In Memorium

Bernadette Manning – 23rd June 1956 to 26th June 2018 – the finality still shocks me. Yesterday on the phone to the VHI, I broke down in tears when the nice woman asked for Bernadette’s birth date. Bernadette is the woman I loved for 37 years. She was my best friend, and when the law changed she became my wife.

We had two children together and fostered a third; lived in three countries with homes in nine different establishments including a metal barn; laughed far more than cried; argued and yelled at each other as only two control freaks can; drank too much red wine and grew into middle age together – our beings so intertwined that now I don’t know what part of me is me and what part is founded in Bernadette.

What I do know is that three years ago with retirement moving closer, our best was just beginning. Then Bernie was diagnosed with breast cancer followed by secondaries in her brain. Bernadette lived those last three years as she lived her whole life – making plans, with a goal or a project always on the go and most of all enjoying life. She didn’t fight cancer, she simply lived her life. It was only six weeks before she died that she first told me things were getting a bit much, that she was finding it hard to knock a bit of craic out of life.

Bernadette was born in north inner city Dublin and was fiercely proud of Mountjoy Square, where we lived and where she worked to improve the area. She also recently became a proud Waiheke islander and a proud New Zealander, my home country, and it is New Zealand’s loss that she didn’t have time to work her magic there.

For Bernadette was a real presence and was never afraid to speak her mind or cause a fuss. Most of her noise was made in an effort to make life better for others. She was a great delegator and could quickly sum up someone’s usefulness, so if you sat down beside her you’d end up leaving with a job to do.

Bernadette was a lifelong feminist and activist. She worked in the London Rape Crisis Centre and the Women’s Counselling Project, developing a method of counselling for women who had been sexually assaulted as children. She marched on many Reclaim the Night marches and abortion rights marches, and ours was one of the homes used by the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group for Irish women travelling to London for abortions to stay in. She fought all her life for children, founding the Standing Committee on the Sexual Abuse of Children to train professionals who worked with children who had been sexually assaulted.

She set up a company for young people in care whom she saw being moved from one residential home to another without being given the opportunity to change their lives or receive an education. She chaired the Board of the Deansrath Family Centre, supporting its growth and development into a leading example of good practice and started the ball rolling on a committee that will see them move into a new purpose-built building.

Bernadette was a lesbian who fought for gay rights, marched in the London and Dublin Prides, hosted an annual pre-Pride breakfast that was difficult to leave in time to catch the march.

She opened her heart, her home and her family to Irish television audiences and newspaper readers repeatedly over the years, laying the groundwork for marriage equality, hanging a YES banner from our Mountjoy Square home during the marriage equality referendum.

She loved music and sang out loud and proud in Glória, Dublin’s Gay and Lesbian Choir, chairing the group that brought the international gay choir festival, Various Voices, to Dublin in 2014. She sat herself up and watched all the way through this year’s Eurovision to the Irish song, when she wasn’t able to hold her eyes open for more than 15 minutes on previous days.

The political work she’d done all her life repaid her in the end, though. We received such kindness from all the health professionals both here and in New Zealand. Not once did we get the hesitation or strange looks in response to my being Bernie’s next of kin; to our referring to each other as “my wife”; or to the inclusion of our children in arrangements. It is such a different environment for gay men and lesbians than the one that existed when we first came out.

We hung a repeal banner from our home during the recent Repeal the Eighth Amendment campaign and although Bernie didn’t live to see the results, she did hear the exit polls, so she knew she could relax and leave the world to the next generation.