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This meant that in our retirement year there was a bit of excitement and happy anticipation to go with our natural regret at finishing a life's work both of us had felt as a kind of vocation. My own school, St Margaret's, was soon to become a 'Comprehensive' and move to a bright modern building. We both had farewell presentations, Jim's of course the more elaborate: the photograph in the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser shows him with the senior members of his staff and the priests of St Edward's parish, Fr Barry and Fr Hayes, and myself bearing the customary bouquet. But that was a few months after Jim had taken away from St Edward's school his few personal things, like the silver-mounted inkpad the pupils of All Saints had given him, and locked the school doors behind him for the last time - the end of a teaching life where he had always stayed faithful to what he had once defined, to the confusion of some official researcher, as the ultimate goal of all education: 'To save the child's soul'.

There was a certain fear at the back of my mind that retirement would prove difficult for a man who had been so dedicated to his work. But although his health began to decline, it was for reasons other than idleness, and indeed seeing to the building of our new Fanad house and walling round our quite extensive garden were just the right projects to bridge the changeover to a more relaxed existence. Perhaps they masked a little, for himself and others, the fact that his health was deteriorating. He had indeed put behind him the major worries of the previous decade: the sudden death of the elder Fr John and its aftermath, and the recurrent concern about his spinster sister Mamie. A diabetic who had had a foot amputated because of osteomyelitis in earlier years, her various times of illness meant trips for Jim to whatever place in Ireland or England she had temporarily settled. In her final illness - which included Alzheimer symptoms - Jim had her brought from England to a local Lanarkshire hospital where after a few weeks she died. Hers was the only wake and funeral which went from the house in Cairnhill Road.

But the serious 'flu he had suffered in John's ordination year was the precursor of other bouts where symptoms like extreme nausea and feverish trembling suggested some hidden cause. Probably things would have got worse sooner if he had not given up his 60- or 70-a- day cigarette habit quite suddenly one day in 1962 and taken to the pipe instead. (It was done in a fit of annoyance - at himself, so enslaved to cigarettes that he had to go out at midnight to get a packet from a dispenser in case he had none left for the morning. He kept the pack unopened, bought pipe and tobacco on his way to school - and threw away the packet weeks later with the cigarettes still inside.)

Within a year or two of his retirement, just when our programme of moving back and forth to our fine new Irish home was getting into a swing, our Airdrie doctor - the daughter of old Dr Pollok - diagnosed a diabetic condition and sent him for prostate tests. Thus began the hardest part of my whole life. It was one of those cases where surgical intervention merely revealed that the condition was beyond remedy. Jim did not realise this, of course, and I had to live for six years with the knowledge that the medication he received, and the cheerful hospital check-ups he attended, were but ways of slowing and easing a process that could only have one end.

I would not like anyone to think that those last years together were unhappy ones. The house in Ireland was a joy to us, not just because of the modern comforts it provided, but because it was something we had done for ourselves: the large slope of lawn which left room for a discreet drill or two of potatoes, the rockery and lower garden which were really too big for me but blossomed in season with unexpected things - the forecourt and garden paths expertly laid in concrete by a neighbour, Charlie Kelly, who with his wife Bridget was to be a great support in the years to come; and the house itself, which had room enough for ourselves and young Fr John and whatever family of grandchildren wished to enjoy a Donegal holiday as we had done in our own young days.

We kept to our plan of passing part of our lives in Airdrie, through time relating our visits to Scotland to the dates of Jim's hospital check-ups. So young Jim's bachelor existence in Airdrie did not go wholly unrelieved until his father's increasing weakness and his own engagement and subsequent marriage to Moira Moran at length made it good sense to give up the house we had come to as newlyweds forty years before.

Those years of the seventies had a serenity of their own despite the anguish at my own heart as I watched my poor husband ageing more rapidly than the passage of time would naturally warrant. Yet he was passing his last days as he had wished, in the land of his childhood, and 'the men that were boys when he was a boy' (as his favourite writer Belloc put it) were often around him. They talked of cattle and fishing and the new way of things, and listened to the lore that was all the sharper etched in Jim's mind for being the memories of one who had been long an exile and who in youth had craved knowledge of times past. If the fishing rocks were beyond his strength and the walk to the shore a long hour's effort, the summertime would bring members of the now extending family, Tom and Mairi perhaps with their four youngsters and Rosaleen and Frank with what I called the Famous Five, John in his holidays from Blairs College where he was now teaching, and towards the end Jim and Moira - to fill the house with chatter and make the whole project of building a retiral home infinitely worthwhile.

Other visitors too I remember in the last months when all the tablets and pills in the world could not delay things much longer. There was my niece Barbara, a University student and daughter of 'wee Eddie' of Tollcross days, whose brimming cheerfulness brought Jim out of himself and made him almost enjoy the chore of his morning walk. And towards the end of the very last summer another niece, Pauline, daughter of my brother Tommy who had died ten years before, came with her husband Jim Gallacher. It was they who took Jim on little car-trips in the final weeks of his life to look at remembered scenes and talk about the past.

From the height where they could park above the lovely bay of Drumnacreag he would see the full length of Lough Swilly, Dunaff head and the Urris hills, Dunree to the south with its fort which once guarded the inner reaches of the lough, and the patchwork of fields above Fahan where he had spent happy days in childhood and youth with the families of cousins related through his great-aunt Bridget Barr. Maybe he would talk about that old lady, who was a family legend in her lifetime. As a young girl soon to be married, she had rounded on Lord Leitrim himself in a bitter verbal attack when he came to the Upper house to serve on the McAteer family the final notice of eviction - never to be executed because of his violent death. The story lost little in the telling, nor its sequel when the local landlord's agent in Fahan told the new Mrs Barr that Lord Leitrim had enquired before his death about buying the Barr farm. Jim remembered the old lady in her last years, still able to walk out in the evening through one of those far fields to have a wee cry to herself, looking seawards down the long lough to where the shape of the great sea- cliff marked the place of her childhood.

Jim died in mid-September of 1976, death coming so gently at the end of his years of illness that the family who had visited during the previous summer could not be called in time to see him again in life. Dr Loughrey a few days before the end had felt bound to suggest moving him to Letterkenny hospital twenty-five miles away; but he agreed with me that a possible prolonging of life by hours or days was not in proportion to the worry and discomfort it would mean for him. It came to it at last, when he had refused for the first time the pipe I had cleaned and filled and helped him to light so often, that he asked if he was dying. I said he was going to Heaven, and he said 'I'll go tomorrow'. I knew that Fr John was on his way to catch the evening boat from Scotland, and in one of his moments of wakefulness - he kept calling on me in my old name, 'Cassie Callaghan, Cassie Callaghan!' - I said he should wait until John came. He drowsily said (maybe he was thinking of his dead elder brother) 'John - the universal panacea'. Fr Michael Sweeney, a priest of the place ordained a little before John, came in to give him the last sacraments, and he said he would like to see 'the boys' to say good-bye. So they came in by ones and twos to shake his hand, the men with whom he had shared schooldays and harvest-times, and the youngsters he had seen grow up between one summer visit and the next. He faltered once on the name of one brother or another, and said 'I'm sorry, Dan, I am a little confused'.

Friends gathered in towards evening and we said the prayers for the dying which he had led at other bedsides himself. When the time came to change to the 'De Profundis' and the 'Eternal Rest give unto him, O Lord...' I managed to go on and lead the Rosary more than once before they made me go to get some rest, and I was pleased later that I had done so.

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