"When beggars die, there are no comets seen." My friend quoted Shakespeare when I phoned to tell him that Dr Dan had died in the Harold's Cross Hospice, in his 83rd year, after a long siege. For five years he had observed the progress of his own cancer with the clinical curiosity of a lifetime in medicine. Even while gravely ill during the past year, he was using his experience to advise hospital staff; his witty self-depreciation, his instructive remarks, interspersed with extravagant Kerry compliments and snatches of old songs, saved him from being the nurses' worst nightmare.
Hardly a week before he died he was complaining to his brother Jackie, who had come up to see him from the O'Sullivan farm at Gortshanafa: "This is a lovely place, and they look after me very well, but they're fussing too much - I'm not that sick!" His death at 11 minutes past 11 on the 11th day of August, during the solar eclipse, had the imprint of his witty way with the world.
Born in December, 1916 - a child of the Rising - Dan had a capacious intellect, fostered early while he was laid up with TB as a youth. A diary for 1934, discovered among his papers, indicates that he was reading everything he could lay his hands on and observing the world around him with uncommon acuity. He studied medicine at UCD and began his career in Cork. When the Emergency was declared, he joined the Army Medical Corps; his service included liaison with his British counterparts, resulting in his being one of the first doctors to administer penicillin in this State.
He practised as a GP and assistant county coroner in Kilbeggan for half a century. Though he retired "officially" at 75 in 1991, he retained a busy private practice; he put in a four-month stint as locum dispensary doctor in Tyrellspass less than a year ago. When his daughter Deirdre asked him, not a little anxiously, when he was really going to retire, he gave her one of his looks: "Two weeks after the funeral." He was seeing a patient in the surgery in his house on the day he was taken ill.
His encyclopaedic memory furnished topics for many a dinner conversation. He loved good food and good drink, blessed as he was with several professional cooks in his immediate family. He could provide the botanical history of even the most exotic plants as he walked you round his award-winning garden, or puncture your firm opinions on Darwin or J. Philpot Curran by reference to the facts. He delivered a scholarly paper at the inaugural Goldsmith Summer School. He was Sir Alfred Chester Beatty's physician for four years; a letter from that distinguished patient describes him as "a wizard at diagnosis". He could be caustic with foolishness, flattery and bombast, but he listened attentively to those in his care, and so won their lasting affection and a wide reputation for his wisdom and patience.
One of my last conversations with him concerned the idea of an after-life. He was quite adamant: there was no such thing, as we might imagine it. We mulled over the etymology of the word "spirit", from the Latin verb "to breathe" and how it carried forward the ancient tradition of a universal "breath of life" which encompasses the individual spirit. And I remembered afterward the lines from Donne's Valediction, Forbidding Mourning:
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no,
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move. . .
J.J.McA.