Ben O’Mahony’s eulogy

I Googled Nina the other day to find out what it was the world knew about her. And there's a lot! In a quick search I struck on four separate obituaries; which moved me. They talk of her as: the ardent socialist, the tenacious campaigner, the Academic, the Writer, the Actor. But none of these were the Nina I knew.

She was simply my friend.

I have known Nina all of my life, which was only a fraction of hers. But most particularly for the last four years. She's supported me financially at times. When I first moved to back to London, she and Phil invited me to live with them. She was a mentor to me; she knew more about films, theatre, and playwrights than anyone I've met in my life. She spoke to me as an adult well before I was one. I remember once after having a conversation about Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, she called me up a couple of months later to tell me that she had booked tickets to see it in Stratford so that we could continue our chat. She valued what came out of my mouth more than I did, which is saying something!

In my opinion she was a real citizen of the world. She had a wonderfully unsentimental and stoic attitude towards life: whenever I would speak to someone about Nina they would always end up justifying whatever they said of her with "well she's Nina"; or when she got ill and I would speak to Phil and he would say "she's still Nina". It is this innate 'Nina-ness' that I will miss most.

I'd like to finish by reading a short poem by the American poet Mary Oliver:

                                                          When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world