Extraordinary LIVES
MY HUSBAND DAVID
DAVID gave his time, money and love to someone every day of his life. Born in Durham, he shared a loving childhood with his younger sister Lorna. The family returned to their Manx roots when David was 12. Studying for his degree, he lived with his granddad in Carlisle, which is when his love for Carlisle Football Club began. David liked to party and enjoyed the odd gin and tonic, and was also a keen sportsman, excelling at tennis, football, weightlifting and scuba diving. He represented the Isle of Man in cross-country. He was 22 when he became one of the country’s youngest quantity surveyors. He worked for the building company Dandara for 26 years in Malta, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Manchester, London, Aberdeen and Jersey, becoming its commercial director. We met when we worked in the same building, bumping into each other in the shared kitchen. David was just out of university, but he told everyone that the second he saw me, he knew I would be the girl he would marry. We wed in 1993 and had to wait nine years for the arrival of our son, Sammy, born two months premature. David was so devoted to his
precious newborn that his friends nicknamed him Daddy Cooil. He was a magnet for anyone with a problem. He made time to listen and put a smile back on their face. At the end of each month, he gave whatever was left out of his salary to a charitable cause, from topping up a friend’s deposit so they could buy their first house to giving away our vacuum cleaner to someone who couldn’t afford to buy one. In 2018, he trained for five months for a white-collar boxing match for charity, raising almost £70,000 for the Motor Neurone Disease Association in memory of the wife of a close friend and for the special care baby unit that had looked after our son. My King of Hearts passed away suddenly — ironically from a heart that was much bigger than normal. More than 300 people came to his funeral, from businessmen to labourers from building sites. The three-legged man is the symbol of the Isle of Man and that was what David called himself, Sammy and me: a bonded triangle that could never be broken. It was only fitting that this was the symbol engraved on his coffin, hand-made by one of his friends. When David died, he was working on a building in St Helier, Jersey, for Barclays and it is being named Cooil House in his honour. Sammy has taken on his father’s charity work and is raising funds to put blood pressure monitors in every senior school in Jersey.
DAVID JAMES COOIL, born August 31, 1967; died November 29, 2018, aged 51.