Pat Sheeran was . . . No. Talking about Pat Sheeran in the past sense feels unnatural. "Pat was . . ." No, it's too strange. It's as though the Corrib had suddenly reversed direction. Pat was a force of nature, a man possessed, Caliban battling Ariel in the body of Prospero . . .
I miss him. The books and scripts he wrote with his love of the last 15 years, Nina Witoszek (under the extremely rude and wonderful pseudonym of Nina FitzPatrick), will live. But there are legacies more subtle. He threw off ideas like an angle-grinder throws off sparks.
A year ago, rewriting my novel Juno & Juliet, I had a single hole in it I couldn't fill. Unable to finish the book, I went on a wild goose chase with Pat instead. In the car, utterly unaware of my problem, Pat told me a perfect story from his past that completely filled the gap. Pat let me steal the story. Later on, my publisher told me it was his favourite scene.
Wild goose chases with Pat . . . We met once, in the street. I invited him for coffee, he said he had no time, he had to buy some DIY stuff for the new wooden house he was so proud of out in Clydagh, and be out in the bog behind it before dark. A flock of wild geese had flown over the house the night before, and he wanted to follow them tonight. He had a theory they were living on a small lake out there. In fact, would I like to come with him?
We ended up deep in the bog as night fell, no sign of anything larger than a snipe, talking about the UFOs he'd seen in Connemara, and the electrical storms I'd seen in the desert skies of Nevada blasting the night above the old American nuclear test sites. We walked back to the car under the Milky Way, looking up at the shooting stars, and the slow drift of the satellites.
The fantastic tension that arcs between the world as it serenely exists outside our comprehension, and the detailed, inaccurate model we build of it inside our skulls, that tension galvanised him, he jittered with it. He was more intensely aware of reality than most, and more eager to touch it, to feel its flank and guess the shape of the elephant. He knew we were blind.
It kept his mind open. Truth could come from anywhere, the bog or the library. Let's go look for it . . .
I knew him, on and off, for 17 years, since he lectured me on Yeats in what was then UCG. He had no sense of hierarchy. He either enjoyed your company or he didn't. He bought me the odd dinner when I was broke. I never had a chance to buy him dinner back. He was a good cook. A great host.
Already he is drifting into myth. On the bus to the funeral in Navan, the stories were being polished, swapped, perfected. The honorary degrees he gave out free in Eyre Square (on actual UCG parchments, dubiously acquired), because if Ronald Reagan could get an honorary law degree from UCG after illegally mining the harbours of Nicaragua, what were they worth?
And was it over the threatened closure of a post office that he declared a State of Independence in Letterfrack, blockaded the road with a small army of academics and farmers, and eventually negotiated an honourable settlement with the garda∅ when everyone got cold and hungry?
And was a beautiful woman involved? What was in the Polish secret service file on him, in the years he and Nina attended student parties observed by the secret police? Did he really levitate, as he believed? What were the fairy lights of the Burren he saw with Jeff O'Connell? He was so recently planting trees in his new garden, planning its future, with the sons, David and Marcos, of whom he was so proud, with whom he was again close after years of painful disconnection . . .
He is so deeply missed by his sons, by his sisters, his brother, his ex-wife, his friends, neighbours, students, by his beloved Nina, and the directors, producers, editors, and academics he worked with and fought with.
The strangest thing about seeing him in his coffin was that the mortician had combed his hair. What industrial-strength product was required to hold those wild curls back in a smooth, orderly quiff? Wood glue, perhaps. No doubt they have sprung free since, beneath the ground. His antennae, connecting his mind to the universe, crackling with static, exploring another strange world.
Few live so intensely. Few burn so bright. As Anne Marie Fives said on hearing of his shocking, unfair death, so sudden and far too young: Pat Sheeran used up his heart.
J.G.