Trying to cope, trying to live

HE’D love tonight, if she were there, though she’ll be there in so many ways still.

Football for the Hartes, especially Michaela, was so much about family, so it’d have pleased her to see an event in her honour geared so much towards laying on a night of entertainment for all the family.

She’d have liked the idea of it being in Casement too. It was only a few miles away in this city that she went to college, partied in her own beautifully distinctive way, met and fell in love with John.

A couple of things though might not have sat quite right with her, namely the identity of Ulster’s opponents, or rather who Ulster’s opponents aren’t. When Ulster Council’s Danny Murphy and Ryan Feeney ran the idea of a match in her honour past Mickey Harte a few months ago, they agreed the match should involve the All-Ireland champions, whoever that would be. Calls were put through to all four All-Ireland semi-finalists and all agreed that if they secured the privilege of winning Sam Maguire in September they’d gladly take part in this special night in November. Jim McGuinness and Donegal were particularly receptive. Tyrone though never got the call. They never made it to this year’s All Ireland semi-final. They didn’t even make it to the quarter-finals, only the second time that had happened since her daddy took over the team this month 10 years ago.

Their season had actually started very promisingly. They steam-rolled everyone in the McKenna Cup, finished top of the Division Two table, going 12 games unbeaten. But her father reckons that in a way they had devoted so much of their focus towards earning promotion to the top division, it was as if subconsciously their goal for the season had been met, their hunger virtually sated. The delightful groove of spring faded out, dubbed over by a spluttering, staccato summer which finished abruptly in Killarney.

Injuries to key players didn’t help and though people have been almost afraid to say it, the absence of Michaela had an impact too. It affected the players and naturally it affected him.

He’d like to think he was still diligent about the job. He was still as through in compiling video analysis with Peter Quinlivan. “I still love delving into footage to see what I can find for the team in it,” he says. “I suppose it’s been almost therapeutic for me, that it gets my mind to focus on other things. But having said that, it’s all about life and putting things in perspective.”

He’s done a lot of reflection since that July day in Fitzgerald Stadium, and on reflection his energy wasn’t at the level it needed to be for Tyrone to be at the level he expected of them. Then again, how could it?

“You have to keep changing. The same core values stay but you have to reassess and ask are there better ways of delivering them? Is there a better way of delegating responsibility? Is it necessary to look at your own energy levels and are they where they need to be? You don’t deliberately go to a place where you’re not passionate about what you’re doing.

“It’s learning to live in a new place. It’s a daily exercise for me. Everyone needs to look at what you are doing and what results you are getting at it. We all have to ask ourselves questions and add value to what we’re about. I mean, I know things that we’re going to do differently in 2013. We did some things differently in 2012 and for a while you’d have been saying they must have been very good because at one stage we were the only unbeaten team in the country. So we have to take the good of what we did in the first half of the season into next year and then see how we have a better summer than we had in 2012.”

There was never a question for him of stepping down, though he’s never taken for granted the privilege of being the county’s manager either. He’s been particularly appreciative of the Tyrone public. There were times even in the glory years when elements of it could be cruelly critical but Harte has found it overwhelmingly understandable that the team in recent years was always going to undergo a transitional phase while he himself was coping with the kind of transition no father should ever have to contend with.

He’s hugely enthused about the coming year. Tyrone are back in Division One. Gavin ‘Horse’ Devlin has joined his management team, his first former player to do so, and he has no doubt Devlin’s passion and intelligence for football will rub off. The plan he says is that in the next few years Tyrone are “back at the top of the table”. “There’s nothing else,” he says. “Nothing else is success.”

But all the while he retains perspective. Nobody hated losing more than Michaela but since losing Michaela, it’s reinforced for him that losing isn’t quite the end of the world. “I wouldn’t underestimate the value of being totally dedicated to the cause of winning football matches. When you’re involved at this level of football, it’s hard to think of anything that’s more important. There are people out there whose year and well being can be heavily dependent on this. But it’s about balance and realising that as big an issue as winning in football can be in your life, there are bigger issues.”

SHE’S still everywhere for him. Her loss, her life, her spirit. We all mourned and sympathised that dreadful January, but there came a point then where we went home and accepted it as a fact of Irish life. We no longer had to live with it. We don’t have to go home to it.

Mickey Harte still has to live with it, without her. He still goes home to it. “Every time I open the front door of the house,” he says, “I just know there’s something missing.

“You can’t let that get to you too much. But it does go across your mind.”

Often when he walks through that door, feeling her absence, he’ll go up to her room, as if to feel her presence. “I actually love going into her room. I just feel I’m there with her, and her there with me.”

That’s one of the ways he lives with it, without her. Is that coping with it, without her? There isn’t so much coping after something like this, there’s only living, or at least going on trying to live.

“It’s a strange kind of world to be in because people look at bereaved families and they almost see them as a single entity. And that could not be further from the truth. You are not a single entity at all. You are a group of individuals within a family group. And different people handle this at different times in different ways. It’s a journey that people move along at different speeds. And it’s not always what it seems to be. Just because you’re able to do certain things, it can lead to a perception that ‘Well, that’s behind that man now. It’s over, it’s in the past, it’s distant’ but it’s never like that.

“Another thing you learn is that nobody can fully understand your pain. Anybody who says they do know doesn’t know. Even if they’ve been through an awful tragedy themselves, it’s not our tragedy, it’s not our daughter they’re without, just as if you’ve lost a child, I don’t know how you feel either. Only I know how I feel. Only [his son-in-law] John knows how he feels. Only [his wife] Marian knows how she feels. It’s a very unique experience.”

John has spoken about how he has sometimes being angry with his God, at times even questioned him. Harte himself never had that doubt. “I can say this hand on my heart and I believe this is a grace that I have received — I have not in the slightest been angry with God. Not even for a moment. I see that I’m still indebted to [Him] rather than that [He] has done something dreadful to me. Because God gave us Michaela. He gave us Michaela for 27 years. If God never gave us Michaela, yes, we’d never have this hurt and this loss, but we’d have lost out on so much more. She enriched our lives. We are still in credit. So I’ll always be in credit to God for what he gave us. I don’t see it any other way. And I still feel her presence. I think that’s where the grace comes from. It comes from her.

“Michaela always had this idea of God’s greater plan. That whatever happened at a moment, there was a reason for it even though it mightn’t have been very clear when it happens. When we lost to Down in a replay in Ulster in 2008, Michaela kept telling us, ‘Keep the faith, God has a different plan for us, a greater plan.’ And sure, he did. By September it was a wonderful plan!

“Now, it might take a long time for this plan to come to fruition. It might even be beyond human comprehension. But (the plan) is unfolding. There’s a great amount of good coming from Michaela’s life, in places that we might not have been able to go had she had lived.”

Already he feels she’s at work. Last January Harte became a granddad, as his son Michael became a father. Friends and family were actually having Michaela’s first anniversary mass in the very church she was baptised, married and buried at when her brother Mark declared in the prayers for the faithful that little Liam had just come into the world.

His grandfather dotes on him. Michael and Mark are next door neighbours and there’s hardly a day that goes by without their father popping over to Michael’s to see little Liam. “He’s just a great wee man,” smiles Harte. “He has this lovely wee pleasant smile. He lights up when you talk to him and he just lights us all up.”

The past year has also given us the Michaela Foundation. It’s just something that organically evolved from those dreadful January days of the previous year.

“We’d just be there cocooned in the house, all in the one room, never really leaving the same room. John would have stayed with us a lot of that time. We’d all eat together. We didn’t even have to go out to do that because friends and family would bring us in food. For a few months that was it. We’d go to bed and we’d get up and we wouldn’t know what the next day was going to bring or how we were going to get through it. We just grew to help each other.” By something simple as helping each other put one foot in front of the other. By just going for a walk.

“Myself and John or the boys, we’d often go for a walk from our house to the graveyard, and pass places where she’d have played. And you’d think, ‘This is where Michaela grew up, this is where her spirit exists, she’s still running around here. Wouldn’t it be nice to put something here that would identify her with the place that she loved?”

From that came the idea of a Michaela centre in Glencull and from that the idea of a foundation and movement which Michaela herself would have been enthused by. So, a student awards scheme was founded, helping three teenagers through college because college had been so pivotal in her development. This past July then a group of her fellow teachers ran the Michaela Girls Summer Camp. Seventy Tyrone kids aged 11-13 enjoyed a week full of fun and free from rancour, all propelled by five tenets of Michaela’s life — fun, faith, fashion, Irish and personal well-being. It was a camp with a difference, celebrating everyone’s differences, because Michaela herself wasn’t afraid to be different from the pack.

“That was a theme of the camp alright. To affirm people so they can have the self-confidence to be themselves. That you don’t have to go with the flow, that you can be discerning in all things that come before you so that you can make good decisions, not forced decisions. Michaela was good at that. If she felt something was right, she’d do it. Didn’t matter who liked it or who didn’t.

“I think we were lucky, Marian and myself, that we were born to parents of an era that was very respectful of other people around them. They were traditional Catholics by all means but it wasn’t just about saying your prayers and going to chapel and then being nasty to people; it was about how you were with other people and how you reached out to them. That’s what we grew up in so when Michaela and the rest of our children came into the family, you tried to portray values that showed that people mattered more than anything else. It didn’t necessarily mean you didn’t have rows with people, none of us are the perfect person by any means, but apply common decency and try to respect every individual, especially what’s unique about them.”

Tonight will be just like Michaela — unique. An exhibition game that will be competitive, a challenge game that will almost pack a stadium, a carnival on a cold night in November. It is a celebration of Donegal’s magnificent All Ireland success and a celebration of Michaela’s life and how it continues to influence others, including her father. Tomorrow he’ll walk through that front door and she will not be there. But in a way she’ll be there beside him too, just as in a way she’ll be there in Casement tonight.

* The Match for Michaela: a Festival of Football begins at 6pm with the match throw-in at 7.30pm. Adults £10, under-16s £5. For more details about the game or the Michaela Foundation, visit www.themichaelafoundation.com