Kieran’s family is grateful for his life so well-lived, so wise, generous, humble, constant, and kind. His ironic sense of humour guides and informs us even as we mourn his death. He never took himself or his achievements very seriously. Success mattered: as a professor of Education, he worked hard and didn’t retire until his early seventies; he travelled extensively giving workshops and lectures—“speaking at people” he called it—and was very engaged by the people he met and the hospitality he received around the world; he appreciated winning awards and prizes and national and international recognition. But all the grand stuff didn’t really matter; what mattered was the possibility that schooling could enrich the lives of children, enabling them to reach their full (and individual) potential.

With dozens of books and articles in many languages circulating his ideas about education, Kieran most thoroughly lived what he taught. A colleague in Mexico has given us a list of his advice to her:

Believe in your students, in the value of their ideas, in their willingness to learn, give them opportunities to also believe in themselves.

Support your students' projects and initiatives, give them quality feedback, listen carefully.

Question your own beliefs, your ideas, your predispositions about the world.

Learning is the most beautiful capacity we have.

There is no authentic wisdom without humility. 

Be coherent. What you teach about education, live it, too. The best teaching is given by example.

Dedicating ourselves to education is a mission that carries great responsibility. Improving it is possible.

An education where imagination is the heart of learning is possible.

Late in life, Kieran turned to fiction and to poetry, where his wry, whimsical, self-deprecating humour explored worlds ancient and modern, distant galaxies as well as the small and immediate moment, the human heart amidst the chaos of time and chance, the natural world, and human history. In a poem titled “Flicker,” Kieran wrote:

We are particles of something

that can neither know itself or be known;

each of us a floating coral

fixing to its random necropolis;

billions of years past, billions to come

only this thin moment infected by us;

ash from our bonfire

invisible on the dark ground.

The facts of the matter? Kieran was born in Clonmel in Ireland in a devoutly Catholic family: his parents James and Barbara and his sister, also Barbara. He was raised in England (Manchester and Nottingham, where his athletic adventures included the second longest long jump in England at the time), and then spent six months as a Franciscan novice, an experience that shaped his life and his work profoundly. He left the novitiate (for the University of London and then Stanford and Cornell, where he perfected his skill at lighting matches with his toes) but even in later life he thought of scholarship as the application of serious thought in the quiet of a friar’s cell and valued curiosity and doubt. “Darkness nestles among the trees outside,” he wrote in “Compline’s Embrace.

The friars had finished Compline and now kneel

among shadows and the crack of cooling oak.

Cowls up, they turn into the jaws of the choir stalls and pray,

clawed but undevoured by the lion day.

Kieran was an atheist but (he was clear) a Catholic atheist. With his PhD in hand, but no jobs to be had, Kieran took a one-year appointment at Simon Fraser University from which he retired some forty-five years later.

Given a job, he married Susanna, who had been wooing him for several years, and together they raised a close and lively family: Michael (who married Janice), Catherine (who married Mick), and David. He adored his grandchildren: Ciaran, Jordan, and Meredith Egan, and James and Kieran Egan Hunter. Grandpa Kieran was, above and before all, a family man. His love for each one of us was strong and generous and unconditional. He wrote of the mind formed in the monastic life that “discipline held his hand and heart,” but also concluded elsewhere that:

now, for me, around the dinner table,

Sharing a complicit smile with a grandchild—

The greatest pleasures are familial.

Celebrating this life, we also want to recognise at his death the valuable support he and we received from Dr. Chris Ryerson, Head of Respiratory Medicine, Providence Health Care; Dr. Geoffrey Edwards, his GP for many years and to the end; the Palliative Care team at Pacific Spirit Community Health; the fine home care from Caring Shepherd; and the practical, comprehensive, and very tender care we received at St. John Hospice at UBC.