Take care, make time for life
PICK three of your best friends, and then imagine all four of you are wiped out in one fell swoop. Imagine that at nine o’clock tonight, in a heartbeat, the four of you are obliterated. It’s hard to even imagine. It’s hard to imagine four people, four centres of their own universes, just gone, like that.
Imagine then if it happened in your early 20s, when you were only getting started. Four heads full of dreams and plans. Snuffed out on a dark cold night on a road half in the middle of nowhere. It’s no ending for anyone. It’s no ending for stories that were only beginning. But the stories of Shaun Harkin, Micheal Roarty, John Harley and Daniel Scott will now forever be stories of young men. No second acts. No seeing how it might have turned out for them.
The unimaginable nature of it is perhaps why the shockwaves reverberated around the country. That, and the tragic poetry and dignity of it. The Sacred Heart Church in Dunlewey, under other circumstances, would have been a beautiful image. This church, in splendid isolation, reaching up out of the valley against the snow-covered backdrop. But then you saw the river of people making their way up to the church, for Shaun Harkin’s funeral, with Errigal brooding in the background. And the reality of four young men going into that cold inhospitable ground hits. They buried them from sun-up to sundown. They laid on buses to ferry people from one scene of devastation to another
At the final funeral of the day, that of Daniel Scott, Fr Sean O Gallachoir said, “Every time that I sit into a car, that you sit into your car, there should be the deep decision and resolution to drive with care, to drive with attention, to drive safely so that no harm will fall on anybody. The car is a lethal weapon. We all know that life is busy, life is hectic, we’re all in a rush. We’re all in a hurry, we all have deadlines. But deadlines can sometimes result in dead lives.”
And he was right. We are all in a hurry. And the four funerals in Donegal were a reminder to slow down. Because we saw clearly on Thursday what really matters. Take time to slow down and make time for friendship, for sport, for your community, to talk to people, to check in with older people. Because that is what will be remembered and will be celebrated later. That is the impression you will leave on this world. And that is the impression these four lads left in their parishes.
And on Thursday those parishes stretched as far as Dubai, Australia, America, and of course Scotland, as they downed tools and stepped out of their busy lives in all corners of the world to slow down, to stop, and to be together in friendship and community and unbearable sadness.