The rain fell in sheets across the ancient stone façade of Our Lady of the Nativity Church in Ardee on the morning of November 22, 2025, as if the sky itself had joined the congregation in mourning. Inside, every pew was filled, every doorway crowded, every breath held captive by the weight of a grief too vast for one small town to contain. A single white coffin rested at the top of the aisle, draped in the green-and-gold colours of St Mary’s GAA club and crowned with a framed photograph of a young man mid-laugh, eyes sparkling like the sun on Carlingford Lough, a hurley slung casually over one shoulder as if he were simply pausing for the camera on his way to the next adventure. His name was Dylan Kierans. He was twenty-three years old. And less than a week earlier, on the rain-slicked L3618 outside Tallanstown, he had been torn from the world in a collision so violent it left an entire community gasping for air.

Just hours before Dylan’s funeral Mass began, a few kilometres away in the same parish, another church had said goodbye to another young man, Alan McCluskey, twenty-four, Dylan’s best friend since they were barefoot boys kicking footballs on the green outside their estate. Two coffins. Two mothers dressed in black. Two fathers whose hands would never again ruffle their sons’ hair. Two sets of siblings who would wake every morning for the rest of their lives reaching for brothers who were no longer there. One single, catastrophic crash on a quiet country road had stolen the light from an entire generation of Ardee, and the town, still raw from laying Alan to rest, now gathered again to whisper the hardest goodbye of all.

The priest’s voice trembled as he began: “Today we are not burying a memory. We are burying a heartbeat.”

And then the tributes came, wave after wave of them, each one more devastating than the last, until the church itself seemed to sway under the weight of love and loss.

His mother, Michelle, stood at the lectern first, her hands shaking so violently she had to grip the wood to stay upright. She spoke of the boy who burst into the kitchen every morning singing whatever song was stuck in his head (usually something by Dermot Kennedy or The Murder Capital at full volume), of the son who still climbed into her bed during thunderstorms because “Mam, I’m only big on the outside,” of the young man who texted her at 2 a.m. the night before the crash to say “Just home from rehearsal, love you millions, see you tomorrow for breakfast xx.” She ended with the words now etched on ribbons tied to every lamppost in Ardee: “He brought light, laughter and adventure everywhere he went… and he took it with him when he left.”

His younger sister, Aoife, sixteen, read a letter she had written to Dylan the night he died, words she never got to give him. “You promised you’d be at my debs, that you’d embarrass me with your dancing and your loud cheering. You promised you’d teach me to drive when I turned seventeen. You promised you’d never leave. I hate you for breaking your promises, but I love you more for every second you kept them.” She collapsed halfway through, her sobs echoing off the vaulted ceiling like gunshots.

His best friend since they were four, Ryan, stood next, voice hoarse from crying. “Dylan never walked into a room; he arrived. Like a storm of good craic and bad jokes and pure, unstoppable joy. The last thing he ever said to me was ‘See you tomorrow, buddy, we’ll sort the world out over a cuppa.’ Tomorrow never came.”

But it was Dylan’s father, Paul, who delivered the blow that left no eye dry in the church. A tall, quiet man who had spent the week greeting hundreds of mourners at his door with tea and handshakes and a dignity that seemed superhuman, he walked slowly to the coffin, placed both hands on the wood, and leaned in until his forehead touched the lid.

“I was supposed to teach you how to be a man,” he said, voice cracking like ice on a winter puddle. “Turns out you were teaching me all along. You taught me how to love without holding back. How to laugh until your belly hurt. How to live every single day like it mattered. I’m proud of the man you became, Dylan. And I’m proud to be your Da.”

He kissed the coffin three times, once for each decade of his son’s too-short life, and whispered so softly the microphone barely caught it: “Until we meet again, kid.”

Outside, the rain had stopped. A weak November sun broke through the clouds, painting the hearse in pale gold as it carried Dylan away to his final resting place in the cemetery behind the church, the same graveyard where his grandparents lay, where he used to cycle as a child to leave flowers on their graves. Hundreds followed on foot, a silent river of black coats and broken hearts, past the GAA pitch where Dylan had captained the juniors to a county title two years earlier, past the chipper where he worked weekends just to have “a few bob for pints and gigs,” past the estate where he grew up, where neighbours stood on doorsteps with candles flickering in jam jars.

The crash itself remains a nightmare etched in forensic detail. At approximately 11:45 p.m. on Saturday, November 16, 2025, the silver Volkswagen Golf carrying Dylan and Alan home from a night of music and laughter in Dundalk collided head-on with a black Audi Q5 on the narrow, unlit L3618 outside Tallanstown. Gardai believe speed and wet roads were factors. The impact was so ferocious that both cars were torn apart, metal twisted into grotesque sculptures. Emergency services arrived to a scene of utter devastation. Dylan was pronounced dead at the scene. Alan fought for four days in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda before his family made the unbearable decision to let him go.

In the days that followed, the town of Ardee became a shrine. The pitch at St Mary’s GAA was lined with hundreds of hurleys laid in the shape of a giant “D.” The gates of Ardee Community School, where Dylan had been a popular Leaving Cert student just five years earlier, were wrapped in green and gold ribbons. His beloved Yamaha guitar, the one he played at every session from Termonfeckin to Termonbarry, was placed on the altar during the funeral, a silent encore. Local musicians played his favourite songs outside the church as the coffin emerged, The Murder Capital’s “Green & Blue” drifting across the square like a ghost refusing to leave.

The double funeral has left a wound that no amount of time seems likely to heal. Two mothers who now share the same unimaginable grief. Two fathers who will never again hear their sons’ voices calling “Da” from the kitchen. Two sets of friends who will never again pile into a car for a late-night spin, singing off-key at the top of their lungs. Two young men who should have had decades of weddings and children and Sunday roasts and grey hairs ahead of them, reduced to photographs and memories and the echo of laughter in empty rooms.

Yet even in the darkest hour, Dylan’s light refuses to be extinguished. His organs saved four lives, a final act of generosity from a boy who gave everything he had to everyone he met. A GoFundMe set up by friends to support both families surpassed €350,000 in four days. The hashtag #LightLaughterAdventure began trending across Ireland, strangers sharing stories of random acts of kindness Dylan had performed without ever seeking credit, paying for a stranger’s groceries when their card was declined, driving an elderly neighbour to chemotherapy every week, stopping on the N2 to help a family with a broken-down car in the pouring rain.

At the graveside, as the final prayers were said and the coffin was lowered into the cold November earth, a lone piper played “The Parting Glass.” And then, in a moment that has since gone viral across Irish social media, Dylan’s younger brother Jack, just nineteen, stepped forward, placed a hurley on the grave, and spoke the words that have become the town’s quiet anthem of remembrance:

“You brought light, laughter and adventure everywhere you went, Dylan. We’ll carry it for you now. Until we meet again, big brother.”

The rain held off just long enough for the sun to break through one final time, a thin shaft of gold falling across the fresh earth like a promise, or perhaps a signature, from a boy who always knew how to find the light, even when the rest of us couldn’t.

Somewhere, in whatever place comes after, two best friends are almost certainly laughing again, planning the next adventure, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

Until then, Ardee keeps the flame.