My latest novel, An Ark of Light, followed the often nomadic final decades of its heroine, known in the book as Eva Fitzgerald, and in real life as Sheila Fitzgerald. For many years her caravan, known as The Ark, was parked in a field in the village of Turlough in County Mayo and I was honoured to go there late in 2018 to give a reading in her honour. In her final decade, however, she moved to the village of Kilmore, near Kilmore Quay in Wexford, where she was made to feel very welcome and very much part of the community thanks to so many local people who befriended her.
Sheila died in a nursing home in Kilmore, Co Wexford in the early hours of August 3rd, 2000 – twenty-five days shy of her ninety-seventh birthday. The young friends who worked so hard to allow her to lead as independent a life as possible, tried to honour the spirit of her last wishes. At her request, one Wexford friend had already taken her measurements to personally make the small wooden box that she wished for as a coffin. In honour of her radiance, his then partner painted this box in such any array of bright colours that it matched the vibrancy of any painting produced in her child art studio amid the conservatism of 1950s Dublin. Sheila was anxious to avoid what she regarded as the ostentatiousness of being transported in a black hearse. While her body needed to legally be held in the care of a Wexford undertakers, they respected her wish by transporting her body to Dublin in an unassuming white van, to the surprise of staff at the Glasnevin Cemetery crematorium. No clergyman spoke in that crematorium but I recited her chosen poem, Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, before the body she had outgrown entered the flames to the sounds of the joyous final chorus of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
Having travelled to Mayo to read from the novel I am delighted that the Write By the Sea festival in Kilmore Quay are giving me the chance to complete my journey by reading in the area where she died when I read from the book in Kilmore Quay on Saturday the 28th of September. I will have a strong sense of homecoming for me. Check the festival website for details when the line-up is announced.