The loving heart of Tomas O Ceallaigh

THE supermarkets on the outskirts of this country town are full of cupid-themed cards and chocolate hearts, all claiming to speak the language of love.

Maybe I noticed that none do so in our native tongue because this St Valentine’s falls just a day over a calendar month since the passing of Tom Kelly, or Tomas O Ceallaigh, as the former RTE journalist and Midlands correspondent was more commonly known in recent years.

Though more than the language of love and the love of our language, and land, came together in this green living gaeilgeoir. Because while many say they would give their life for those they love, far fewer are prepared to donate their death for the benefit of complete strangers.

For Tomas is still giving, though he is gone from this world. Bequeathing his body to the UCD

School of Medicine enables medical science to do vital research and train another generation of doctors so that others might not suffer as he did.

“I hadn’t realised how unusual it was,” a relative told me. “I thought bodies were donated every day, but that’s not at all the case. The hospice says it happens maybe every six months.”

A spectacular and moving tribute to Tomas was held a week to the day of this death, which incidentally he shares with James Joyce. Perhaps more poignant was a friend’s observation that Tomas died at the same age as the great Irish language poet, Sean O’Riordan, whom he revered.

But this keen cyclist with strong rural roots in Co

Roscommon also cherished a poem called The Fly by William Blake, so much so that one of his sisters read it at his memorial service. It goes:

Little Fly,

Thy summer’s play, My thoughtless hand, Has brushed away. Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance,

And drink, and sing,

Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life

And strength and breath, And the want of thought is death;

Then am I

A happy fly.

If I live,

Or if I die.

Tomas kept his brave six-month battle with cancer largely to himself. It meant that many of his friends were distraught when they learnt of his death.

But maybe this spiritual man, who always spoke from the heart, wanted to spare them both the burden of an official goodbye. And to keep things real by leaving his relationships exactly as they were, almost as if saying ‘to be continued’.

Especially as he surely knew that the similarly nonconformist Blake’s beliefs were transformed by the loss of his beloved younger brother, Robert, this month in 1787.

After Blake saw his brother’s spirit rising up through the ceiling as he died, “clapping his hands for joy”. Blake claimed that Robert’s spirit continued to visit him and that in a dream taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other works.

So why buy Made in China cards and hollow hearts? When love is not just all around but always free to give.