Kevin Myers: Christabel Mary Harmsworth Bielenberg, the last great witness of Hitler's Germany, paid her final visit to St Columba's Church in Tullow on Wednesday, and the Bielenberg tribe, tall as oak trees, gathered as a grove in the front pews to bid her farewell.
You could tell she chose the music; Fauré's In Paradiso; Ave Maria in German; She Moved Through the Fair; "The Lord's my Shepherd", and of course, Abide with me.
Christabel was truly a daughter of Ireland's middle kingdom: the Ireland of Goldsmith and of Yeats, of Shackleton and French, an Ireland which most of us now recognise as being as validly Irish as the Ireland of the Gael. She was herself an exemplar of the virtues of the middle kingdom, both martial and literary. There was always something of a general's wife about Christabel, always a hint of an obliging soldier-servant loitering just within earshot. And of course, she became one of the best known Irish writers in the world, though her name has usually not found its way into self-styled Irish dictionaries of celebrity.
On her mother's side she was connected with three great Irish newspaper magnates - Lord Harmsworth (Cecil King), Lord Rothermere (Alfred Harmsworth), Lord Northcliffe (Harold Harmsworth) - people of modest enough background in Chapelizod but of enormous drive and single-minded ambition.
Such similar steel glittered in Christabel: it showed in her eyes, in the unbending and unflinching manner in which she faced adversity, but it was tempered always with a grave courtesy and a quite bewitching charm. For she was, above all else, utterly adorable.
You could see this as her grove of oak trees, some no longer so young, were visibly grief-stricken in St Columba's church, though she had passed her 94th birthday last June, her hearing and her sight were largely gone, and she had for some while before that been marking time before she went the way of her beloved Peter. So even though the call of death was due, and it was in its own way welcome, her passing has left a huge void in their lives: in that redoubtable Bielenberg woodland, there will always be a clearing where the noble oak of Christabel once stood.
Christabel was of course the author of one the greatest books about the Second World War, The Past is Myself: and though it brought her international recognition, and no small amount of money, I think what gave her the greatest pleasure of all was that it became an established work on the Leaving Cert syllabus. She felt enormous pride that the young people of Ireland, the country to which she was passionately attached in that understated way of the middle kingdom, were able, through her testament, to learn something of Hitler's Germany.
We needed, we need, that testament; as does Germany. In the darkest days in the history of the world, there were brave Germans who were prepared to risk all; and as we now know, that risk they took, and that all they gave.
And not just that their country might be free, but that if it were to perish amongst the nations of the earth, at least it would not do so with complete dishonour. Or, as the 22-year student Sophie Scholl said, shortly before she was guillotined in Stadelheim Prison for her part in other anti-Nazi activities: "So many people have died for this régime, it's time somebody died against it."
As is well known, Christabel and Peter were associated with the July plot against Hitler, and that they too did not end up on the end of piano wire on butchers' hooks in Ploetensee prison alongside so many other conspirators was in large part due to Christabel's patrician authority. To confront the Gestapo in its own headquarters as she did takes true Harmsworthian gall. The purge that followed the bomb plot swept away almost all their friends, so giving them an understanding of life and of death which few of us can ever know.
She and Peter settled to an idyllic existence in Ireland after the war; and here they found the true measure of their lives. They made their home outside Tullow into a little paradise, perhaps best seen in late spring, when daffodils bloom in their thousand and the Wicklow hills glow to the north. And they would have been an education to the health lobby. The last time I saw them together, they were relaxing in their glorious sitting-room, each with two packets of cigarettes before them, which they smoked, one after the other, without bothering with matches. One did not get secondary smoking there, but primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary - the lot.
And who gave a damn? They loved one another, and they loved being with one another. Their marriage lasted 67 years, from the early days of the Third Reich through to the end of Communism, and to the sunlit uplands where their oak grove prospers and grows; so much so that Bielenberg is almost as Irish a name as Burke or Fitzgerald. Knowing them was a great pleasure and a privilege.
In life, we can understand almost nothing about death; and maybe in death, we learn nothing because there is nothing. However, if there is an afterlife, then Christabel is now renewing old acquaintances: Berthold and Claus von Stauffenberg, General Henning von Treskow, Adam von Trott zu Solz, General Freidrich Olbricht, Arthur Nebe, Freidrich Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg and so many others, who gave their lives for freedom and for the honour of Germany.
But most of all, she is in Peter's arms again.