Sean uploaded this to his Flickr site on 5 January 2008.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
26 November 2011
Pauline says that when she was in Dublin yesterday she kept expecting to see Sean. She says she doesn’t know whether she has fully accepted that he’s gone.
She still thinks of him all the time, and so do I. When I went to the supermarket today it was so easy to picture him walking beside me, to hear his voice, to imagine what he might be saying. The fact that he has died still seems unreal and unbelievable; there is a strong sense that he has not gone away at all. ‘The soul is surely not where it is, but where it loves’, Friedrich Schelling wrote. As I wrote myself in a song, ‘Hope is the cure for the heartache we feel/Hope that life is unending and death is unreal.’
Yesterday I went through old posts on his Facebook page – he uploaded the photo I now use as my avatar on 17 October 2009, exactly a year before he died (although it was taken long before that).
Sean’s music 33 … The Big Strong Man
I was looking through Sean’s YouTube favourites, and thinking of posting a couple of tracks by Nina Simone, when I came across something very different.
I was quite touched to see it, as it’s a song I used to sing in the car on long journeys when the children were small – I remembered it from my own childhood – and everyone would join in. It’s also an excellent pub song, I have found … I sing it with a slightly different tune, as I remember it. Continue reading
Some diary entries … September to November 1998
Sean and Itsy
1/9/98 – While we were eating some pizza for dinner, two wagtails flew into our bedroom window: one soon died; I put the other in a hedge where it may have survived.
2/9/98 – We had to wake Sean and Susanna in the morning for their first day at their new school. Pauline dressed them in their grey uniforms and took photos … [Later] Sean and Susanna both enjoyed their first day – Pauline had worried about Susanna because she cried a bit this morning on arrival, perhaps a bit confused. Sean, typically, ‘completely loves’ his teacher … While the kids were playing at Sinead’s, Pauline and I had a long walk around by Lurganboy. It was a beautiful evening, and the country landscape was lovely. We saw a fox running in a field, playfully (it seemed) trying to catch birds.
3/9/98 – Very happy to be living in the country – it’s so beautiful. Continue reading
The Road
This is song number 18. To listen to it, please click here: The Road
THE ROAD
Here we go
Making our way down the road
Fast or slow
Reaping whatever we sowed
Day or night
Following those that have gone
Out of sight
We’ll catch up with them before long Continue reading
Filed under Ireland, Music, Philosophy of life
Waterfall 4
Another photo that Sean took some years ago in the Fairy Glen, Rostrevor, Co. Down.
Filed under Death, Ireland, Memories, Photography
Some diary entries … December 1998 to February 1999
1/12/98 – I had a walk up the fields in the afternoon; they seemed magical in the fog, which was very thick.
2/12/98 – Bought a Yamaha keyboard for Sean’s Christmas present.
3/12/98 – Before we went to bed I was locking up the garage when I heard a loud and strange noise from the field. I went to call Pauline, who had heard a strange (dissimilar) screaming the other night, then the noise had moved and got more distant. Perhaps the cry of a wild goose or some other bird, but very eerie.
4/12/98 – When the kids got home we all went to Maire’s to feed the hen and chicks … We let the kids stay up for the Late Late Toy Show, having tried unsuccessfully to video it. So they were up till midnight. Continue reading
Sean’s music 32 … Avril Lavigne and The Darkness
Avril Lavigne’s ‘Sk8er Boi’ single was released in 2002, when Sean was 10 or 11 years old; The Darkness’ ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’ came out in 2003. Sean really loved both these tracks in an innocent time before his musical taste began to mature, and the latter was probably a stepping-stone to the liking he developed for guitar rock and heavy metal not very long after.
I remember him telling us earnestly that ‘Sk8er Boi’ (which I mention in my song ‘The Heat of Love’) had a great story … he always liked songs with stories to them. The premise of Avril’s hit (which reached number 1 in Ireland, but nowhere else) was ‘He was a punk/She did ballet/What more can I say?’ (quite a lot, as it turned out). Continue reading
The road to God knows where ... Brendan O'Brien 