VIDEO: Karen Buckley Funeral: ‘We pray Karen has reached final destination with God’
The parish priest read from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which speaks of “a time to be born, a time to die”.
“Karen’s death seems so utterly inappropriate. It violates our sense of order. In our view of life, death and childhood are poles apart, and 24 years simply does not seem the right time to die.”
Fr O’Keefe said it was a particularly difficult time for Karen’s parents. “Karen was a young woman, a friend. To her family she was a cousin, a niece, a sister-in-law, a sister, a daughter, a child,” he said.
“It is most difficult then for them, but in particular for Karen’s parents, John and Marian, to associate the cradle to the coffin. One represents the beginning of life and the other represents the end. And it is doubly sad when the two are so closely linked.”
He spoke of the many things in life that become so much a part of a home that their absence leaves a void.
“It may be a picture that hangs on the wall, a familiar footstep, a stray kitten whom Karen named Boots, or whatever, but nothing becomes so indispensable as a child,” he said. “From the outset she tangles her tiny fingers in our heart strings and when they are pulled away the hurt is indescribable. It is an hour of heartache, a time of tears.”
Fr O’Keeffe offered read from American poets Edgar Guest and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both of whom lost daughters.
Guest’s poem, ‘If They Could Write’, described how she had “touched the hem of Jesus’ gown”, while Longfellow wrote: “She is not dead, this child of our affection.”
Fr O’Keeffe said: “We pray Karen has already reached her final destination and that she has touched the hem of Jesus’s gown and is with God in heaven.”
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