Aunt Bridie

By AM Tuesday, December 25, 2012

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Christmas Day amongst everything else is an occasion when some of us take a bit of time out from the festivities to reflect on those who didn’t make it this far. In the final months of the year I made the journey to Belfast by train for the funeral of a much cherished aunt. Bridie Stinson was the last of the Shannons from the Grosvenor, having been predeceased by all her siblings and parents. And she was a treasure. The Shannons were my mother’s side of the family lineage.

I had known Bridie for as long as I recall. She reaches back into the nascent stages of memory, taking me to see Santa in Woolworth's as a very young child. It is my first memory of meeting with the great man.

With all my father’s side now gone as well I guess that puts me head of the bloodline that merged from both the Shannon and McIntyre families. It might also make me the next in line to pop my clogs all else being equal in the order of things, but that isn’t something I dwell on. Long having shared the Mark Twain perspective, I realise I was dead for all those billions of years that the universe existed before I was born. Not one problem did it cause me. And it will be the same once my coil expires.

Bridie had a let your hair down type of attitude. Alone amongst my aunts I could talk to her as easily as a friend. There were many things she may not have agreed with me on but she was not the judgemental type, so while we would disagree we never argued in any real sense of the term. When her sister, my mother, died five years ago Bridie was amazed if not aghast at how much atheism was around the house. I told her my mother had read Richard Dawkins rather than Thomas Merton, a one time favourite of hers, while she was nearing the end. Despite her deep religious conviction we slagged about it rather than seriously discussed it. For sure she would ask me if I was not afraid of Hell and would look at me as if I had horns when I pronounced it all religious bunkum. Bridie’s love of life was such that she told me it would be preferable to exist in Hell than for life to be snuffed out completely and forever.

Not long before Bridie died I was rushing through Belfast city centre to catch a train. Glimpsing her through a crowd I pursued her.  Despite making my train on time being doable if I continued on my way I doubled back across Donegal Place and managed to catch up with her about Fountain Street. There were trains aplenty but only one Bridie. We went in for coffee and were joined by a Sinn Fein friend I ran into fortuitously and who at one time was one my co-accused. Whatever his antipathy towards my views, or my incomprehension towards his, neither of us carry them around on our backs like humps. 

When I got out of prison in 1975 I would often visit Bridie in McDonnell Street, stopping en route as I would cross the city from the Lower Ormeau Road to make my way to Twinbrook where I lived, or at least where I put my head down at night.

At the cathedral for her funeral mass two of my brothers stood outside. I opted to go in. It seemed a waste of time to rush up from Drogheda just to stand in the cold outside a chapel. I am glad I did.  The prayers meant nothing to me but to hear her friend, the officiating priest, deliver a narrative of Bridie’s life was something I found engrossing.

Bridie Shannon Stinson was not my Great aunt, but a great aunt she most definitely was.