NeuroDivine

At the Nuns’ Church in Clonmacnoise, on Tuesday afternoon, with the Shannon moving in its slow, silver drift and the callows breathing in the wind, I stood before a piece of stonework I couldn’t name. The carved arch, the worn moulding, the quiet authority of the place—all of it felt like the kind of thing my father would have understood without effort.

So I turned to Fr Philip and said, lightly, naturally, “When I’m north again, I’ll ask Dad what that part is called.”

It was a simple sentence, spoken into the open air, the kind of small future we assume will always be waiting for us.

And then I remembered.

The realisation didn’t crash; it settled—soft as the river mist, cold as the stone beneath my hand. I will not be able to ask him. Not next time. Not in the way I meant.

And the tears came.

Not only for the loss itself, but for the quiet, ordinary futures that grief quietly takes away.

Yet the place held me. The ancient stones, the grass pushing up between them, the long curve of the Shannon—all of it spoke of endurance, of lives and loves that have passed through this landscape for centuries.

And I understood that the instinct to ask him, the ease with which I spoke his name, is itself a sign of how deeply he shaped my way of seeing the world.

The river kept flowing. The wind moved through the sedges. And in that monastic stillness, I felt both the ache of what cannot be recovered and the steady truth that he remains part of me—in the questions I still want to ask, in the knowledge he gave, in the love that continues its quiet work.