That first morning in the tiered physics Theatre in UCD, sensing something behind me, I turned. She was sitting at the back, her eyes unfocused and reposing in infinity. Those eyes alone could have stopped a train; they certainly had no trouble halting my heart.
The young Fedelma Cullen was and remains the most beautiful human being I have ever seen. Her beauty was certainly aided by her exquisite features and by those astonishing orbs which in other people go by the name "eyes" and which in her case were searchlights; yet no mere physical features could have caused the divine golden glow that sprang from the rest of her face.
Science might one day devise instruments to measure beauty like Fedelma's: it was a heart-stopping, breath-taking, head-turning, car-crashing luminous aura, of a kind which must be found in some as yet undetected corner of the electromagnetic spectrum.
But of course, fate takes with one hand what she gives with the other, and Fedelma was afflicted by deep and irremediable medical problems all her life. They began almost from the moment of her conception, and they meant - among other things - that she could never have a child. Moreover, she spent much of her adolescence being examined by gynaecologists - undignified and traumatic for a teenager today, quite horrifying for a girl in that distant decade of the 1960s.
She was, however, incredibly brave, and this enabled her to deal with her physical problems and also manage the many handicaps of beauty. She wanted to be an actress, so an actress she became. Yet her choice of career might have been inadvertently influenced by the St Louis nuns in Monaghan: they dinned into their girls the vital importance of emotional discipline.
Spontaneity, vivacity, frank displays of feeling - these were severely discouraged. Young women were meant to be models of decorum, ice-queens who would not hesitate to put boys firmly in their place.
So the stage gave an opportunity and a licence for her to behave in ways she had been very vigorously groomed not to permit in real life; yet she didn't have to act to seize everyone's attention. Being there was sufficient; and to have stood on the same stage as her must have been quite terrible - a ragwort beside her rose. Yet even then, she retained a central reserve. One so often felt that there was much more going on inside her than she would ever show.
Did she know how beautiful she was? No: not possible. Only other eyes, other minds, other hearts could register such beauty. Women who are self-confidently beautiful legendarily do not befriend other beautiful women. But Fedelma's best friend at UCD was the second most beautiful woman of that year, Nuala Hayes. Jesus, the sight of them, that distant summer of Strawberry Fields Forever.
Not then but later, Fedelma and I became good friends, as she freed herself of the legacy of St Louis; and though she developed a deep and bawdy sense of humour, she retained that private, inner self - aloof, wry, observing, the secret she that resided deep in the amazing pools that were her eyes.
What kind of actress might Fedelma have been had she not in far later years become Donal McCann's lover? For the gradual departure of her astonishing looks had, in breadth and depth, hugely enriched her acting. She should now have been coming into her own. Instead, she found herself minding Donal McCann, trying to keep him clear of alcohol, and herself clear of his fists when she failed.
For this was too often a dreadful relationship: abusive, violent, exploitative. She gave him her life, her talent, her heart. I do not know what he gave her, apart from, intermittently, some charm and great company when he was sober; and pure hell when he was not.
It was she - and she alone - who in 1986 put him together sufficiently to enable him to star in the career-
rescuing Juno and the Paycock; and it was he who rewarded her with a beating the morning after the run was over.
Maybe she endured such treatment because of her unrealised maternal instincts: she had so much love to give, and he was the ungrateful vessel into which she poured it. In time, of course, he left her for another, younger woman; and when, later, he died, her name never appeared in any of the many official tributes to his admittedly lustrous career.
In her latter days, she expended her thwarted mothering skills on gardening and cooking in her tiny little house in Glasnevin. She wasn't in the least unhappy; for she had grown wise with age and experience, and knew that, as orchids can grow in what may seem to be the most miserly cliffside soils, contentment can be found in modest circumstances and improbable ways. She had a few great friends, dear and loyal, and her career at last blossomed as experience, intelligence and talent finally brought theatrical rewards which should have been hers years before.
But after a small stroke in the late 1990s, it seemed unlikely that she would make old bones. And nor did she, easing from this world two weeks ago in an undemonstrative manner that the Louis nuns would have approved of.
The funeral orations by her brother Paraic, who - God help him - found her body, and by her dear friend Derek Chapman were utter perfection. Then, as her coffin was wheeled down the aisle, the loudspeaker once again and finally uttered the anthem of that long lost summer: Strawberry Fields Forever.