Jimmy Kinsella: ‘Not a day goes by when I don’t shed some tears, I miss her so’

Thirteen and a half months had elapsed since her passing when I called to the family home in Skerries. It was September 22, 2022, which also happened to be the day he saw his counsellor for the last time.

“I had an appointment with her for last week, but I forgot,” he said. Which prompted her to suggest: “That’s a good sign. You won’t need me any more. You’re fine.” Sadly, the counsellor didn’t know her patient sufficiently well to recognise that this was a long way from the truth.

Towards the end of November 2023, he was leaving the home of his daughter Clare in Balrothery, when it struck her that he was unusually quiet. “I would normally walk him out to the car with Seamus [Jimmy’s dog],” she recalled.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. He broke down in tears. Despite laying his hands on the roof of the car, he began to lose his balance, prompting Clare to put her arms around him to keep him upright. With help, she then got him back inside her house where a nurse friend came around and examined him over a cup of tea. As Clare put it: “On being reassured that he was going to be OK, my friend could identify the problem. He was just heartbroken; waiting to die.”

​Before departing, however, she insisted on Jimmy taking a few steps, to satisfy her that he was going to be all right. But when she stepped away from him, he collapsed. That’s when she called an ambulance and got him to Beaumont Hospital. He was there only a few hours, however, when he was released. An examination of bloods and vital signs indicated that there was nothing physically wrong with him.

His older daughter, Bernadette, had been given the same message after a similar episode. “They could find nothing wrong with him,” she said. “Every specialist under the sun has examined him but they can find nothing the matter.”

If love is the greatest gift a parent can give their offspring, the four children of Jimmy and Bernie Kinsella felt truly blessed.

Bernadette was their second. Named after her mother, but by way of differentiation, I quickly learned that she is not to be shortened to Bernie.

“They were always very close,” she said of her parents. “When he’d be gone a little while to the golf course, she’d say to me, ‘You’d better go and look for him. He could be dead in a ditch.’ She always appeared to be worried about him. ‘Feck him anyway’ was as far as she’d go, by way of disapproval.

“He never had a mobile phone and she’d talk about him being off pouching for balls. Pouching was a word she liked and we knew what she meant. They went everywhere together, at home and abroad. It could be away in Florida or Malaga, or here in Ireland, perhaps in Waterville.”

I wondered about the impact their romantic closeness had on her, as a woman. Her sister Clare, for instance, said they reminded her of the elderly couple played by James Garner and Gena Rowlands in the 2004 movie, The Notebook. You could certainly imagine tears being prompted by a closing scene in a nursing home ... “Duke [Garner’s character] sneaks into Allie’s [played by Rowlands] room in the night. She instantly recognizes him, they kiss, and fall asleep holding hands. They are found in the morning, having died peacefully in each other’s arms.”

It wasn’t an act. This was natural, genuine love

That didn’t quite happen for Jimmy and Bernie, but the idea of it clearly moved Bernadette. “I couldn’t believe they remained so much in love at such a late stage of their lives,” she said. “But there was nothing smoochy or excessive about it. Nothing embarrassing. It wasn’t an act. This was natural, genuine love.

“Later on, as mammy became more immobile, I’d be there to look after her when daddy would leave the house. She’d give him a kiss. ‘Will you be long, Jimmy?’ And he’d say he was giving someone a lesson. ‘Ah! That won’t take long.’

“There was always a waiting list of women anxious for golf lessons from daddy. This led to an ongoing joke whereby mammy would be ribbed about his popularity. But she invariably ignored the innuendo. ‘It won’t take him long,’ would be her standard comment, not realising we were having her on. To my mind, daddy is a very handsome man but she was never jealous. Not even at the way women might look at him in the golf club. He was her Jimmy and that was it.”

​When his beloved Bernie was 91, Jimmy decided to hold a special birthday get-together for her, even though it was April 2020 and serious Government restrictions were imposed to curb the spread of Covid 19. So it had to be a family affair, with the addition of a few neighbours. As Jimmy pointed out: “Bernie never liked fussing, anyway. She was a very private person.”

By late afternoon, Jimmy figured that it was then safe to put a secret plan into action.

“When they had all left, I knew what I wanted to do. I had already shared the plan with my youngest, Clare, who’s a bit of a divil like myself. ‘I’m going to put mammy on the bike’. I told her ‘and you can help me.’

“So she and I brought Bernie out and we lifted her onto the little Honda Four. And through it all, Bernie went along with everything. She was great like that.”

For Clare and Jimmy, the success of this little episode was based on something Bernie had once said, “As a couple, Jimmy and I never grew up.” And Clare was conscious of the others knowing nothing about it.

So it was that with his 91-year-old wife on the Honda, 80-year-old Jimmy sped down the estate, though Bernie had urged her husband: “Jimmy! Don’t go too hard.” And he had assured her: “Don’t worry, Bernie. I won’t.” After a few hundred metres, Jimmy eased down on the throttle and turned around.

By the time they arrived back at the house again, a sprinkling of neighbours had emerged to clap and cheer this remarkable couple. Jimmy’s verdict? “It was the perfect way to end a great day.”

He went on: “When we got Bernie off the bike, she was smiling and laughing. She never had any fear of a bike and this, her last spin, wasn’t going to be any different. It would never have crossed her mind that she shouldn’t be engaged in such antics at her age.”

Given the would-be impromptu nature of the exercise, it goes without saying that it was done without a helmet by either the rider or the pillion passenger. “Bernie never wore one,” insisted Jimmy. “Maybe a hat or a scarf.”

Clare retains fond memories of that special occasion, not least because she had the presence of mind to make a video of it. “They’re beautiful pictures,” she said. “My mother always told me I was daddy’s pet and I like to think we have a special relationship.”

Her memories of the day are: “With Covid restrictions, I remember we were anxious not to put mammy and daddy at any health risk. A carer was present and we gathered outside the front window where we had cake and buns and tea. And we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’.

“It was a happy occasion. Though my mother had mild dementia, she wasn’t medically sick, and daddy just loved caring for her. He was always so proud of her. During the days building up to the occasion, he had mentioned that he wanted to get mammy on the motorbike to mark her birthday. Nobody thought it was a good idea, but my reaction was whatever he felt would make her happy.

“When people began to drift off, I asked him if he was going to go ahead with his plan. Not only was he determined to go through with it, he had selected the Honda because it would be easier to get her on a small bike. Mammy was laughing at it all. She loved going on the bike, right back to when they were young.”

So it was that Jimmy got on the Honda and Clare and her husband lifted Bernie onto the pillion. And seeing that neither of them was wearing a helmet, Clare recalled a cousin of hers recounting how Jimmy’s mother, Kathleen, had reacted on seeing her son riding past the house without a helmet. “She would ring our house and give out to my mother for letting daddy out without a helmet. For all the good it did.”

In that most difficult situation, I knew Bernie was looking after me

In the event, she was left with images of the wind in her mother’s hair on that gentle trip up the estate and back. And neighbours applauding the madness of it all.

Most of all, she remembers her mother’s laughter. And the way the episode would have revived for her parents their love of travelling round the country on motorbike trips. And she thought how brilliant it was that they were still able to enjoy such an escapade at that late stage of their lives.

​Bernie would laugh about the 10-year age gap between herself and Jimmy. Mind you, she could afford to do so after they had spent the guts of a lifetime together. From the outset, however, her family had warned her not to marry Jimmy and though she effectively ignored them, age remained a significant issue. The fact is that they were blessed that Bernie lived such a long, reasonably healthy life, until she died at 92 having four children along the way, despite being 36 when they married.

Still, the issue was eventually confronted when, as one of six siblings, Bernie began to lose her sisters. How could that be happening when they were so much younger than you, mammy, she was asked. “That’s when she told me,” said Bernadette. “As far as I can remember, she was 69 at the time, which meant that daddy was 59.”

The notion of age being just a number meant that the family had no difficulty in accepting the situation, because Bernie remained so youthful in her way. But ultimately, ill-health intervened.

Three years before she died, Bernie had to be hospitalised with a stomach ache which turned out to be a perforated bowel. She was 89 and continued to behave mischievously in front of her children, making light of it all when she returned home two weeks later.

Then came a long-threatened hip replacement in Cappagh Hospital. This time, her stay there was only four days. Then she endured a mini-stroke, which shook her somewhat, for the way it affected the use of her right hand. But as Bernadette pointed out, being ambidextrous helped her to cope.

“After the bowel problem, we wrapped her in cotton-wool and relieved her of all her household chores,” said her second daughter. “Then, in what proved to be her final illness, she developed a very bad cough and could barely breathe. It was Tuesday July 19, 2021, when she was taken into Beaumont.”

Jimmy found it extremely difficult to cope with all of this, even when Bernadette brought him into her own home, the one-time bungalow home of Jimmy’s parents, about half a mile from his current abode. On a particular visit he made to Beaumont a nurse answered Bernadette’s phone-call as to how her parents were getting on. In a scene straight out of The Notebook, she was told that the two of them were asleep together, and he had his head on her pillow.

Typically, the family rallied around him for what proved to be 13 days before the end came.

When she died at 6.10 on the evening of August 2, Jimmy was sitting in a chair to the left of her bed. The family took turns at looking after him through what was an extremely distressing time. At the funeral, they joined together in ‘Angel of God’, a prayer their mother had taught her children, almost before they could speak.

All of which was typical of the Irish way of grieving. In those moments of great loss, they sought comfort in their shared spirituality, in a belief that God had taken Bernie to a better place. “A mammy is a mammy for life,” reflected Jimmy, “and in that most difficult situation, I knew Bernie was looking after me.”

She was buried on the Friday. And after visiting the grave two days later with her two children, Bernadette asked her dead mother for a sign whereby she could assure Jimmy that she was fine. “Just for daddy,” she pleaded.

“With that, I fixed the flowers on her grave. Then noting that one of them was crooked, I bent to straighten it. Suddenly, at the top of my left thumb was a little white ball, like a miniature golf ball, which I picked up. And turning to my daughters, Mary and Alice I asked them if it had been there a moment ago. And they replied, ‘No mammy’.”

Bernadette then talked of the way sunlight reflected through this translucent little piece of granite. She took it as the sign she had sought. And she brought it home where it now sits on her mantelpiece.

Links of Love: How Golf Brought Jimmy and Bernie Kinsella Together is published this week, priced €20 (£20). It’s available from Bobby Kinsella, professional, Skerries GC (01-8491567 or bobkins05@yahoo.ie).