The coffin lowered, the mourners were about to disperse for the after-match chat at the school, Assumption College, Kilmore, where he had lived and taught. But first his second family — the men in black, the Marist Brothers - gathered close by the head of the grave and sang James Wright up to his God. Perhaps, too, they sang for the loss of one of their own. They were so apart from us, his flesh and blood. A separate family and a separate world.

If the Catholic Church had knights who represented its best and highest ideals, then Jim was one of them. In the last years of his life, he bore the motor neurone disease he was stricken with as a test of his faith that he was determined to pass. Like his younger brother, my father, Jim was convinced that death would bring him to the mother they had lost before they were three years old.

He had a chiselled face, blue eyes and a droll monotone of a voice. A friend who taught with him at a Catholic school in Melbourne's eastern suburbs described him as "a bit of a spunk". His sole vice was smoking; the cigarette rested on the second knuckle of his middle finger, held in place by the arch of the index finger. Somehow it rendered no nicotine stains.

He was as tough as flint; less so, possibly, as a dormitory master at boarding schools from Sale to Adelaide to Bunbury, but more in what he expected of himself and how that was transmitted to those around him. It was family lore that his footballing talent in the mid-1950s had been sufficient to bring him to the attention of Jim Cardwell, the secretary of the then all-conquering Melbourne club of the Victorian Football League. Decades later, a columnist for the-then Melbourne Sun filled in some of the blanks for me. He had played footy with Jim as a schoolboy in Sale. The boys were playing against men, but they always walked taller and played more confidently when Jim was there. Most successful teams at any level had a least one guy like this on their team — the enforcer. Continue reading

Sources

• The Global Mail
• Image: Sacred Heart College
  

It is, nevertheless, a choice that confronts me. I was diagnosed almost two years ago with motor neurone disease, admittedly with a rare variant of the disease that typically progresses more slowly than the more common forms.

Already my legs are virtually useless and I spend about 14 hours a day in an electric wheelchair. I need help to get into and out of bed and to get to the toilet. More recently I have noticed the beginning of weakness in my right arm - a sign of things to come, as all of my voluntary muscles begin to shut down.

At present my determination is to live as fully as possible within these already significant limitations. I am acting dean of the united faculty of theology within the MCD University of Divinity. I am teaching one course within that faculty. As a Catholic priest I celebrate Mass several mornings a week in the church at Richmond where I live, and on Sundays at Werribee. I go to the MCG when Collingwood is playing. I go to concerts in the city, and to exhibitions at the NGV. I frequent cafes that serve good coffee. I do most of the food shopping for my small community. For some of this I need to use a maxi taxi. But more commonly I travel simply by wheelchair or by train, courtesy of a free myki pass and the help of train drivers who put out a ramp for me. When my arms and upper body become weaker, all this will be more difficult, ultimately impossible, but I have managed thus far to adapt in ways that would a few years ago have seemed improbable to me, and I hope such adaptation can continue. Continue reading

Sources

• Geoffrey King SJ in The Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: The King's Blog

Geoffrey King is a Jesuit priest and acting dean of the united faculty of theology, a college of the MCD University of Divinity.