Last night, a few hours before the break of dawn on this year’s St. Patrick’s Day, beloved husband, father, friend, and historian Robert Harris passed away.

If anyone who knew Robert had to characterize him to someone who had never met him, it would be difficult to do him justice because of the immense quantity and quality of valuable and lasting work he and his wife Finola provided with their “Roaringwater Journal”.

Only one statement is truly fitting and while it was used once before, we need to borrow it now to describe Robert’s life; Sir Ronald Storrs said it about the great traveller and writer, Sir Harry Luke:

“…he lived the most unwasted life of any man I have known” (DNB).

Wouldn’t that be something, to know or to have known such a man?

I am sure Robert Harris was just that, a man who appreciated the value of time and his quiet and wonderful humanity was ever present in his work, and I am sure in every relationship he had with anyone, no matter how close or distant.

In our last conversation, Robert spoke freely about his life here in Ireland and his life before Ireland. Robert reminisced about a bookshop he once owned in the south of England, which specialized in folk history, and how connections to Ireland through one of his oldest friends, who had bought a property in Ireland on a whim and unseen, led to his unexpected happiness in finding two true loves in later life.

His first and most important true love was finding his beloved Finola over their shared love for Irish history, art, and culture. In the fifteen years in which Robert and Finola made a life for themselves here in West Cork, they made every minute count, and we can take away as much from the work Robert leaves behind as we can take away from the relationship of two soulmates who were inseparable and always did everything together.

Robert’s second true love was finding happiness in his work. He spoke to me about it, and we both agreed on what happiness really means: to live your moments fulfilled and with someone you love and care for while doing something meaningful with your life that not only benefits you but the community that surrounds you!

There is always so much hope in seeing a couple enjoying life together, and when encountering Robert and Finola one always had the feeling that they would have wished every day had forty-eight hours and that they could do with more and more and yet even more time together.

It is impossible to know yet what we have lost in Robert.

I find consolation in knowing this because there was always a majestic, just beautiful tree, a 200-year-old Monterey Cedar, in front of the bedroom window where my wife and I drink our morning coffee together.

We lost it to a storm a few years ago. It fell unexpectedly and with an unforgettable sound in the middle of the night, a sound which we could not at first decipher. Only when daylight came, we saw what we had lost and at first we were heartbroken but now we enjoy an entirely new view over the rolling hills to Castle Townshend.

The sun comes up in the morning and in the distance is the elevation with the 2000-year-old Knockdrum Stone Fort, about which Robert wrote a beautiful article on the 18 March 2018, almost exactly six years ago.

We live with this new view, a new perspective we needed to learn to like, and while we reluctantly do so more every day, and while the sun is shining again in our window, it will always be impossible to forget the beautiful, meaningful tree we once knew.

Holger Smyth