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.