You will appreciate that the week gone by has been a very strange one for me. You will also appreciate that the gospel of the day is not to the fore of my mind at the moment. I think you would think it strange if I preached here this mornmg without any reference to the events of the week gone by. To do that would be unreal, and would do no credit to the gospel we all purport to serve and strive to live.

At the end of October, Paddy and Eileen invited me to accompany them to his consultant, Dr. Courtney in Kilkenny. The journey from Kiltown to Kilkenny is 20 miles. Paddy sat in the front of the car, Eileen as usual a strong but unobtrusive presence in the back. I asked Paddy to talk to me about the families that lived in the houses by the roadside on the twenty-mile journey. He could name most of them, know who they were related to, and when required, said, 'They have Rower connections, Dick.'

Paddy was intimately connected to The Rower. He was part of the landscape in the place. He loved it and them, and they loved him. He often held court and held by a 'contrary opinion'. His humour, which he had in abundance, was always self-deprecating. He loved pithy stories rooted in the locality. One such story involved a local man in the 1940s. He was living with his ageing and widowed father. The father was in rude good health and there was no sign of him passing the few acres to the son. He made a radical decision: he would emigrate to England secretly. He packed his bag, and silently slunk down the laneway. When he arrived at the end of the lane he heard his father's voice calling, "Come back here, Come back here". He dumped the bag in the ditch and did as he was commanded. On arrival at the house, he saw the father with his hand on his hips at the doorway: "Feck off, you," said the father "'twas the dog I was calling." It was the Irish reversal of the story of the Prodigal Son!

That afternoon Paddy received what was in effect a death sentence. I was brought along to ask questions. Eileen and myself composed a list of questions and I wrote them down with her pen. After the Consultant's first statement, I knew questions were superfluous. The doctor then asked, "Are there any questions you want to ask" Paddy responded with characteristic sharpness: "I don't think I want the answers you have."

Having cried together and comforted one another, my first instinct was to phone Flor Callaghan whom you all know. Flor knew Paddy well over the years. He was I suppose every bit as devastated as I was. Then Flor said, "I hope this doesn't sound cruel, but some great blessings will come out of this. " If it was anyone else who had said that, I would have put down the phone and avoided them for the next few years. But I knew Flor well enough not to do that. And, now that we have reached the end of the journey, I know that Flor was right. While they were purchased dearly, great blessings have come out of that terrible journey. The deep resources of the family were called upon as never before, and not one of them was found wanting. The same applied to friends, family friends, and my own friends here in Galway. For example, Dermot Murray was a daily visitor to Paddy, and Paddy valued his visits greatly. He even found the time, energy and humour to be sartorially critical of Dermot's 'apparel'.

Thanks to your generosity to me personally here in Galway, I was able to fly up to see Paddy in the Mater Private Hospital at will. I was driven to the airport at Carnmore for the 4.30 flight to Dublin and I walked into the Mater at 5.45. I usually left the Mater at 9.30 to catch the 11.00 flight back to Galway. There I was collected by Gerry or Coinin.

On Wednesday morning, January 16th, I could not sleep. I was pacing my room from 4.15 am, reading the poetry of one Michael Hartnett from Limerick. Hartnett died in 1999, and his final poem was called "A Prayer for Sleep." (For text see the last week's Newsletter. )

On Friday morning, it was uncanny to look down the small Church in the Rower and to see the familiar faces from Galway. Faces that I had accompanied through their varied valleys of darkness, and faces that had nursed me here through some very difficult times. And then the little Church filled up with the exquisite music of the Galway Augustinian choir. It was wonderful to behold. Such 'little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love' will never be forgotten by the Lyng family. Another such act was the visit of Bishop James McLaughlin, together with his brother Aidan, O.Carm., on Thursday evening. He drove from Galway to Kiltown, sympathised with the family, drank the tea with us and returned to Galway for an Ecumenical engagement in Kylemore Abbey on the following day.

Johnny is senior to me in the family. He served for 26 years in Nigeria. All his holidays were spent with Paddy, Eileen and the two kids in Kiltown. Providentially, he decided to come home permanently in July 2001. He was appointed to John's Lane in Dublin and, consequently, was close to the Mater Hospital. He nursed Paddy with great care and affection. It was entirely appropriate then that he should deliver the homily at Paddy's funeral Mass.

The homily went as follows:

Paddy spent all his life in this place until devastating illness took him out of it a few months ago. His father died while Paddy was a teenager. First with his mother and then, for the past twenty-six years, with Eileen he made a home on which some of us depended heavily and where everyone found hospitality .We're here today to welcome him back, and to say goodbye. We are a mixed group but by being here we're saying that in our various ways he was important to us, and so we break the routine of our day and week to remember him, and to make our little recommendations to God, to the effect that we knew Paddy, he was alright, and should be gently treated now. We commend him to God with confidence because, notwithstanding the quota of faults, big or small, that's in everyone's baggage, we know he was an honest and compassionate man who respected nothing but what was good. So, he surely finds a place among those Jesus says in today's gospel are happy now. We're here too to say to Eileen, Elizabeth and Patrick that we're trying to appreciate their loss, though we know we can see only a glimmer of how they feel it. Maybe simply being here is all we can do for them in this regard, but we trust that our presence is some help and consolation.

Paddy was grateful to enjoy good health all his life and often said so. In his recent weakness he remarked wryly more than once: "And I never took even an Aspro."

He leaves an abundance of happy memories. In time those happy memories will come to the fore again. But inevitably, for now, his sickness and his death are very big things in the eyes of those closest to him, and are the things of which all who knew him when he was healthy can now be told. That's not a bad thing, because our greatest test comes when we are weak rather than when we are strong. When you come to think of it, the best time to be playing a blinder is in the last quarter before the final whistle blows. Paddy was a private and independent man who lost no grace when sickness took that privacy and independence away. He kept his dignity when all the things on which dignity might seem to depend were gone. He was living and not dying and the difference was important. He was grateful to all and apologetic to none. The sources of that strength in weakness are not hard to find:

He wouldn't be likely to take to the streets to publicise his religious belief but it was there and strong and constant: Eileen brought him home for Christmas and they arranged of have Mass in the house. As the time came he had a bout of severe pain and distress and we suggested that the Mass might be postponed or cancelled. To that proposal he reacted very crossly indeed and evidently didn't think it very bright. Pain or none, he insisted we go ahead, and at the end of the Mass he was even calling for photographs, a thing he didn't often do before. The same quiet signs of what he believed, and what he saw as right, were seen in hospitals in Kilkenny and Dublin.

If religion was a source of his strength in good times and in especially in bad, there was another one and everybody knows it: that was Eileen. Six years ago at our mother's funeral all agreed that Eileen's care of Mammy for days and months and years was excellent beyond description. Well, here we are again: same place, same person, same performance. In terms of love and effort she moved heaven and earth to get Paddy back but it didn't work out as humans hope. Every day she did what needed to be done at home to keep the place going and to give her children as normal a life as possible. She then headed for Kilkenny or Dublin with Denis and Mary , or Kitty , or Stasia and Andrew, or more often on the bus, where she could get a bit of private time, a scarce thing in those hectic months. She went there to sit with Paddy and look after him for as many hours as possible; then she headed home to do the needful before starting all over again early the next morning. And, being Eileen, she did it all very quietly and very very well.

I've said that everybody knew she was a source of strength to him but no one knew it better than Paddy himself. Every night beyond the pills and the needles, and the hospital machinery, and the rituals of the very sick of body but bright of mind, one more thing was needed before he would even try to settle and get some sleep. That was the phonecall from Eileen saying that she had arrived safely in Kiltown, that Patrick was at home and that Elizabeth's whereabouts were known. No sedating device ever defeated that. Paddy, who, as many of you know could get up a bit of speed driving a car was always anxious that everybody belonging to him should drive slowly and travel carefully. One night, as Nan and Michael and Paddy and I looked down from the 4th floor of the Mater at Kitty and Eileen leaving for home, he commanded me to use the phone, and make it quick. So as Kitty made the difficult right-hand turn into Dorset Street she received a call warning her there was frost on the roof of the car: I didn't find her very chatty that night.

The last pillar of Paddy's strength when he was at his weakest was the two children and they didn't let him down. They went to see him at every opportunity and stayed as long as possible, crying only after leaving. At Christmas when he was at home, unable to eat or drink and pitifully weakened, they kept their eyes on him as they did in cloudless Christmasses gone by, with the same love and admiration as when he was strong and they were small. Through the long months of his fading they never turned their faces from him. Paddy would be horrified at any hint of boasting, but 'twas plain he was proud of Elizabeth and Patrick. And the rest of us think he was right.

Even last Tuesday night, which was hard indeed, the phone call from Kiltown was required and came around half-ten. It had to come a second time before he was able to get out a word in answer. After that the distress eased, he managed to say that he was not afraid of anything to respond to a prayer and to send his little message to the three in Kiltown. He was conscious to the last and stopped breathing without the slightest sign of worry or disturbance at half past four on Wednesday morning. For the last week and more, when Eileen had been told that medicine could do no more, she was preparing to take Paddy home. But God got there first.

That's the story and there's no need for preaching.

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