I'm Christopher Lighten and this is open source in rural Ireland this time for family talk toward the end of an extraordinary life.

Oh wow, out of one secret garden into another.

Yeah, look at this.

These trees on the right are in a very clear row and they were presumably part of the planting in 1790.

They are Lyndon, they call lime trees here, called Lyndon in America.

My brother Patrick was the youngest of six, the saint in our family as we had known all along and invariably the brightest company.

In our regular catching up by phone between his community farm in County Kilkenny and my base in Boston, he struck an odd note two inches ago.

He said, Chris, I've aged more in the last ten weeks than in the last ten years.

To walk fifty yards, he said, had become an ordeal.

A hundred yards, impossible.

Soon enough, the villain turned up in a Dublin exam.

It was ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, that slow irreversible breakdown in the neuromuscular system.

Typically ALS spares the victim's thinking process and speech.

Same time it cripples the body.

There was nothing to be done about this, except I thought recorded Gabby Memoir over Zoom and then face to face on the porch of Patrick's little farmhouse in the town of Calon.

Howdy, my brother, just to remind you, you weren't picked out of a lottery here to do this.

The reason everybody is here is that a no-blow and smoke at anybody.

But you've lived in most amazing and beautiful life, Patrick.

It's a spectacular example to me, to your Sibs, to your colleagues, to your workers, to your classmates.

Patrick was the brother who never had a salary or a personal savings account.

His famous high school, Phillips Exeter, in New Hampshire, gave him its highest award for a life non-city, not for self.

He had found his match in Gladys Kinghorn, from Aberdeen, in Scotland.

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