There was something incongruously exhilarating in being alive last week, watching the Pope die.
Usually, in our modern world, an old person close to death becomes an object of pity mixed with sorrow and a degree, however suppressed in the public arena, of benign schadenfreude. In our modern societies, those who are healthier, younger, who believe they have ahead of them enough years to constitute an all-intents-and-purposes forever, tend to see the old and dying as a different species. But John Paul's determination to dramatise his final struggle in a way that communicated - better than the words he could no longer utter - the everydayness of dying is the most reassuring thing we have been told by a world leader in the longest time.
The Pope who told us how to live was, at the end, teaching us how to die. He leaves us sorrowful, yes, but also hopeful. The sympathy we felt for John Paul on account of the painfulness of his physical condition does not extend now to regret for him in the loss of his earthly life, which in a strange way we could almost come to envy.
How long since a death has conveyed to us a sense of a leave-taking for a better place? How long since the continuity of life and death has been so visible in the public realm? His demeanour in the clutch of suffering communicated at once the pain and anguish of the sinner and the hope and joy of the faithful servant of God. By his faith in the face of his impending journey, the Holy Father reanimated the faith of his children and left us shuddering a little at that leaving, but also less afraid.
How we had come to love this man who loved us enough to allow us space to quarrel, in our foolishness, with his wisdom and witness. When, as "young people of Ireland", we sullenly called him "the most reactionary Pope of the century", he smiled and told us how much he loved us. We pummelled his chest and he lightly touched our cheeks, leaving us puzzled and less angry, smiling in spite of ourselves.
Uniquely among world leaders of our time, he seemed to understand the inevitability, indeed necessity, for dissonance between age and youth. We told him what we thought, and he told us what he had found to be true. He taught us renunciation, duty, postponement and how to be grown-up, how to accept the authority that comes with age and responsibility without fear that the observance of duty will make us less popular. He taught us the meaning of the word "father" and the benign purpose of power.
What other leader of our time has exercised so well the responsibility of telling his people things they do not care to hear? What other leader has so defied the political spirit of the age, which resides in being liked above all else? At a time when leadership has surrendered to the clamour for freedoms, John Paul reminded us that, sooner or later, authority must say "No". And he taught us also that what follows is not necessarily unpopularity, but a gradually less grudging respect that slowly turns to love.
John Paul's persistent witness against the evils of Nazism and Communism was not, we should remember, directed merely at tyranny or totalitarianism, but against the seeds of these excesses in the pursuit of human ambitions for earthly perfection. The utopia of which the human imagination is seemingly programmed to dream exists only beyond the horizon of human competence and understanding.
It is likely to be some time before the world comes to understand the true importance of John Paul II, which possibly lies in his exposition of the short-circuit that is freedom of the modern kind.
George Weigel, author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II, said that the late Pope's longest-lasting contribution to his church and the world will be "something that very few people have ever encountered". He had in mind the late Pope's "theology of the body", laid out in 129 general audience addresses over the early years of his pontificate.
John Paul walked on to the world stage at a time of generalised intoxication by particular forms of freedom, hitherto denied us, we had come to believe, by the prudishness and misanthropy of our joyless elders. John Paul's core philosophical offering centred on the reinvigoration of the mystery of the human body as expressed in the uniqueness of the human person and the dignity of the union of masculine and feminine in an unselfish conjugal love, the crucible of "the grandeur of procreation".
It is difficult to outline these ideas in the modern climate of rational scepticism, contaminated as they instantly become by prejudice, cliché, misunderstanding and self-serving cynicism. The roots of these mysteries, John Paul told us, have been lost in the modern way of looking at things. And so we see the imposition, the denial of freedom, rather than the tendering of the only freedom possible on Earth.
Unready, we shrank from his message and embraced, instead, the man. But that's all right, too. The Pope is dead; his words remain.