A FAMILY PORTRAIT OF OUR BRILLIANT KEELIN
Ciara Ferguson pays tribute to her sister-in-law Keelin Shanley, and the immense love she had for her family
SO much has been said about Keelin Shanley’s stellar career in RTE, but she also excelled in her personal life as a wife to my brother Conor and especially as a great mother to her precious children, Lucy and Ben.
She lived for her family, and as a role model to her children she was exceptional. She showed them what true courage and love look like, how hope and acceptance go hand in hand, and, ultimately, how to go on by putting one step in front of the other.
Lucy (13), creative, sporty, dreamy and so kind, and Ben (11), dynamic, thoughtful, and strong, were their mother’s joy, and her love for them was fierce.
Keelin was a force of nature. In everything she put her mind to, she was the energy that made things happen.
Just as she made colleagues want to work harder, she inspired people to be fearless. Never indulging in procrastination or self-pity, she had a resilience born of a zest for life.
That tenacity kept her going longer than we imagined. She had the ability to rebound from the many knocks that terminal cancer bestows, with an incredible grace and acceptance. She never gave up, and in the two years since she had the diagnosis she finished restoring the large tumbledown house she loved in Dun Laoghaire, added another new facet to her journalistic career as anchor for Six One news, took to swimming regularly in the Forty Foot with her children, made new memories, lasted past Christmas into spring against the odds, and, ultimately, gave her children time to grow up a little bit more.
Keelin always had gusto. Or, as Conor lovingly put it, a humble gumption.
The last time she broadcast Six One in RTE six months ago, she knew it was the last time — but no one else, apart from her close colleagues who also knew, would have guessed, such was her consummate professionalism. She was always impressive, with a drive that inspired everyone who came in contact with her.
She was curious and genuinely interested in people and their stories from all walks of life which made for some brilliant documentaries in her career. She gave time to people and was able to draw them out of themselves.
Something of a paradox, she was gregarious in her public life, yet very private in her personal life. There was a quirkiness to her that wasn’t always apparent, and she liked nothing more than strolling through the gritty byways of Dun Laoghaire, taking it all in. She liked real life, as opposed to any sanitised or polished-up version.
It was 1983 when Keelin first noticed my brother Conor on Grafton Street; she was 14 and he 16. Mind you, it was hard to miss him. Conor was a goth, complete with sticky-up hair, black eyeliner, lipstick (all raided from my stash, actually).
It was a slow-burner.
They became good friends, hanging out together around town over the years. Keelin went off to Bologna to work for a year, becoming fluent in Italian. When she got back, they met up during the Dublin Film Festival. It was 1995 and she had begun her career in media as a film reviewer. This impressed Conor, always a film buff, and they finally graduated from just friends to going out together.
But even before they got together, they were nearly married as far back as 1990. They met up again not long after he reluctantly came back from New York when his J1 visa expired.
All he wanted in life was to get back and live there. He met her, as they often did, on Christmas Eve and she reminded him that she had dual US citizenship and offered to marry him so that he could go and resume his destiny in New York. To anyone, this was clearly a crazy idea, but Conor said she made it seem completely plausible. He was still pondering it a few weeks later when he realised that he wasn’t quick enough and she had gone back to Bologna to resume her life there.
From the beginning, theirs was an intense, always lively, and at times tempestuous relationship. Never a dull moment, sometimes you had to stand back and let them at it. Sparky, humorous and argumentative, they were made for each other.
Where Keelin led, people followed. Literally. Conor said she would come out of a shop and stride off in one direction and it took him a while to realise she didn’t know where she was going either. You just assumed she did. Her decisiveness along with an ability to respond fluidly to changing circumstances made her a formidable force.
From the time they got together, it was always obvious to us how much Conor adored Keelin. And vice-versa.
In the year 2000, they were married at a lovely, fun wedding in Markree Castle and celebrated their 20-year anniversary just a couple of weeks ago.
In the last years, their love grew even deeper.
The diagnosis of terminal cancer revealed new depths in their relationship. She felt lucky to have lived such a full life but especially to have met Conor and to have their beloved Lucy and Ben together.
On the day before she died, she said she had married the most amazing man. That she always knew he was a kind man, but it was only when she got really sick that she discovered just how kind.
She wanted people to know this. She knew at her funeral there would be much talk about her and her achievements. But she wanted highlighted the man without whom she felt she couldn’t have gone on the last few years. She was proud of him and his achievements, too. A talented and awardwinning filmmaker and photographer, he happily took a back seat on his own career to spend more time at home so that she could be free to take on the exciting new job at RTE, despite her illness. He even learned to drive for her.
Just as Keelin’s courage grew beyond the confines of the inevitable, so, too, did Conor’s. For better. For worse. All of it was just more time together, salvaging something beautiful out of the pain. Fearless yet practical, she always forged a way forward with optimism and bravery. In the end, she went swiftly and peacefully as she deserved.
Ever the pragmatist, she bought her own Chinese urn at auction for, well, the next thing.
Conor said it was a privilege to be able to be there for her. And he was there through it all, helping her to do it her way. That’s how she was able to hold on to the light inside of herself amidst all the layers of loss — to keep her strength, humour and perspective. To hold herself with dignity and grace to the end.
And I think that’s all any of us could wish for from true love.
The sun came out in the hospital room shortly before she died and again when we exited the church after her love-lit service.
Ever the force of nature. Our bold, brilliant and beautiful Keelin.
“The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life’’ Seamus Heaney
‘The sun came out in the hospital room shortly before she died’
EVERY light in our house somehow ends up on. I know who’s to blame, but that’s another story.
I go around the place muttering to myself about electricity bills or sustainability, switching off the lights room by room. And I remember my father did the same thing after my mother left the lights on.
I have inherited other things from him. I love books on World War II.
This can sometimes cause a problem in my marriage. The other night, when the kids were finally asleep, we opened a bottle of wine and settled down to watch a movie on Netflix. My wife, queen of the remote, made the mistake of allowing me to choose the movie. To her credit, she didn’t once complain — or even nod off — when I made her sit through Dunkirk .I did have to sit through her choice the following night, the appalling The Stranger. She felt the same about my choice of Uncut Gems a few nights later. I loved it; she hated it.
This reminded me of my late parents’ relationship. They used to go out to the movies together in town but would go to separate films: he to a western or a picture about World War
II; she to a horror movie; yes, my mother loved horror movies. Maybe my wife and I will eventually go to that direction: me upstairs watching Uncut Gems and she downstairs in the living room watching The Stranger.
My father also passed on a love of football to me. As a kid, I used to watch Match Of The Day on a Saturday night in my pyjamas. As soon as it was over it was straight up to bed. When my dad was starting to get ill 12 years ago (he would eventually die of cancer), I recall sitting in the living room — in the dark, as he didn’t like to waste money on electricity by having the fecking lights on — with him watching a documentary on Brian Clough.
My dad worked in cars and trucks. In the late
1970s, when he was based in Germany for a time, his neighbour in Hamburg was Kevin Keegan, who was playing for the local team, having made a controversial move from Liverpool. I got Keegan’s autograph through my dad in Hamburg.
Years later, at Christmas in 2009, I ended up being out for a wild night with The Dubliners in Hamburg. Over pints in the Fischerhaus restaurant in Landungsbrucken in the port, Barney McKenna’s laughter could be heard echoing around the old port, not least when he told stories, as he loved to do.
“We were walked off Achill Island one time when we went there to busk in 1963. Put off the island!” laughed Barney, who sadly passed away on April 5, 2012. Then he told the story about a charity gig that The Dubliners played for The Irish Wheelchair Association in the mid-1970s in Dublin.
“A huge row broke out,” Barney began. “There were coshes in socks and everything flying around. And by the end of the fighting, there was more going out in wheelchairs than came in...” *******
They say nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it. I remember my wife and I meeting Keelin Shanley with her young daughter Lucy a few years ago on Windsor Terrace in Portobello. The image of Keelin by the canal with the swans hurrying along behind her somehow stuck in my mind.
She stopped for a chat to say that she was hurrying to Tesco Express at the end of our road to buy ingredients with Lucy because they were going to spend the afternoon baking. And they were very excited about it. And we should drop by to taste a few of the freshly baked cakes some time.
We were neighbours of sorts for a few years circa 2013. She and her husband
Conor lived opposite the chipper in Portobello, around the corner from us. I would met Keelin the odd time in the local coffee shop. I don’t think I ever saw her without a smile.
She was that kind of person: a beacon of positivity. I remember her laugh too. It was what you call infectious. Infectiously echoing around that cafe in Portobello.
Haruki Murakami, in Norwegian Wood, wrote that “People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
I also remember feeling a small twinge of sadness, even though I barely knew her, when we bumped into her one morning with her Lucy and her young brother Ben, and she said they were moving to Dun Laoghaire. She told me the big plans she had for the house. I never saw her again.
Apart from, that is, on the telly, when I would always proudly tell our young daughter that that brilliant woman presenting RTE
Six One News used be our neighbour.
Last Wednesday, standing at the back of St Paul’s Church in Glenageary, around the corner from that new home in Dun Laoghaire, for Keelin’s funeral, it seemed very wrong that Keelin at the age of 51 was no longer with us. Seeing young Lucy and Ben — now 13 and 10 respectively — walking out of the church as their mother was carried out in her coffin seemed almost as wrong.
It is one of the most awful sights in the world to see children suffering such grief, the loss of their beloved mother. And I’m gutted.