Author a 'giant of a man', mourners told

FINAL TRIBUTES: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN was a "giant of a man" who forced people to lift their gaze from his disability and focus instead on the bright, thinking, charming individual that he was, mourners at the author's funeral Mass heard yesterday.

Fr Derek Cassidy reminded family and friends at St Fintan’s Church in Sutton, Dublin, of “the charm, the compassion and the tenderness” of someone who managed with his unflagging will, to “wipe away the blindness from our eyes”.

“Today, we’re here to bury a giant of a man – a man who refused to allow disability to smother God’s gift,” he said of the writer, who died last Friday at the age of 43. Nolan was an embodiment of God’s injunction to “rise above our own disabilities, rise above our own limitations, rise above our ordinary humanness”, he said.

“When we read his work and listen to his lovely facility with language, it opens our eyes yet again. It brings us back to life – out of our own meanness and selfishness and isolation, into a community of shared vision. That was Christopher’s vocation in life, his gift to you and to me.”

Fr Cassidy recalled the excitement that Christy found in nature, “watching the seasons coming and going . . . being enthralled by that cycle of nature”, and how his skill as an observer and a craftsman of sentences culminated in “that lovely winning” of the Whitbread book award in 1988, for his autobiography Under the Eye of the Clock.

“[That] for him, brought in the dawn of a much wider public appreciation of who he was and his gifts and his talents and allowed people to lift their gaze from disability into the eyes of this bright, intelligent, thinking, imaginative person that Christy was in our lives.”

Chief mourners at the Mass were the author’s parents Joseph and Bernadette Nolan, his sister Yvonne, brother-in-law Stephen Corr, nephews Fiachra and Garvan and nieces Sunniva and Djuna.

Fr Cassidy reflected on the care of compassion the author received from his family, and the love they got in return. “To Bernie and Joe: you have a treasure in heaven in your son, Christy Nolan.”

President Mary McAleese was represented by Capt Niamh O’Mahony ADC, and Taoiseach Brian Cowen by Comdt Michael Treacy ADC. Also among the attendees were Fianna Fáil TDs Michael Woods and Seán Haughey, poet Theo Dorgan and actor Conor Mullen, who played Joseph Meehan in Torchlight and Laser Beams, the stage adaptation of Under the Eye of the Clock.

The church emptied quickly after Mass, as family and friends spilled out into the car park set in from the serene expanse of Dublin Bay on this still spring morning. Near the inside porch were a few copies of the Mass booklet, adorned on the first page with a striking picture of Christy in a white tux. Just beneath it was one of his poems, A Pass to Your Dead from Dam-burst of Dreams, the first book he produced, one typed letter at a time, with the “unicorn” stick fastened to his head and his mother Bernie holding him in her arms.

A grave that always waits,

A verge round at front and

A lasting sad cross,

Put away sadness,

Pray all the while,

Past is sorrow,

Heaven will be thine.