Pope's face like his life - pained and serene

For any reporter covering the life and times of Pope John Paul, his death walked that fine line between a personal and professional loss.

In more than 25 years covering the Pope, I had travelled around the world with him - from Manhattan's Fifth Ave to the steppes of Kazakhstan, from Chile's Tierra del Fuego to the ice of Alaska.

I had flown on his plane more times than I can remember on more than 70 of his 104 foreign trips, had been in the same room as he welcomed such leaders as Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.

He once handed me a piece of a cake his nuns had baked for him at his summer mountain retreat.

Yesterday, I was one of a small group of reporters allowed to enter the Vatican's frescoed Sala Clementina to view the Pope's body at a special private requiem rite for Vatican officials and dignitaries.

His face in death was, like his life, at once pained and serene.

It seemed a fitting expression for the Pole who survived the horrors of World War II, the Nazi invasion of his country, the dark years of communism, an assassination attempt, and yet always managed to remain optimistic.

Looking at it closely, I thought that even in death it still had that mix of a grimace and a smile - his recipe for a full life.

Even if as a Catholic I did not agree with all his pronouncements, even if as a reporter I was dispassionate about covering him, there was no escaping the emotions of witnessing the passing of such a towering figure.

On the scale of my journalistic memories, few can match the emotions of watching the Pope each time he returned to his Polish homeland, where his compatriots saw him as their liberator from communism, their defender on the world stage.

As his Popemobile passed a sea of his people, they knelt before it like wheat bending before the wind.

As his body lay in state yesterday, the faces I watched most closely were those of the Poles in the room. It was they who seemed the most lost, the most orphaned.

His private secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was at his side for more than four decades and whom the Pope loved like a son, valiantly held back tears.

At one point yesterday, Dziwisz left his chair and approached the Pope's body. He had the same gait, affectionate gaze, confidence and familiarity with which he had approached thousands of times before to adjust the Pope's cassock, hand him a speech or fix his microphone. Then, apparently realising that he did not have to do that any more, he went back to his seat.

Dressed in crimson and white vestments and a white mitre, the Pope lay on a bier in the frescoed room where once he addressed world leaders, bishops and pilgrims.

The Pope's face showed the signs of the physical sufferings that racked him in the final days of his life.

As a reporter I had been in that room hundreds of times, so often that after a few years I no longer looked up to admire the frescoes.

It was in that same room on June 4, 2004, that the Pope told United States President George W. Bush that Iraq had to regain sovereignty.

Now this once-robust man who had feared no one but tried to respect everyone was languishing lifeless, his face yellowing, his hands waxy.

With him were his rosary beads and the silver cross he carried around the world. Both had sustained him in life and comforted him as he approached death.

As a reporter, I often had the human privilege - and the professional challenge - of flying on the same plane with that man, that cross, those rosary beads.

- REUTERS