COLETTE PURCELL RIP

Colette and Frank on their wedding day in 1959

Colette Fahey was 16 when I was born and she would have been into her twenties by the time I became conscious of my Ballyhaunis heritage. So I never knew her as a young girl, only as an accomplished woman.

My main, sometimes vague, memories are of a self-possessed and stylish lady who played the cello and was a comptometer instructor. The comptometer was the cutting edge mechanical calculator in the business world of its day. It later emerged that she was involved in interior design, including of a well known Ballyhaunis pub, but most impressively, of Canon Horan's Knock Basilica interior, as mentioned by the priest at her funeral mass this morning.

Colett and Frank on their 50th wedding anniversary in 2009

Fr. Stephen, PP Ballyhaunis, encapsulated much of my memory of Colette when he mentioned her elegance, creativity, strong personality and quoted what I think was a Castlebar author describing her as "a class act".

I am personally grateful to Colette for her contributions to my own efforts at family history research. I knew I had an uncle who died on the Somme but Colette, through I think Frank's connections with the Military History Society, introduced me to the background to Uncle John's death.

On another occasion she recounted how Uncle Paddy had died because of his impulsive skinny dipping on a lake, from a boat with mixed company where the boatman wouldn't let him back on board for his want of clothing and in deference to the modesty of the young ladies present.

It wasn't exactly like that, but that did turn out to be the guts of it, sort of, and had I not heard her version of the event I wouldn't have had anything to pursue.

At my present age, my contemporaries, those who have survived this far, are dying all around me. So the experience of other people's deaths and funerals becomes a more emotional experience as time goes on. I have even got to the stage that, when I'm taking leave of a living contemporary at a funeral, I suggest that we might meet at the next funeral providing it is not mine or theirs.

Colette's farewell mass in St. Patrick's Ballyhaunis

Fr. Stephen made it a very dignified and impressive ceremony. Though he hadn't known Colette hardly at all, he had done his homework, and in the absence of family eulogies did her proud.

He concelebrated the mass with Colette's cousin, Fr. Frank Fahey, who had once been a curate in Knock, then in charge of Ballintubber Abbey and is currently retired.

The Irish language also had an innings in the form of the Lord's prayer and the music was tasteful and appropriate.

I'll finish with an image of Fr. Stephen's: "Death is not the end, it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has begun.".

May she rest in peace.