There is always something arbitrary, as well as absolute, about the death of any person, even if that person has borne a difficult illness with stoic grace over an entire life: and so it was with the passing of Mary Lappin in July. She had known for some months that her lifelong battle with cerebral palsy was now complicated by a cancer, but somehow those who visited her felt that, like one of Beckett's walking wounded, she would always find a way to go on.
It was not to be. Her death robs many people of a radiant spiritual presence as well as a dear friend, but such was the strength of her conviction that the spirit can survive the breaking of the body that it is possible to think of her as having been set free of life as well as deprived of it.
She was born in 1929 and grew up in Sligo, the eldest of five sisters. Although she never took formal public examinations, her learning was so great that local parents soon commissioned her to give grinds to their children in Irish and Latin. She served on a number of voluntary bodies, including the Feis Cheoil.
Later, she became known to an even wider circle as PRO of the Yeats Summer School. A consummate democrat, she believed that its debates should be available to the public at large and so she - sometimes mercilessly - extracted advance summaries from still-preparing lecturers. When reporters went AWOL to a Sligo hostelry, she often phoned the copy through herself.
By the end of her stint in 1995 she was a close friend of many leading writers and scholars, all of whom were impressed by her shrewd and witty reading of character as well as of texts. She used her position to promote the work of emerging young poets such as Frank Ormsby and Paul Muldoon: and on the day that one of the very earliest of her singing birds carried off the Nobel Prize she was delighted to receive his postcard, sharing in the joy of that event.
Between 1972 and 1978 she wrote (or, more accurately, dictated) a radio column for the Irish Press. Every sentence in it was sculpted to a rare pithiness and her judgements were utterly honest, sometimes even acerbic. She became a respected adjudicator of the Jacobs Awards.
She often surprised visitors to the Yeats Schools by introducing them to relatives whom they never knew they had. She was widely read and had an acute memory for everything she heard, telling one astounded lecturer at a recent school that: "Your lecture was good - but it was much better when you first gave it in 1973".
Spiritual rather than religiose, Mary had a love of mischief which drew her naturally to life's subversives and dissidents. She loved to see overweening authority humbled and had a knack for discovering and proclaiming neglected talent.
Her connections extended to a Benedictine community in the California desert, which she visited annually, as one monk waggishly told me, "for her own physical health and for our spiritual renewal". She had about her a sort of still authority which drew many secular intellectuals into her company. Every year, following her arrival at the monastery in Valyermo, a group of writers and critics from the university at Santa Barbara would drive down to spend some days with her and her equally remarkable friend, the late Fr Denis Meehan.
They will all be saddened and surprised to know that she has gone, but I do not think it fanciful to say that many of them will continue to speak with her spirit and to draw strength from her example. She showed that one way of surviving this strange world is to live as gracefully as you can with its imperfections - but only after you have done your very best to reform them.
Her sisters and family deserve not just our heartfelt sympathy but also our gratitude, for their kindness over many years helped to keep her so rich a presence among us.