THIS MAN’S LIFE

ANAIS Nin put it well: “People living deeply have no fear of death.’’ So it was with

Gay Byrne. Last year on RTE, Joe Duffy said in the introduction to Once More

With Meaning — where Uncle Gaybo revisited some highlights and guests from his show The Meaning of Life

— that there might be no answers to the big questions of life and death with the show’s host, but it was some journey.

When Gay’s own journey ended last Monday, happy memories of him flooded back for many of us...

My own favourite recollection was of the summer of 2018, sitting in Gay’s house in Sandymount and asking him the question you were never supposed to ask the host of The Meaning

Of Life. (My excuse: I had drink taken; Gay had plied me with whiskey.)

I asked Gay did he believe in heaven, in life after death. Did he believe that’s where he would go after he died?

“I have a policy of never answering that. Because if I do it will disclose my situation.”

His wife Kathleen, arriving with some buttered bread and smoked salmon, possibly let the canonical cat out of the bag.

“He has the faith,” she said, before disappearing as quickly as she arrived.

I asked Gay if it was true. Did he have the faith?

“I’m not going to tell you,” was his reply.

I asked him instead if he could tell me where was God at Auschwitz-Birkenau?

“This is the question people ask all the time,” Gay answered. “And they say the answer — and the only possible answer — is that he ain’t there. It is just that there is evil in the world and Auschwitz-Birkenau was a manifestation of the evil in the world; and God doesn’t exist, because if he did... this is the question Stephen Fry asked about babies being born with awful diseases.”

Gay was referring to the English comedian’s question for God upon arrival at the pearly gates: ‘‘Bone cancer in children, what’s that about?’’

I asked Gay what was that about.

“What omniscient God is going to do that?” Gay said in reply.

How do you answer that? “I’m not telling you I am a believer. But people who do believe, as a woman said to me recently: ‘God doesn’t do that [concentration camps, babies born with cancer]... it is us who do that.’ I said, ‘Us who do what?’ And baptism to absolve you from original sin? You’re an infant in a cot!”

I told him that he looked well.

“If I only felt as well as I look I’d be doing terrific,” he said, laughing. “It is up and down.” (Hearing him talk about his cancer reminded me of Melvyn Bragg’s 1994 interview on Channel 4 with the dying Dennis Potter.)

Gay laughed again when I said that this comment reminded me of Andrea Corr on Once More With Meaning, when she said human beings never really see ourselves properly. Gay had asked the singer from Dundalk about seeing herself as a beautiful woman.

Just then, Kathleen — the beautiful woman who was at Gay’s side all his life — returned with more food: buns, this time. I tried Gay again on the questions I wasn’t supposed to be asking him. But he had refilled my whiskey glass. And his.

I mentioned that in Once

More With Meaning the late Terry Wogan says that he didn’t believe in God.

“I know it’s arrogant,” Wogan said. “Better men, and more intelligent men, than me have believed in God.”

I asked Gay whether he thought Wogan was being funny when he said he didn’t believe in God.

Gay shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I think probably the loss of the child, the little girl, had a profound effect on him.” Wogan’s daughter Vanessa died when she was three weeks old in 1966,

“My mother lost several children and went to Mass every Sunday and never lost the faith,” said Kathleen.

“That’s the conundrum,” said Gay. “How you reconcile one with the other.”

I said to both of them that some Catholics believe God does not give you something you aren’t strong enough to carry.

“Some people are better at accepting and moving on than others,” replied Kathleen.

“Some people are better at reconciling one with the other,” said Gay.

“Your mother, as an old-fashioned Catholic, would have been very good at reconciling the fact that God took her baby but there must be a reason why God wanted her baby, and you have another little angel up there praying for you.”

There’s another angel up there now praying for us.