Bernadette Manning – 23rd June 1956 to 26th June 2018 – the finality still shocks me. Yesterday on the phone to the VHI, I broke down in tears when the nice woman asked for Bernadette’s birth date. Bernadette is the woman I loved for 37 years. She was my best friend, and when the law changed she became my wife.
We had two children together and fostered a third; lived in three countries with homes in nine different establishments including a metal barn; laughed far more than cried; argued and yelled at each other as only two control freaks can; drank too much red wine and grew into middle age together – our beings so intertwined that now I don’t know what part of me is me and what part is founded in Bernadette.
What I do know is that three years ago with retirement moving closer, our best was just beginning. Then Bernie was diagnosed with breast cancer followed by secondaries in her brain. Bernadette lived those last three years as she lived her whole life – making plans, with a goal or a project always on the go and most of all enjoying life. She didn’t fight cancer, she simply lived her life. It was only six weeks before she died that she first told me things were getting a bit much, that she was finding it hard to knock a bit of craic out of life.
Bernadette was born in north inner city Dublin and was fiercely proud of Mountjoy Square, where we lived and where she worked to improve the area. She also recently became a proud Waiheke islander and a proud New Zealander, my home country, and it is New Zealand’s loss that she didn’t have time to work her magic there.