Recalling the Introduction, readers will already know that my wife, Anne, became ill at the end of 2011 and died in July 2012. It remains difficult to reflect on that enormous loss, not just for me but for family and friends.

Many, many people have recorded in personal messages their regard for Anne as someone distinguished by her grace, dignity, intelligence, kindness, modesty, integrity, and love and concern for those close to her. It is difficult to know what awareness she had of the 2012 diagnosis that her much loved daughter, Patricia, had been beset by MS since childhood, but her submission and courage in the face of her own illness was quite extraordinary and was respected as an exemplar by everyone treating her and visiting her during seven months of hospital care.

It overwhelms me to remember that when Anne and I understood for the first time in her hospital room that death was inevitable and close, she told me she saw our life together as an idyll. That wonderful, particular, and precise choice of words was reflected in her funeral Meeting for Worship at Monkstown Meeting House and at the graveside in the nearby Temple Hill Burial Ground.

Throughout her illness, which first manifested itself in a routine blood test suggesting kidney failure, the focus of the medical profession and the support of family and friends was a great comfort to us both. The definitive diagnosis that she was suffering from an unusual cancer called “light chain disease”, a disturbance of the bone marrow’s production of blood cells, was a shock.

While intense dialysis helped restore some kidney function, the available chemotherapy proved ineffective in dealing with the disease. When Anne became too weak for any kind of continuing intensive treatment I did what I could to be with her every step of the way as patient’s advocate and activist, as well as her proud and devoted husband.

At Anne’s death I had no issues to pursue on a personal basis with any medical staff, hospitals, or the health system. I did however feel I should challenge the main hospital authorities in the hope of changing for the better the care procedures that we had experienced as painful hurdles and which I believed no patient should ever have to face.

I had seen in the months of treatment that patients and families ill-equipped to act as advocates and activists could suffer seriously from poor organisation and delays in staff access. The senior management of St. Vincent’s University Hospital responded quickly and appropriately to my analysis of Anne’s experience and suggestions for change and I believe this dialogue process contributed to some change for the better. In my view, the key to any overall improvement in the ongoing challenge of providing effective health care for all must lie in an acceptance by all concerned that patient care has to be a 24 hour, seven-days-a-week priority.

By way of conclusion, I would like to return briefly to the pattern this memoir has followed up to now, and to try to put its publication into context.

What made Anne’s loss seem particularly untimely was the fact that we had been settling into a retirement pattern of engagement in our Dublin community and the range of interesting activities it offered. At the same time, we were enjoying more travel at home and abroad, and increased contact with family and friends in the UK – Patricia in Exeter and Justin and Amma and our two exciting grandchildren in North London.

Three examples. At the beginning of 2011, thanks to our experience of reading to Eli and Emer, and partnership with a young illustrator friend, I had completed work on the idea of a series of baby books for submission (unsuccessfully) to a range of literary agents. Our major travel project for the year was a great success. On the same vessel that had carried us to the Levant, we did a wonderful circuit of the Black Sea, heading north and anti-clockwise out of Istanbul. Our shared enjoyment of Anthony Powell’s great novel, “A Dance to the Music of Time”, and membership of the Anthony Powell Society, looked set to involve us in regular and interesting visits to London’s Clubland, where a number of the clubs have reciprocal relations with Dublin’s Kildare Street and University Club, of which we were both members..

The immediate shock to any widower or widow who has enjoyed the closest of partnerships and an established lifestyle and agenda, is to imagine how it could be possible to deal with loss and bereavement and attempt to continue ones living agenda. That is what I set out to do from July 2012. This text has been part of an ongoing movement towards closure.

No act of imagination can prepare one for the immediate experience of such loss. It has since allowed me to empathise more realistically with the situation of families and friends who have lost loved ones close to the story I have told. Ann Brady, widow of my painting companion Hugh, died suddenly shortly after Anne. Kiste Regan, wife of Eugene, and Kieran Kennedy, husband of Finola, both died after long illnesses. Ann Budd, the welcoming hostess of Magherabeg and wife of Declan, died just before what would have been her holiday time in an exceptional summer.

Patricia, Gemma, and Maura helped me through the painful initial task of dealing with Anne’s clothes. Much more recently, I was staggered to find Anne’s wedding dress hidden away in the corner of a wardrobe. She had described and dated it in her own hand and I was delighted when the National Museum of Ireland accepted it as a gift to their dress collection as a fine example from its time.

Dealing with the museum was a rawly emotional experience, similar to the business of having the necessary headstone erected at Temple Hill, in time for a summer visit from the UK of all my immediate family.

The University Club programme of activities proved most supportive. That range of family and friends accepting invitations to join me in events there and elsewhere won my particular appreciation. I accepted, reluctantly, the encouragement of Club members that I should again organise a holiday expedition as a club activity. As I look back now on a successful visit to Istanbul, I can see that my decision to take on a leadership role as the main programmer for the trip was a good one. The trip experience was most positive and rewarding.

I am indebted to Tony Brown and Brendan Halligan of the Irish Institute for International and European Affairs for asking me to join in a working group looking at values, narrative and communication in the context of the continuing crisis of the European Union, its membership, and the Eurozone. In Monkstown I am deeply involved in activities organised jointly by the Church of Ireland and Roman Catholic parishes and Monkstown Meeting, a successful ecumenical enterprise known as MC3, standing for the community of the three local Christian congregations. I felt honoured by an invitation from the Blackrock Society to launch the annual publication of proceedings in January 2014.

A wonderful event in Exeter on 5 April 2014 was Patricia’s marriage to Kevin Miners, a time of great happiness for them and for their families and friends.

In October 2014 I began a new relationship with the poet and novelist Pauline Hall. We married in August 2019.

It feels good to end this memoir with a programme reaching into a future embracing themes and interests which have been central to much of my life and to my recent retirement years.

2017 saw the publication by Ross Hinds of “Memoir”, my third collection of poetry, which includes a couple of diary poems, particularly one covering my trip to Ghana with Justin and Amma, Eli and Emer in 2014.

In October 2018 the UCC Library Archives Service published a Descriptive List of the Collection held there of my papers. UCC also mounted an exhibition “1972: Ireland Votes for Change” based on my papers and focused on the 45th anniversary of my referendum year. It was opened by Emeritus Professor J.J. Lee, the Irish Historian.

The publication of this autobiography, “Forever Beginning”, coincides with the launch of the Exhibition.

Pauline and I particularly look forward to happy years of writing, reading and travel as we seek to cherish each other and keep at bay the challenges familiar to anyone over the age of 80 in a time of pandemic, the Russian war on Ukraine, climate change and economic uncertainties affecting the cost of living. I hope to continue to be an activist calling for change and my strongest continuing interest is to make the case for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income.

Read on: Chronology