Little did I know when I picked up the second Pogues album, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, on cassette in the mid-1980s in Dublin that I would one day be watching Shane MacGowan‘s funeral on a livestream from San Francisco in 2023. But so it was. MacGowan, who died on November 30, had been ailing for a long time. I hadn’t realized that he lived in Dublin with his wife, Victoria Clarke. He was being treated at St. Vincent’s; he had been in a wheelchair since a fall in 2015, I learned.

Back in my college days, I liked “Dirty Old Town” best of all on that album and couldn’t really connect with any of the other songs. It turns out “Dirty Old Town” wasn’t even written by Shane, but it evoked Dublin so well. “Dreamed a dream by the old canal…” There was a tenderness to it that contrasted oddly with Shane’s jarring appearance. Even as I watch the video now, his teeth look particularly grotesque and he seems slightly nervous and out of it.

When his wife posted a recent photo of him in his hospital bed, I knew he didn’t have long. And that was a shock. But he was smiling gamely, as he always did in later photos. I see the sweetness and brilliance in him now.

After Sinead O’Connor died earlier this year, I was looking back at clips of her performing, and one of the later ones she did, on RTE television, was a rendition of “A Rainy Night in Soho.” This happens to be my favorite Pogues song and I am pleased to see that it now stands as one of his best. Shane was a romantic and when I look back at his work, I hear courage in every line he sang. Just the way he boldly proclaims, “I’ve been loving you a long time…” Another fantastic line from the song that I love is “The wind was whistling all its charms.” Very Shane.

His funeral took place on what would have been O’Connor’s 57th birthday. Fate wove their lives together somehow, and of course they must have had many private moments that no one will ever know about. She died in London; he died in Ireland. His funeral was a much grander occasion. The President of Ireland sat in the front row! TV channels in England and Ireland streamed the service. I tuned in via Twitter at 7am (!) to watch for what turned out to be three hours, still rather amazed that I could. It was mind-blowing for me on a number of levels. Although held in a Catholic church, the funeral was a pantheistic experience. The music was intensely powerful. Looking at Shane’s wicker coffin, adorned with red roses, was very poignant.

Once, on a Friday evening in the late eighties, at the end of a long week at college and near the end of my time in Ireland, I stood on the main street of Bray waiting for a bus to take me to Newcastle, which was the tiny village in Wicklow where my family had moved in 1983. I could have taken a bus the whole way from Dublin, but sometimes I preferred to take the DART train and look out at the peaceful coastline on the way there. Bray was the last stop then, so I would hop on the 84 there and it was a quick 20-minute ride home after that.

I wish I could remember the season. It must have been spring or early summer because there was a young couple in their late teens sitting on the street at the bus stop with duffle bags, very relaxed. They smiled at me. It was unusual, to say the least. We got to talking, slowly. “We’ve been to London,” the man said. Then, later, he suddenly started singing “Dirty Old Town” as the day dimmed slightly. I remember smiling to myself.

It was a perfect moment, one of those rare moments when I was comfortable in my own skin and in sync with a pair of strangers. Now I realize they must have been at a Pogues gig in London. Why did I never want to go to one? I never thought about it. But when I visited an old friend in London in ’86 I picked up the Poguetry in Motion EP and heard “A Rainy Night in Soho.” And I still have it. Since nobody talked about it then (and it never became a hit), it seemed like a song just for me. And it still does.

Shane left a beautiful legacy: his art. A duet Shane penned that I never even knew about in the 1990s, “Haunted,” has been a wonderful solace to listen to recently. Both Sinead and Shane are brilliant on it, her emoting with such quiet focus, his voice sprawling and expressive. Music is medicine for the soul. And I think they both knew that.

Camille O’Sullivan and Mundy sang it at the funeral. It was my favorite performance.

And the eulogies: his sister Siobhan and his wife getting equal time to remember him, both in very different ways. No men spoke at length except the priest, who delivered an eccentric homily where he reminisced about listening to “Lizzy” as a youth. It seemed like everyone was looking back at the past, reexamining their identity. How strange to see Gerry Adams get up to speak first… surreal for me. And such a reckoning with time to see my generation age. Glen Hansard, younger than me, now a bearded patriarch!

But it’s all good, as they say, even though it did have a kind of “last stop” quality. And that’s appropriate, too.

Here’s Haunted: