Oscar Wilde walked into his office one morning and someone said "did you hear Johnny So and So died". Oscar Wilde responded "You mean we will bury him today because he died ten years ago". Nobody can say that about my father. When my father and myself were looking at Ned draining the Black Garden five years old when he trained the last pony. People were saying "the pony will knock him, kill him". "Why don't you stop him", they said to me. I laughed and said "you are missing the point, don't you see that the pony is giving him vitality and life".

My Dad was born on the twenty second of January 1908 and died on the fifth of November 2001 - almost 94 years of life. He was the end of an era in many ways. He was the last of his own family and that generation of the O'Hanlons to die. He was the last of his own people in Dooncaha to pass on. He was the last surviving member of the great Tarbert team who won the county junior championship in 1929. His death ended a sixty one year relationship with my Mom where we experienced the triumph of love and commitment over quarrels, disagreements and little divisions. He was a man of his time and place. He was aware of his shortcomings and failures, but as he said on his death bed "I did my best".

What gave him that great enthusiasm and zest for life? What activated the vitality within the man to train a pony at eighty six and to walk from Kilnaughtin to Lisloughlin Abbey on the Tarbert 2,000 Jubilee Pilgrimage? He preserved a very healthy balance between work, play, prayer and rest. He changed the gears at different stages in his life. He knew when to let go and move on. I was in the Philippines when he handed the farm over to Ned. I thought he was dying when I heard the news but he was wise to give Ned his head while he had energy to develop the farm. He cultivated interests at different stages of his life, football when he was young, then greyhounds, then horses. He followed his passions, his allurements. He allowed these to activate the giftedness, the potential within him. These vital interests drew the man out. He was rooted in the environment, the community where he was born. He was close to nature, the people in Tarbert and his relationship with God continued to grow throughout his life. These relationships were the secret of his vitality and zest for life. They were the source, meaning and inspiration for all his activities.

Nature was his first book and he drank very deeply from that source. He taught me the names of all the grasses, weeds, flowers, plants and trees in Dooncaha and the local bog land. He valued topsoil and knew the potential of every field on our farm. How he admired the blue green grass and clover of rich soil. He savoured a glass of water from the spring at home. When I came home from the Philippines or Pakistan, he always handed me a glass of spring water "take that, you drank nothing like it since you left here" he would say.