It’s a blustery Dublin day and I’m cycling northside, thinking of Kathleen Watkins. I’m thinking about her elegance and sense of fun and the conversation that flowed from her like music.
She died on Thursday having turned 90 last month. She was let out of the hospital especially for that celebration which, I have it on good authority, included afternoon tea and champagne.
Our paths had crossed over the years through her late husband, the legendary broadcaster Gay Byrne, and at children’s concerts around town. Her beloved grandchildren and my daughters attended the same music school. I used to look forward to watching her in the audience, wearing a brightly coloured scarf and even brighter lipstick, the proudest, most besotted of grandmothers, lost in the music.
But I knew her by reputation long before any of that. Kathleen Watkins, a woman who kept her own surname after marriage back when that was an eyebrow-raising decision, was something of a star past-pupil of my secondary school. She played the harp at Sion Hill in Blackrock, Co Dublin, and later went on to become the first continuity announcer at RTÉ.
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I’m sad but I’m smiling as I cycle home having just heard the news that she’s gone. There was always fun to be had with Kathleen. Things were “marvellous”, people were “darling”, food was “just divine” and memorable happenings were “the greatest times of my life”. She was one of the most enthusiastic people I’ve ever met.
Arranging a lunch a couple of years ago, she texted a string of red wine emojis in anticipation. A mutual friend was celebrating her 70th birthday. “Oh, to be so young,” she texted. She was about to turn 88 herself by that stage. At lunch she was full of stories and plans and endless, fascinating conversation that covered art and music and theatre and family. There were stories of holidays in Donegal where she and Gay palled around with Brian and Anne Friel.
My daughters arrived towards the end of the lunch and under pressure from their pushy mother one of them reluctantly recited a poem she’d written. (Well, you try reading your teenage rhymes to a table of adults that included poetry curator Kathleen Watkins and author Marie Heaney, wife of Nobel laureate Seamus.)
One of the many great things about Kathleen was that she knew she’d had a wonderful life and she appreciated it deeply. As wife of the host of The Late Late Show she was Gay’s plus-one to glittering events and first-nights, many of which were arts-related, which suited both their interests. Neither of them were party people but they loved cultural goings-on of all kinds. It was “a charmed life”, she would say. “God is too good to me”.
It was a more challenging life after losing Gay, who died almost exactly five years ago. They would have been 60 years married last June. She was full of the memories of their partnership. She loved “his sense of humour, the unexpected off-the-cuff quip, he was so smart”. She told me about the way he’d compliment her, noticing a well-tailored new suit she’d bought, saying “well done, Kaysie”. (He called her Kay or Kaysie, never Kathleen and she called him Gabsie. She was Nana Kit to her grandchildren and she answered to nothing else). She told me she missed Gay dreadfully. “But then I’m very spoiled,” she said of having her two daughters Suzy and Crona close by.
As well as being endlessly interested in the arts, in music and in poetry, Kathleen was also a massive reader and rugby fan; she finished reading Johnny Sexton’s autobiography Obsessed last week. She’d often watch Sky Arts at 6am in the morning, entranced by ballet productions or concerts live from the Sydney Opera House.
A mutual friend remembers going to annual lunches in her and Gay’s apartment in Sandymount, where they’d host his old Late Late Show production team. There were several sketches of Kathleen by Seán Keating hung in the hall, he remembers. Keating was a struggling artist when they were made. Kathleen would sit for him in his lodgings, which had a single bar electric heater, and pay for the drawings, a way of supporting the artist financially without making him feel embarrassed.
It’s astonishing to think she began a career as a children’s author in her eighties, with the Pigín books. She was also involved in a number of poetry podcasts. I interviewed her four years ago around the publication of her book One For Everyone, a collection of her favourite poems. I admired how she was never “high falutin’” about poetry. “I’m not a bit like that. I feel poetry is for everybody.” She was particularly fond of a poem called Love After Love by Derek Walcott, she said it spoke to everyone. What did it say to her? “Well, sometimes you put yourself on the back burner. So take time, be at peace, be calm, look and see who you are. Who you were. Things are good aren’t they? They could be worse. Feast on your life, the poem says. That’s important. I was always a glass pretty full person.”
There were three poems by the late Derek Mahon in the book, which was dedicated to her late husband with a simple “For Gay”. The final poem in the book, Everything Is Going to be Alright, was the one she believed Byrne would have liked the best and one that gave her comfort as she navigated life without him.
“There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to get into that ... Everything is going to be all right.”
We’d been texting regularly in recent months, trying to make plans to meet up “for a chat and a cuppa” – we didn’t get around to it and I am now very sad and sorry about that. Still, we were in touch as she managed visits and stays in the Blackrock Clinic where she told me she watched the racing in Cheltenham – “it helps to pass the time”.
[ Kathleen Watkins: ‘Occasionally I find myself talking to Gay in my head’Opens in new window ]
We exchanged war stories, she was always putting a positive spin on even the worst events. She had suffered a few ailments and she texted one day: “a hip problem and two mini-strokes. Never knew they happened. Feeling good”. I told her some of my own troubles. “Lotsa love, K,” she wrote in reply, with some encouraging words that lifted my spirits at a dark time. She was a great one for prayers, “not a holy joe” she clarified to me once, but she was a woman who loved a good Mass. She credited her longevity to “genes and the luck of the draw”.
Kathleen had so many poems in her head right until the end, her memory sharp, recalling the words she held dear. She once told me that Gay loved her to recite Beannacht by John O’Donohoe. That poem contains these lines: “When the canvas frays/ In the currach of thought/ And a stain of ocean/ Blackens beneath you,/ May there come across the waters,/ A path of yellow moonlight,/ To bring you safely home.”
Lotsa love to you, Kathleen. We’ve lost a marvellous Irish woman. Safe home.
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