Victoria Mary Clarke reveals Shane MacGowan's last words ahead of first anniversary

Victoria Mary Clarke has revealed Shane MacGowan’s last words to her as she prepares to mark his first anniversary next week: “I love you.”

The Pogues legend died last November at the age of 65, prompting an outpouring of national grief. His wife Victoria was by his bedside when he passed away in Dublin’s St Vincent’s Hospital, having battled encephalitis and pneumonia.

In an exclusive chat with the Irish Mirror, Victoria said: “The last thing we said to each other was ‘I love you’, which is all you want, really. For me and Shane, a lot of our communication was unspoken anyway. We were just very happy to be together. We would say, ‘I love you’ a million times a day. We said it so much, we both knew there was never any doubt.

“I don’t think, ‘Oh f***, I wish I’d said this, or that’. Because I probably did say it, and if I didn’t, I can say it now and I feel he will hear it, and get it, and understand.”

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A year on, she says she struggles with how they are now in “different realms” after their love story of 40 years. The artist and writer said: “I want to be with him. Whether I’m with him there, or he’s with me here.

“I miss him here. I want to see Shane. I want to touch him. I want to hold his hand and see his eyes and kiss him. I want to hear his laugh – so funny. I want his physical self, because of all those things.”

However, she feels she can communicate with Shane even now, as his force was so strong she can sense his presence in the afterlife. She added: “I will talk to him a lot, I talk to him all day long. Sometimes I actually feel him viscerally present.

“I went to see Bob Dylan the other day and I could feel Shane right there, really enjoying it. If I closed my eyes he could be sitting there, watching it. I feel his energy and his personality is strong enough for him to still be able to communicate.”

She listens back to taped recordings of herself and Shane in conversation, to feel close to him. She made the tapes of their chats for her 2001 book A Drink With Shane MacGowan, which told of life with the songwriting star.

Victoria said: “I was lucky, I managed to record a lot of our conversations. I was doing it for the book but after that, we kept recording ourselves. I go to those and they make me feel I have gone back in time, to that moment. I play them over and over again. Vocal recordings are not like videos – because it’s different listening, and you can actually go there, in your head.

“He was a great conversationalist, really funny, really surprising, never, ever boring. He was always full of surprises, right to the end. One day, I came into the hospital and he was singing I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. And I just cracked up.

“I don’t know anyone like that, there’s nobody like him. You can’t replace him with a similar version – they don’t make them like that.”

Looking back on Shane’s funeral in Tipperary last year, she agrees it was the best ever seen in Ireland.

The star-studded celebration of Shane’s life was held in St Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh on December 8. It featured world-famous musicians such as Nick Cave – who sang a piano version of A Rainy Night in Soho – as well as a video recording by Bono. Hollywood star Johnny Depp carried his coffin.

Glen Hansard, Imelda May, Camille O’Sullivan, Cait O’Riordan and Mundy were among the Irish musicians who performed.

Victoria danced around the altar with Shane’s sister Siobhan to Fairy-tale of New York, with Siobhan telling the congregation after: “Wow. I think Shane would have enjoyed that.”

What will Victoria do this year to mark Shane’s first anniversary on November 30? She said: “Something a bit quieter, I will probably go to Mass. It’s a difficult one.

“You just have to keep finding ways to stay in the present and not go into it. Stay with what’s happening now and what am I doing now. And how do I feel now. You’ve got to move forward, because it’s so easy to get stuck and say ‘I just want to stay in the past’.”

But Victoria did go through some dark times in the aftermath of the uplifting last goodbye for Shane.

She said: “The funeral was light and joyful. But there was also this horror he was gone physically. It was good and bad in exactly the same moment. That’s happened a lot. I would wake in the morning howling and have to phone the Samaritans. I’ve quite often wanted to kill myself and I’d be phoning Pieta House.

“Whatever connection you had with someone in the physical realm you have lost that, so you miss it and you can’t avoid those feelings. I rely heavily on friends and family to get through it and I’ll ring them up and say, ‘I need you.’ Some feel embarrassed to do that but I think you need to do it.”

She believes she and Shane stayed together for so long, after meeting in London when Victoria was 16, because theirs was “true love”.

There were wonderful times as well as tough times, as Shane publicly struggled with addictions.

Victoria said: “I never could stay away from Shane, even if I wanted to. I did try a few times. But it was just impossible. I was magnetised to him. I really think we were meant to be together from the very first time. I never seriously considered anyone else.

“It was the love that was coming from our spiritual selves, gluing us together. We both felt it so strongly. We could see each others’ souls. That was the main thing about us.”

Throughout the tough times, her belief in angels gave her strength, and continues to do so.

It’s why she chose to create art of them, and launch her solo exhibition Angels of the Trea Collection, which features angels who have guided her and that she has channelled. She also has a collection of scarves featuring her uplifting angel artwork, which have been worn by Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Bruce Springsteen and Primal Scream’s Bobbie Gillespie.

Victoria said: “I do think the angels gave me strength. When you make that kind of spiral connection, it gives you a core stability through the ups and downs of your life.”

Art is always something she was interested in, and she started painting in 2019, but this is her first exhibition. It features 22 acrylic and ink paintings and prints in what Victoria calls “comic style” and depicts some of the key angels in her life. It opened in Dublin’s Irish Georgian Society on Thursday, with music by Liam O Maonlai and Larry Beau and will run until November 26.

As the exhibition was announced, she said: “They were a positive energy source of strength and comfort during Shane’s illness and when he died. Shane always really wanted me to have an exhibition of the angels and I promised him that I would.”

• See victoriamaryclarkeangels.com.

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