Ten years ago tomorrow, in Killarney, a brave soul perished. Blind from the age of 8, he held his own in the world of the sighted. He often said we who can see are at a disadvantage – we rely on sight alone and are blind to all the other senses. Once, cycling through France, I asked him what he was getting out of it. After all, he could not see the beautiful countryside we were passing through.
          “Oh, you’d be surprised!” he said. “I can feel the sun on my face so I know which direction we’re headed in. I know there’s a clump of trees over there because the wind from that direction smells different. We just passed a farm on the right and there’s dust on the road.” He was alive to everything and particularly perceptive about people. “It’s all in the voice,” he said. “Listen to that and you won’t go far wrong.”
          He said we’re distracted by the show people put on – their clothes, hair, expression are all designed to project the image they want us to see. But they can’t hide their true character if you listen to the voice. He was right. The Cuban email pal was a case in point. She was living in Miami when we met and the first time I heard her voice it sent a chill through me. She wanted to move here and we offered to help – she could stay with us until she found somewhere of her own. It took ten months to get her out. She went nowhere unless one of us went with her and she knew no one. Funded by her shaman healer husband she was quite content to laze around our house with all meals provided for the indefinite future! Still, it was an experience I wouldn’t have been without. Life isn’t all a bed of roses.
          He was full of advice and people often sought his help. But it was tough love with him. He was as hard on you as he was on himself and he was brought up without mercy in a German institution for the ‘severely hindered’ as they call it over there. Made to run, play games, do everything normal people do and to fold his clothes into such exact shapes that when I first met him I thought he sent his washing to a laundry.
          He had phenomenal hearing and his aural skills were unmatched. Local singers and musicians came to his front-room recording studio to record their work and declared it far superior to that produced by the professionals. It was lost on me. He would play me an ‘original’ sound clip and then his ‘improved’ version and I could not tell the difference. The muscians could, though.
          He had moved to Killarney only months before his death and the people in the church he joined had known him only seven weeks, yet the church was packed to the doors for his funeral. They all spoke to me of him and the help or insights he had given them and each one said he had told them that all he wanted was for the two of us to be together again.
          So in death he was given back to me over and over by these kind people. And that is why I love Killarney.
          “Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
         He was 9 days away from his 51st birthday.