REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE MEMORY GARDEN IN GLASNEVIN CEMETERY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE MEMORY GARDEN IN GLASNEVIN CEMETERY, SUNDAY, 19TH JUNE, 2005.
Tá lúcháir mhór orm go bhfuil sé ar mo chumas bheith anseo libh inniú, agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl daoibh as an chuireadh, agus as fáilte a bhí caoin, cneasta, agus croidiúil.
I was very moved to receive Ron Smith-Murphy’s invitation to be here today at the inauguration of the Memory Garden here in Glasnevin and I was glad be able to accept.
I welcome the opportunity to be part of this occasion because I recognise how important and how valuable it is to have a memorial such as this one.
The death of a baby is the end of a life in the most tragic, shattering and baffling way. Most of us find the death of a loved one hard to deal with but the death of a baby is a particularly poignant tragedy. A baby evokes in us a powerful unconditional love, often overwhelming in its intensity and of course every little life inspires us to dream of the future that we hope will be good to them. But when that intense love hits the closed door to the future that a still-birth brings, the bewilderment and loss are painful beyond words. Here is a child who never smiled, or said its first word or took its first faltering step. Here is a child whose personality never fully revealed itself over a lifetime. Yet here is a child who was, and is, profoundly loved and profoundly missed. For the parents and for siblings, left to try to make sense of their lives in a world that carries the gaping wound of absence, the grief is a hard cross to bear. My own grandmother gave birth to eleven children among them a little daughter Bernadette who died at just a few months old. Fifty years after Bernadette’s death, she was still spoken of with passion and with sadness, and it was important to my grandmother that each generation would be introduced anew to this little lady whose life and death shaped a family and its store of memories.
Remembering is not easy but it is important. It brings us here today to this sacred place to honour the little ones, so loved still, so missed still and so entitled to the dignity and the respect that this offers. There was a time when the stillborn child was buried in oppressive silence between dusk and dawn - a time mourning was endured in a private, lonely hell because so few took the time or trouble to comprehend the sheer scale of the loss. A brusque insensitivity accompanied that eerie silence and it was not an easy place in which to find the comfort or support to help a person cope.
Things are different today. Now we know of the grief and the lifelong heartache. Now it is talked of freely and these little lives are seen in a much more sensitive and rounded way. But for all that, those who suffer their loss go a very lonely journey that no one else can go for them, but we can at least go with them.
Joan Rivers was right when she said, “You have to let grief break your heart so that the light can get through.” Now this garden is part of the healing light. It will change with the seasons. People will visit in different moods and circumstances. Some days they will be raw with emotion and other days they will surprise themselves at how they have coped and found joy in life again. What better way to vindicate the memory of those little angels than, for those who have life, to live it to the full, and to showcase its beauty in the glory of nature.
I know what the Old Angels Plot was like before it was restored and so I have a fair idea of just how Trojan was the renovation work undertaken by ISANDS. I thank all those whose hearts and hands created a place where the love for these little ones shines as it should.
Mo bhuíochas libh arís. Guím gach rath agus séan ar bhur gcuid oibre san am áta le teacht.