PUFFS OF cloud in a blue sky and some 1,300 mourners yesterday watched as a hearse carried the small white coffins of six-year-old Zoe and two-year-old Ella Butler to the Church of the Star of the Sea, high above Ballycotton Bay.
Their mother Una carried her daughters' baptismal candles to the church where the family regularly attended Sunday Mass. Relatives carried symbols of the sisters' lives - soft toys, a judo outfit - as they stoically followed the little coffins inside.
"Love is the theme of our Mass. We think of the love that these two little children exuded during their lifetime," said funeral celebrant Fr Aidan Crowley, supported by six priests and the Rev Walter Hill of the Church of Ireland.
He described "two beautiful little girls, two princesses", one a mischievous little two-year-old who loved to dance and once locked herself in a wardrobe, which had to be dismantled to free her; the other a caring, chatty big sister, who loved judo and gymnastics and a nice pair of shoes.
Once, while being helped with her shoes by a teacher, Zoe gazed at her feet and remarked admiringly: "Aren't these the most beautiful shoes you have ever seen?"
Their father, John Butler, whose funeral takes place in Cobh this morning, was expressly included in the service, both in the prayers of the faithful - when a child asked for prayers for all those relatives of Zoe and Ella who have died, "especially their loving Dad" - and in Fr Crowley's homily.
He was at pains to stress that John Butler loved his children. "He loved them . . . Don't take my word for that, take the word of the parish, take the word of Una.
"He would do anything for his children. He was a loving father, but because our human nature is flawed at the very core, because we're all shackled by the fragility, by the imperfections of human nature, then there are aberrations to nature, of mind and body, that affect us.
"That's the price we pay for being human," he added, "for being part of such an adventure in the world, and it's in the quagmire of this imperfection that you will find the seeds of the tragedy that we have in Ballycotton this week."
The Butlers, he noted, lived in a beautiful part of Ballycotton. "Everything seemed to be right, so we ask ourselves the question - what went wrong?"
He read a poem written by a priest who had visited a west Cork home where there had been a cot death: "The silence burned/ Where were the words to dress the scald of parents/ Wherever words were tried, the echoes blistered/ Dogma can dry no tears/ Christ's touch was what they needed, not his teaching."
In the chilly, sombre evening, 40 uniformed children from Zoe's school, Scoil Réalt na Mara, stood shivering in perfect formation to escort the hearse down the hill to Zoe's school, on the little girls' final journey to Cloyne cemetery.
