communicate, but only 5 years ago he came out when my mom was dying and was such a support to my dad – playing endless games of 25 and drinking beer and offering his quiet, steady presence in such a tumultuous time. I can so easily draw on a bouquet of memories, all of them lovely, most of them funny, when I think of him.
What a gift to have been given this precious man as my uncle! What a long and lovely gift… And how different the experience of grief when someone has lived long (he was 79) and the end has been expected for some time.
There is sadness, yes, and deep missing of the past, but there is also peace. That, too, is a gift. It feels epic in that he is the first of my dad’s nine siblings to go. It’s the end of an era…
Do you have an uncle? I’m so glad I had mine.
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