Amy’s tearful tribute to brother Seán: ‘I will always love him’
A 16-YEAR-OLD girl who lost her little brother and two other members of her family in a road accident has said she will ‘always love him’.
Amy Wilson paid a heartbreaking tribute to sevenyear-old Seán Wilson McGlynn at the triple funeral in St Joseph’s Church in Binghamstown, near Belmullet, Co. Mayo, yesterday.
Seán had been travelling on the N17 Galway to Sligo road south of Claremorris with his mother Marcella Wilson and grandmother Mary Ann Wilson when their car was in collision with a truck on Monday.
A tearful Amy, who received her Junior Certificate results this week, addressed the overflow congregation.
‘I lost my granny, my little brother and my mum,’ she said. ‘I just want Seán, the baby of the house, to know we will always love him and he will be in our hearts and minds forever.’
Speaking on behalf of Seán’s father, Anthony McGlynn, Michael Gallagher said Anthony wanted to express his deep and enduring sorrow for the loss of three people very dear to him.
He also wanted to express his gratitude to the thousands who attended the removal and funerals as well as those who assisted at the scene of the tragic accident.
Parallel to the altar rested two brown coffins containing the remains of Mary Ann Wilson and her daughter, Marcella. Each coffin carried a photograph.
At a right angle to the two coffins was seven-year-old Seán’s white casket, adorned by his own photograph and his beloved Paw Patrol teddy bear
Before the Mass, the silence in the church was broken by sobbing when Mary Ann’s heartbroken husband Joe approached the coffins and kissed each photo in turn. Father Kevin Hegarty, assisted by six co-celebrants, presided over the funeral Mass. In a homily lasting 16 minutes, Fr Hegarty said no words – not even a multi-volumed Oxford Dictionary – could describe the anguish of the bereaved families.
Pledging his support for those affected, he said the Wilsons had enriched the lives of those who knew them and loved them. Mary Ann, he said, had been a wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. ‘Motherhood was at the core of her being. She knew the language of love and she expressed it eloquently in the way she lived.’
Of Marcella Wilson, Fr Hegarty said the single mother-of-four had been full of life and laughter when he knew her as a student.
‘She had her personal difficulties but she confronted them with courage, grace and dignity,’ he said.
Describing Seán, the clergyman said he had been full of life, energy and ‘divilment’.
As Fr Hegarty spoke, gentle autumnal sunshine shafted through the stained glass windows and the altar skylight of the thronged church.
The priest called on the community to support Marcella’s other children – Amy, Kelly and Anthony – to give them the kind of life their mother passionately wanted for them.
On their way to Cross Cemetery in Belmullet, where the three accident victims were laid to rest, the three funeral hearses stopped briefly at the Wilson family home in a touching ‘farewell’ before resuming their journey.
‘She knew the language of love’