'After 10 decades of life, you need to be matter-of-fact about death'

Irish Examiner

20 hours ago

Jennifer Sleeman, aged 95, is so matter-of-fact about death that she had a coffin made for herself several years ago. She asked the man who carved her kitchen table if he would make one and when, a little surprised, he agreed, she lay down on the rug in her sitting-room to be measured up.
'We all die and I think it's sad that we don't talk about death,' she says with a gentle, disarming pragmatism that runs through all of her conversations on the subject.
Jennifer Sleeman. In the 10 decades since her birth on September 23, 1929, she has been a dairy farmer, a pre-marriage counsellor, an environmental campaigner, a Green Party candidate, a Fair Trade activist, and, more recently, an advocate for women priests and a more open attitude to death. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family.
And there have been a few — in a podcast with her son Andrew (Fr Simon) Sleeman, the Mindful Monk at Glenstal Abbey, with artist Sheelagh Broderick, outlining her funeral playlist (it includes Ol' Man River sung by Paul Robeson), and with her grandson Paul Power who made a beautiful short film entitled For When I Die (2018), as well as the words that are written on the folder containing all her post-death arrangements.
There are shots of the aforementioned coffin, standing tall in a bedroom in her home in Clonakilty, 'waiting patiently for me', as she casually puts it.
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Jennifer is neither sentimental nor mawkish; she is simply articulating 'some of the messages she wants to get out there'. In essence, that death is inevitable and we should try to prepare for what she terms a 'good death', one with family around and everything in order, rather than her mother's 'very bad death', which still upsets her.
Mother and daughter had words the night before she died and they never had a chance to make it up.
'I could cry about it now. It was just so sad and in a way, I kind of blame myself because for most of my life I did what my mother told me. I was a good daughter. And if I had spoken up a bit more about my own needs and my own thoughts, perhaps the end might have been better,' she says in For When I Die.
The need to speak up is a theme that runs through Jennifer Sleeman's extraordinary life. Just eight years before, on the eve of her 81st birthday, she made international headlines when she called for a single-Sunday boycott of Mass to protest about the lack of roles for women in the Catholic Church.
Jennifer Sleeman in Ireland in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family
If people didn't want to skip Mass, they were asked to attend wearing a green ribbon to let the powers-that-be know that women were no longer happy to be second-class citizens.
The letters and phone calls of support, which came from men and women in Ireland, Australia, the US, and Canada, vastly outnumbered the disapproving ones.
Jennifer still relishes the attention, and laughs heartily when she recalls having to turn down one interview request because she was already booked to talk to the BBC.
Ask if she thinks the Church is changing and she mentions that interfaith minister, Rev. Dr Nóirín Ní Riain visited her yesterday. 'She's almost a priest.'
Jennifer Sleeman is in a nursing home now — 'one of the annoying things is that I spend all my time in bed. I'm just old' — and is slightly bemused that anyone would be interested in her life. But what a life.
In the 10 decades since her birth on September 23, 1929, she has been a dairy farmer, a pre-marriage counsellor, an environmental campaigner, a Green Party candidate, a Fair Trade activist, and, more recently, an advocate for women priests and a more open attitude to death.
Jennifer Sleeman. All she wanted to be as a child growing up in South Africa was a cowboy.
She is also a mother of six — Andrew, Duncan, Paddy, Mary, Katey and Patricia (aka Bushy) — which she considers her greatest achievement.
That short summary of her life to date shows that she has lived her own philosophy: 'I don't want them to say she died at such and such an age, rather that she lived until she was that age.'
All she wanted to be as a child growing up in South Africa was a cowboy, she says, recalling the long pony rides with her sister Alix when they were almost too young to be let wander alone.
But then, in a fascinating account of her early life, she writes about how safe and idyllic life was on the fruit farm run by her parents, Loïs and James Graham, a royal navy reservist.
It 'was laid out in orchards of fruit trees, apples, pears, and peaches and there were two nectarine trees and [a] cherry [tree] on which we gorged when they were ripe … I can't remember lessons being very onerous. We swam in the water tanks used for irrigating, we rode, we looked after our animals, our clothes were minimal, one dress, shorts, jodhpurs, and for the winter, yellow polo-neck pullovers.'
All that changed when the Second World War broke out.
Jennifer Sleeman in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family
Jennifer's father was recalled to the navy and the family returned to her mother's native Scotland, counterintuitively moving nearer the fighting rather than farther away.
The 10-year-old Jennifer didn't see it that way, though. Some eight decades later, it is quite something to hear her talk with glee about the excitement of sailing back to Dumfries through 'submarine-infested waters', to use her evocative phrase.
She joins her hands to evoke the prayers she and her sister said on the journey: 'Each night, we ended our prayers with, 'and please God let us be torpedoed.' We thought that would be great fun. Mum was wise enough not to disabuse us of the notion.'
In any case, their mum had knitted red, white, and blue bobbles for their hats, which they thought would keep them safe if they found themselves bobbing in the waves.
It wasn't long before the harsh reality of war dawned with a jolt: 'I have vivid memories of being taken to see the army coming home from Dunkirk. Lorry after lorry of exhausted soldiers, we stood on the dusty roadside and waved, and mum told us never to forget seeing the soldiers coming home. I haven't,' Jennifer later wrote.
Jennifer Sleeman at her wedding to Brian Sleeman in 1949. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family
Little did she know then that, nine years later, she would marry one of the soldiers who didn't make it home. Her future husband, lieutenant-colonel Richard Brian Sleeman, of the royal sussex regiment, was captured in Dunkirk and spent the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, along with captain Harry Freeman Jackson, from Mallow in Co Cork.
That friendship explained how the couple later ended up in Ireland — Jennifer now thinks of herself as Irish — but we are getting ahead of the story.
After the war, in 1949, Jennifer married Brian Sleeman and moved to Berlin where he was secretary to the general of the Allied sector (British, French, and American) in a divided, bombed-out city.
Jennifer is looking at her album of photographs explaining the political context because, as she says, her grandchildren don't know that Berlin was divided between the Allies.
There are photographs of some of the streets reduced to rubble and while she didn't see the worst of the devastation in the city centre, she met some of the women who were victims of the mass rape perpetrated by Soviets on tens of thousands of German women.
Jennifer's uncle, a linguist, had stayed with two women in Berlin before the war and, against advice, she snuck out to visit them.
She found them living in a tiny flat and heard that they had been raped by the Russians. 'I felt awfully sorry for them.'
She feared for the women's safety and for the young girl who was living with them. At times, she worried for her own safety too. 'I used to feel a bit afraid. What if the Russians just walked in, there was absolutely nothing to stop them coming in from their sector of Berlin,' she says.
Damage in post-war Berlin. She lived there with her husband for two years after the war. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family
It didn't happen, though, and those post-war years also hold more amusing memories, such as the time the German gardener dug up everything they had planted in their garden and replanted it in rows.
For a woman who later spent many happy hours gardening without gloves so that she could feel the dirt under her fingernails, that particular anecdote still sends her into hoots of laughter. 'You couldn't believe that, but it's true,' she says.
Berlin is also associated with the happy arrival of the couple's first son, Andrew. Two more sons followed. Duncan was born in South Africa and Paddy in England before the couple acted on captain Freeman-Jackson's invitation to move to Ireland, where they developed a dairy farm, Killuragh Glen, in Killavullen in Cork in the 1950s.
Jennifer Sleeman in 1943. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family
Three more children arrived, Mary, Katey, and Patricia, and Jennifer Sleeman embraced her new life as mother and dairy farmer, milking cows.
'I loved that. I think I was quite good at it too,' she says. Even now, she looks out the window on these lovely summer mornings and remembers how lovely it was going to get the cows in all those years ago.
The conversation continues, going forward and back over Jennifer Sleeman's 'long, happy, busy life', as she describes it.
There were hard, sad days too. One of the hardest things, she says, was watching her husband suffer with Alzheimer's disease. She converted to Catholicism in the 1960s after meeting a nice priest. She had also seen the comfort her husband's faith gave him.
Jennifer Sleeman skiing in Germany in the 1950s. Photo courtesy of the Sleeman family.
Solace for her, however, came later when she was able to talk to another woman, Margaret, whose husband was suffering from Alzheimer's. 'She always said I was such a help to her. Unless you've been there, you cannot understand it.'
Unbidden, another memory resurfaces; the time she missed the only bus to Dumfries during the petrol-rationed days of war and was forced to walk the seven miles home in gathering darkness.
'I remember some kind, kind woman — the people you never forget — came on her bicycle. She got off and walked with me. That's the sort of thing you remember forever. You really do.'
After her husband died in 1988, Jennifer moved to Clonakilty where she built a house. 'That was interesting because they don't expect women to build houses.
I said to the builder, 'If you make a good job, I'll tell everybody. And if you make a bad job, I'll tell everybody too.' Well, you know, he did a good job.'
Jennifer Sleeman: 'I don't want them to say she died at such and such an age, rather that she lived until she was that age.'
She went on to have several more 'incarnations'. At a time of life when many slow down, she did the opposite and began a new career as a pre-marriage counsellor, using her free travel pass to go around the country giving courses, and later training the trainers.
She also got deeply involved in the Fairtrade movement after her daughter Patricia visited Nicaragua in 2001 and saw how much trading based on transparency and respect benefitted local communities.
After attending a 'Food We Buy' conference run by North Cork Organic Group, Jennifer started a Fairtrade campaign at her own kitchen table in Clonakilty, with the help of Cionnaith Ó Súilleabháin, of Sinn Féin, Canon Ian Jonas, Church of Ireland minister, and the late Fr Ger Galvin, a Catholic priest.
Again, she used her free travel to visit towns and villages all over the country to encourage support for farmers in the developing world, and to raise awareness of the devastating effects of climate change.
In 2007, she was named the Cork Environmental Forum Outstanding Individual for her work.
On a personal level, she got immense pleasure from the natural environment and worked in her own garden into her late 80s.
Jennifer Sleeman has a gentle, disarming pragmatism that runs through all of her conversations on the subject of death.
The oak trees growing in it tell a poignant story about the lasting scars of war. Jennifer lost a cousin and two uncles in the Second World War. One of them, her uncle John, was shot down over the Netherlands, and many years later she visited his burial place in Velp with her sister Alix.
'I picked up sprouting acorns on the path outside the graveyard and hid them at the bottom of my bag. They are now the oak trees growing in my garden in Clonakilty and to my delight I have found that they have had 'babies', little saplings which have an interesting history.'
Speaking of interesting histories, we have only scratched the surface of the life of a woman who has seen and done so much.
She says the width of life is more important than the length but she has clearly had both in hers, even if she doesn't always see the point in talking about it: 'How can you listen to me yapping on?'
With the greatest pleasure and ease, though we are sadly running out of space. I ask for a piece of advice she might have given her younger self: 'Don't be afraid to speak up and do what you want to do in life.'