Edmund Coyle was born in the little village of Carrigart in Co Donegal but for some odd reason after his father died, his mother took himself and his younger brother, Danny, across the border into Derry where they went to St Columb’s College.
He never quite knew why she, a widow, moved away from the security of her own family. But whatever her motivation, that decision shaped the rest of his life.
After leaving Columb’s he went on to UCD, qualified as a doctor and emigrated to America in the late 1940s and practised as a consultant anaesthetist in a huge hospital in California.
I met him by chance in the early 1980s when he was home on holidays and running the family pub - the Crock O’Gold – in the wee townland of Glenree.
Looking back, I think when he died they broke the blueprint. He was a total one-off.
For starters, he managed to get five months in Ireland each year by making a unique arrangement with his hospital bosses. The deal was he worked for seven days a week for seven months, often doing 12-hour shifts from seven in the morning.
It was one hell of a tough way to make a living.
We got talking in the Crock O’Gold and when he found out I was the editor of the Derry Journal, that was good enough for a conversation that went on for most of the night. And we became fast friends.
Some of his stories were brilliant.
One day, he told me, there was a big Yank sitting at the bar. He was a quiet man who had been asking on a couple of occasions about relatives in the area but no-one, seemingly, was in much of a position to help.
As he sat there talking to the locals, another much older American man came in and overheard the conversation. Edmund said this man began visibly to shake and he asked him if he was okay.
The old man replied: “Not really… but I think I have just found my son.”
Turned out the man and his wife had split up in a bitter divorce and she had moved to another part of the States and cut off all communication. He subsequently lost track of his son.
So, can you imagine the absolute shock of walking into a bar in a remote part of Donegal on a summer’s day in, I think, 1974 and finding your long-lost child? What are the odds?
One of his other stories was about a senior theatre sister in California who heard, during a big operation, that he was Irish and remarked that she thought her grandfather was from Donegal. She really wasn’t certain. But, she explained, there was a picture of him standing outside a house in Ireland back at her apartment. She would bring it in the next time they were scheduled to work together.
She did, and Edmund said he nearly fell of the chair. He recognised the man immediately as an old neighbour.
He had often wondered what had happened as the entire family had, apparently, moved out in the middle of the night and told no-one they were leaving. Their house lay vacant for years. Indeed, there was a tree growing out the roof and for some inexplicable reason Edmund had stopped the year before on his way to Letterkenny and taken a photograph of it which he was then able to show her.
I often think of him when I hear stories like that of the young man, also from Donegal, who while walking the Camino in Spain came across a Swedish girl. She fitted the Hollywood stereotype – tall, blonde, blue-eyed. This guy introduced himself and they got along swimmingly.
I have done a bit of the Camino myself and usually the conversation gets around to what is motivating people to undertake a gruelling, 600-mile trek. Most, I discovered, are trying – to use that old hippie term – to find themselves. So, the guy had no bother coming out with the explanation that he was at a crossroads in his life, that he really needed to change direction.
The young lady was less forthcoming. She stayed silent.
A day later, when he asked her again, she stunned him when she stated bluntly: “I have terminal cancer.”
For the record, all these are true stories.
Like myself, what intrigued Edmund were the vagaries of life. What really does shape us? If his father had not died young, would his family have stayed in Donegal? Had he not gone to St Columb’s and got a good education, what career options would have been open to him?
As it was, he spent half a century in the States, and his younger brother spent most of his life in Africa as a senior engineer working on big railway projects.
So, I suppose the message we can distil from the life of the very wise man that was Edmund Coyle is work hard but make sure to take time to smell the roses, drink the good wine and nice coffee and love the family. That’s the important bit.