A light goes out forever in Portobello as Colette and Robert are reunited
THE picture in the front window was, out of the blue, gone. One day, the week before last, the picture in the front window of my neighbour’s house was taken down. It was of a young boy in a Barcelona Football Club replica top, smiling. When I moved in next-door five years ago, it was one of the first things I noticed: young Robert Wallace smiling from the window, frozen in time. As the years went by, I heard the desperately sad story of how Robert, aged 18, was killed in a motorcycle accident in Crete on September 11, 2005.
His parents, Pat and Colette, never recovered from that day. And Robert’s beautiful mother in particular. It was like a light went out in her, in her life, in her marriage. I only saw Colette possibly three or four times in that whole five years. She dropped in a present once for the baby. She was a lovely and dignified woman who hid her pain from the world, behind the permanently drawn curtains of her home.
On January 23, however, Colette didn’t need to hide her pain any more: she passed away in the night at her home in Portobello.
If it was possible to die of a broken heart, then Colette died of just that. The day after, her husband, Pat, took down the picture of Robert from the front window.
Robert and Colette are now both gone forever from the house. The house seemed suddenly dark.
The lights went out on September 11, 2005, in Crete — and in Portobello.
And for Colette and Pat, I don’t think they ever had a chance of coming back on.
The first time Pat met Colette was in the Garda Club on Harrington Street around the corner from where they would live. He was calling the bingo numbers, and his luck was in when this beauty from Walkinstown, Colette Hart, walked in and stole his heart away, 40 years ago now.
Pat’s brother, Vinny, wasn’t best pleased that day, because he had his eye on the stunner who would become Pat’s wife. Colette will be forever framed in Pat’s mind’s eye as that beautiful woman with a heart of gold, with the soul of an angel. She was a fantastic mother to Robert. Robert lived for her. And she for him.
Sadly, with his tragic passing, the lovely luminous light in Colette slowly but surely dimmed then, and finally, went out for good.
How could it not when Colette lost such a great son like Robert? I know Pat’s heart is as irreparably broken as the Hart family’s hearts must be about the loss of their beloved sister.
Colette has been taken from them — like Robert — too young, too early away.
The only consolation to them is that Colette is perhaps now where she always wanted to be: reunited with her beloved Robert. She is happy again next to him. The lights are back on finally — and forever — for Colette in heaven next to her son.
I went to Colette’s funeral Mass last Saturday morning. The church was packed with those who loved Colette: her husband Pat; her sisters Irene and Carmel; brothers Declan and Eamonn; mother-in-law Josephine; in-laws and partners Patricia and Pat, Anne, Vincent and Orla, Caroline and John, Thelma, Evan; nieces; nephews; extended family; and friends.
The priest, Fr Joe Kennedy (something of a character with a turn-of-phrase as much suited to presenting The Late Late Show as the altar) presided over an emotional celebration of a great young woman’s life in the Church of Saint Agnes in Crumlin, and later at the blustery graveside at the Bohernabreena Cemetery.
Colette — and Robert — will be missed in Portobello. I later found out that Fr Kennedy, the priest who celebrated Colette’s funeral Mass, is a good friend of Fr Ralph, the priest who baptised my daughter Emilia. (Fr Ralph and Fr Kennedy live with all the other men of the cloth in Mount Argus.) It says something about the strange nature of existence in a way: one man sent Colette to God and the other prepared Emilia for God.
It was Emilia’s birthday yesterday. She turned two. She got a few new toys from her mummy and daddy and her uncles and aunties and her great-granny Mary, but overall Emilia seemed happiest outside splashing in her baby Wellington boots in the muddy puddles along the banks of the canal (It’s a Peppa Pig thing.)
When we got in the door two hours later and I took off her muddy boots and put them away, I noticed something: her first pair of boots that we bought her when she was one — and she has long since grown out of — were in her little drawer.
I was suddenly wistful at the sense of something lost forever. A part of her life was over. It was hardly monumental but Emilia’s first pair of shoes no longer fitting her touched a nerve. It was a moment of reflection as much about the passing of time as a father as Emilia moving into the next stage of her life.
It reminded me of something Gabriel Byrne once told me: when he lived in California in the mid-1990s the actor would drive his baby daughter Romy to school every day.
It became second nature to open the back door to put the child in her car seat.
Buckle her in, get into the front and drive. Unbuckle her, take her out.
And then one day she didn’t need that car seat anymore.
He could vividly remember opening the garage door one day: “And there was this car seat sitting by itself.”
Romy looked the same as she did the day before or the week before but his daughter had moved into a different period of growth.
It will be a sad day in Portobello — and in my heart — when Emilia no longer needs her car seat.