Ever since I went to Germany, it almost seemed she had identified with Keats:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy! Her association with meteorology began nearly 70 years ago when as a child she would visit Westwood House, the then residential part of the establishment that we now know as Valentia Observatory, near Cahirciveen, Co Kerry. There she would play with the daughters of the superintendent at Valentia, no doubt at hide and seek among the rarest specimens of the phenological garden, or tripping lightly over a ground thermometer or two.
Her adolescence coincided with the birth of the Meteorological Service back in 1936, and in the following years she became close friends with many of those who in succeeding decades were to be its leading lights. When she was 20, Killian Rohan, later to be the director of that service, introduced her to a colleague, Sean McWilliams, one lunchtime in Tralee. Sean fell in love with her, and she with him; they married, and in due course Sean himself reigned over that Observatory that as a child she visited. He did so for more than 30 years.
Sean's work in meteorology and geophysics took him far and wide in Europe to all kinds of scientific gatherings. His wife often went with him to these meetings, and through her effervescent interaction with meteorologists of a myriad of nationalities, she played no insignificant part in oiling the wheels of international co-operation in the science. Indeed, long after Sean had gone, several of these international weather people remained among her closest friends.
Perhaps it is maudlin, even cheap, to speak of things like these, but on such a day what else is there to write about? Weather Eye, in its time, has acknowledged many a departing meteorologist, and it is hard to resist when an invading line from Casablanca seems to infuse itself into the list of prospective topics for the day: "Play it, Sam, play it; you played it for them, now play it for me."
Today, we will bury Nora McWilliams, wife, mother and friend to a host of meteorologists over three generations, on the edge of the Atlantic near to her beloved Waterville. The fierce gales, which even in old age she dismissed as one of Nature's mildly inconvenient trivia, will now be even less relevant to her than they have ever been before.