My younger sister Claire’s final resting place is infused with the lavender scents of Provence and its rich palette of colours, painted by the famous native son Paul Cézanne.
While he is also interred in Aix-en-Provence, Claire’s artistic talents were more fully expressed in her gardening and cookery, DIY skills, and wicked sense of Irish humour, which never abated, despite a lifetime spent living in France.
She was brave, too. So brave. She stayed spirited until almost the end, which was early on a sunny morning last October 2nd, 3½ years after she was first diagnosed with glioblastoma (a fast-growing and aggressive brain tumour).
That news was like being hit by a double-decker bus here on the boreens of the wild west in April 2021. I had wondered the previous day why she hadn’t joined in a WhatsApp chat marking the first anniversary of our father George’s death.
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He had taken his final breath in his Westport nursing home as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the globe. My sister had watched his funeral service remotely as some of our family sat in the front pews of an otherwise empty church. The last time she had been home for a funeral was for our mother’s in 2018.
Ironically, a year earlier, in May 2017, we had all gathered in the picturesque town of Mozzate, near Lake Como, devastated by the death of our youngest brother, Dermot, from pancreatic cancer. His ashes lie in a sun-soaked crypt with his wife’s family, the Borghis.
You could call Claire a wild child. Her teenage years were filled with rebellion as she straddled that time in Dublin, which was still a place we called “town”.
I can easily conjure the image of her sweeping through our kitchen in Lucan and straight out the back door as Daddy threatened and failed to ground her. Her long black cape and big curly head of hennaed hair defining her duskish shadow as she waited down the road for the 25 bus from nearby Dodsboro to town.
It was the mid-1970s and she was part of the city centre scene, working in Captain America’s on Grafton Street before moving over to Betty Wall’s vintage clothes shop on Crown Alley in a dilapidated Temple Bar, which was almost transformed into a big bus depot.
Claire always spoke French with an Irish brogue. She seamlessly transformed her sharp wit and sense of fun into the cadences of her French expressions
In so many ways, these years of the Dandelion Market, patchouli oil and elephant flares defined my younger sister even though she lived most of her life in France, having met her husband-to-be Michel on a plane en route to Bangkok.
Claire always spoke French with an Irish brogue. She seamlessly transformed her sharp wit and sense of fun into the cadences of her French expressions, charming her more reserved French friends, putting manners on the starched world of officialdom.
“Tu comprends, je suis Irlandaise et nous ne tolérerions jamais une réglementation aussi stupide.”
Which probably translated in Claire’s dialect as: “Do you realise I am Irish and we’d never put up with this kind of stupid shit?”
Despite coming from a family splintered by our parents’ separation when she was 24, travelling the world throughout her 20s, marrying in a civil ceremony in Aix-en-Provence in 1993, living for most of her life abroad, returning home infrequently, the yearning was always a deep part of her spirit.
When home, she loved nothing more than picnics on Old Head beach, near Louisburgh, with the salt air of the Atlantic replacing the waves of heat from the Mediterranean.
For me, it is not the proximity of a grave; it is about keeping my sister and brother alive in my heart
We feel fortunate now, as we grieve her absence, that her two daughters, Lucy and Marine, have embraced their semi-Irishness.
Like Dermot’s two sons, Patrick and Liam, whose primary home is with their Italian mother, they have embraced their daddy’s home country by attending Irish universities. It is so comforting to hug this next generation, catch a gesture or look that enlivens the past, gather with the Irish cousins, laugh, cry, reminisce and tell stories.
For me, it is not the proximity of a grave; it is about keeping my sister and brother alive in my heart. In November 2014, when George, our father retired after 44 years as Bridge Correspondent of The Irish Times, Claire came home for the shindig.
The following day, we walked through Temple Bar, across College Green and up Grafton Street to McDaid’s pub: that doughty institution of poets of the past. It was one of Claire’s watering holes, too, when she worked in Captain America’s.
In the words of Paddy Kavanagh:
“On a quiet street where old ghosts meet,
I see her walking now ... ”
