Clodagh Finn: When there is an empty chair at Christmas

The jolt of realising that you’ve already sent the last card to a beloved relative is part of the emotional roller-coaster that is the festive season, writes Clodagh Finn.

Clodagh Finn: When there is an empty chair at Christmas

The jolt of realising that you’ve already sent the last card to a beloved relative is part of the emotional roller-coaster that is the festive season,  writes Clodagh Finn.

I’M an inveterate sender of Christmas cards, just as my late cousin Lelia Boyle was. Every year, her card was one of the first to land on the mat, providing a gentle reminder that it was time to swing into action.

If I’m a sender of cards, I’m also a last-minuter which, in these deadline-driven times, ratchets up the festive frazzle another notch.

Not that Lelia Boyle’s card ever added to the panic. It always succeeded in capturing the true spirit of Christmas and wished its bearer peace, good will and a year ahead filled with the same.

For the first time this year, she is no longer on my Christmas card list. She died in August aged 93 and her funeral in Castleisland, Co Kerry, was one of those sad-happy events that celebrated a full life that touched so many.

She taught home economics and religion at Presentation Secondary School in Castleisland and scores of her former pupils turned out to pay tribute to a woman who was ahead of her time.

They posted tributes on Facebook: Genuine, warm memories of a teacher who taught them how to cook, sew, and manage a home, but also one who taught them about life.

She used to quote the old saying that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, but she added a far more useful piece of advice — don’t think you can change someone by marrying them.

Indeed, she told her charges that marriage wouldn’t necessarily be for everyone, a radical message in the Ireland of the last millennium.

My favourite Lelia saying was about books. She maintained that a person needed only five books in life – a dictionary, an atlas, a cookery book, a prayer book, and the Good News Bible.

Yes, there are those who commented that the list was a little heavy on the spiritual, but Lelia Boyle was not only a strong woman, an influencer, and a mentor. She was a Presentation sister with a deep faith.

It was always a comfort to know that, whatever happened, she was praying for you. She’d tell you that you were in her daily prayers in regular phone calls. She often told me that she went through every name in her address book and prayed for each entry.

She had a little notebook, too, in which she wrote the names of a huge number of parishioners and past-pupils who sought prayers to help them cope with life’s many challenges.

Her passing this year truly marks the end of an era.

While we can’t ever know, it seems safe to say that there aren’t too many like her left. Whatever your personal belief system, or lack of it, it is beyond heartening to know that there was at least one person who thought daily about your welfare.

Four generations of our family enjoyed that privilege, and much more. We also had the pleasure of visiting her at Presentation convent in Castleisland, a place of warm welcomes and exquisite apple tart.

Lelia Boyle, born Joanna Boyle on August 23, 1924, at Killeacle, Ardfert, to Patrick and Julia (née Leahy) Boyle, entered the novitiate in Oakpark, Tralee, now Collis-Sandes House, when she was 18 years old.

She was appointed to Castleisland in 1945 and spent the next seven decades there.

As a child, I remember glazing over as she and my parents discussed, in mind-numbing detail, who was related to whom — and how. I’m sorry I didn’t pay more attention because the intricacies of those complex relationships are lost to me.

What will never fade, however, is how my cousin (and I’m sorry to say that I’m not sure if she was a first cousin, once removed, or a second cousin, or indeed if those are the same thing) put a human face on religious life.

There are so many memories.

One Christmas, aged eight, I remember knocking over a glass and watching in horror as a splotch of orange liquid spread out like doom over the pristine starched linen table-cloth. I held my breath, waiting to be ‘kilt’, but the accident was glossed over. Made light of, even.

Sure, it was said later that it was nothing compared to the time my brother somehow got locked into the garden oratory years previously, and a window had to be broken to release him.

Mind you, that too was made light of and we began to realise that the women living in a place that seems so hallowed and ordered knew only too well about the messy treacle of real life.

It shouldn’t, then, have come as a surprise to see that one of those women made such an impression on so many.

We often underrate the good that teachers do; even more so, if those teachers happen to be nuns. Sr Lelia Boyle left a lasting legacy and it seems fitting to recall it this Christmas.

As one former pupil wrote: “You were an amazing woman ahead of your time. I often refer to things you said to us about life.”

Others said her class was their favourite in school, although she was a teacher who had no favourites.

“Everyone was the same in her eyes,” wrote another past pupil. She “gave us plenty of advice even though at the time we took no notice but realised in later years what she had to say was very true”.

There’s a wonderful picture of her at prayer in the nun’s chapel in Castleisland taken by photographer John Reidy. It looks like a Christmas card, framed, as it is, by the tracery on the wooden partition.

As we rush headlong into 2018, it looks more and more like an image from an Ireland past but, thankfully, one that still lives on. To quote another past pupil: “Sr Leila, you will never be forgotten by us.”

Here’s to the many more who won’t be on the Christmas card list this year.

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