Death Need Not Be Fatal

ONE

Angela's Diary

Death has always been a particularly confusing situation for the Irish. We're the only race that celebrates the wake and mourns the marriage. With beliefs rooted in pagan times, a healthy dose of guilt, shame, and misinformation courtesy of Holy Mother Church, and perhaps a jar or two too much of liquid spirits, it's no wonder we don't know which way is up, or down, as it were, when it comes to how we're supposed to die, and what happens after.

Right from the first, death had me scratching the old cranium.

As far as I can gather, the father and his father came to America in 1922 to escape the vengeance of His Majesty's law lads for activities against the interests of the Crown. Although IRA membership and purported heroism increase with the number of downed pints in Ireland, the talk was that grandfather was wanted for the dispatching of a constable of the RIC, the Royal Irish Constabulary. There was a letter, one that hung around for years, a very official-looking one in that grave organized-rebellion way, that asked for safe conduct to America for the duo. The father remained here; the grandfather returned to Ireland after the hunt had been called off.

Or so the story goes.

Malachy Sr. then met up with the mother, Angela, in 1930 at a dance in Brooklyn, after which they did what most of us cannot imagine our parents doing. The result of the "knee trembler," what the smart Irish call stand-up sex against a wall, was pregnancy, and thus began the gallop of Angela's family folk, mostly large female cousins from Brooklyn, and husbands thereof, to the rescue. The daddy was made to marry the mammy. No shotguns present, just a stern Irish warning of the punishment to come if Daddy declined. For if the Jews have a monopoly on guilt, then the Irish RCs own the monopoly on remorse. (Protestants have regrets only, thank you.)

Five months later, on August 19, 1930, there popped out in Brooklyn, America, that literary lad Frank McCourt. A year, a month, and a day later it was my turn to pop out, on September 20, 1931, and a year and a month after that out popped the twins, Eugene and Oliver, not identical but very much together in mischief and mirth. A year later, in the midst of the five males and the mother, there popped out Margaret Mary McCourt. Five children in a little over four years and the rhythm method be damned.

If the last of the American McCourts had been a male, I doubt I would remember Margaret Mary the way I do, but a male she wasn't. Instead the most exquisite angelic entrancing little creature with amazing black hair, the bluest of blue eyes, and baby skin that was so pure it was almost translucent have a permanent place in my mind. Her little voice sent out a sound so softly musical that we didn't mind at all if she cried.

In my memory, illuminated by the arrival of this tiny magical being, the shabby apartment was suddenly filled with song, smile, and loving talk as we crowded around her crib just to look at her.

Frank, Oliver, Eugene, and I all slept in the same bed, twins at the bottom, Frank and I at the head of the bed with me on the inside. There was a severe shortage of sheets, so changes of bedclothes were infrequent, and the immediate atmosphere around our bed could be described as acrid. We were not piss poor; there was more than enough to go around.

Then crash! The light of life, love, and laughter flickered and went out.

It was the anguished voice of my father that awakened me that night, and when my eyes adjusted, they were filled with the sight of him standing in the middle of the room, outlined against the light-lit doorway with his shadow enlarged on the wall. For some reason his arms were outstretched, and he was holding Margaret Mary in his hands, from which she drooped like a rag doll. I could see the shadow of her head, her arms, her legs that just hung limply, silently in the shadowed room. My father just kept repeating the same words: "God blast it to hell! God blast it to hell," which was unusual for him, as he was a bit prudish about what he called bad language and, when sober, was the quietest man you could imagine.

He was sober then, and he left the room carrying my sister, with the apartment walls absorbing the ancient keening wail of a bereft mother. The terror of the unknown paralyzing me even to the vocal cords, I couldn't even ask, "What's happening?" and I couldn't even move to go and find out. Angela was moaning, "Oh, Jesus, Mary, and holy Saint Joseph, what have you done to me? Why have you taken my child? Blast you. Blast you. Blast you."

I lay in the bed, afraid to move, my brothers not stirring for some reason. Was I the only one aware? In the morning we got up, and the mother was in the kitchen buttering some bread and boiling the kettle for some tea, which were our breakfast. The dad was absent and so was Margaret Mary; the mother explained he had taken her to the hospital to see the doctor.

The father returned. MM did not.

The little voice disappeared from our lives, and the explanation given by the father was that the angels had taken her to heaven, where she was very happy playing all day on swings and seesaws.

The mother then fell into a darkness. She sat staring into space, not paying much attention to us, no food, and sometimes we sat and watched as the ash on her cigarette grew longer, longer, fascinating us and making us wonder when it would fall.

In memory the ash never does fall. The smoke rises and rises forever, and the mother's eyes stare forever into space.

In today's psychology, Mam would have been diagnosed with a severe postpartum depression complicated by grief, but back then her condition came from the weight of a world too cruel to carry. Undiagnosed and untreated, the mother's condition was handled the only way her cousins who lived in Brooklyn knew how.

They sent her home to Ireland—and us along with her.

Ahead lay the years in Ireland the brother Frank so famously chronicled. The poverty and wretched conditions smothered us, but not so much as to extinguish the memory of Margaret Mary or the question of her whereabouts.

The frequent queries to the mother elicited a blank stare and a halting, "The doctor took her away."

"To where?" we asked.

"The hospital, I think," she said.

"But when is she coming back?"

"I don't know. Stop bothering me," the mother said. We tormented her with that sort of question until she'd explode in anger, and tell us to shut up and leave her alone.

And so my first experience with death was the perfect first stage of grief in the Kübler-Ross model: denial.

As it turned out, in the McCourt family you could deny a death for a very long time. Years later, in her diary, the mother would finally put pen to paper to express the reality of her grief:

But when I was a child, the repudiation of Margaret Mary's death left me in a state of suspended animation. You don't know what the fuck is going on. And so my views on death were screwed up from the very beginning. There was no completion of the stages of grief. It was either a seesaw with baby Jesus or the longest extended hospital stay in the history of mankind. It was all very mysterious and confusing, like parents trying to explain how babies are conceived and born. And yet somehow the questions about Margaret Mary that seemed so important faded into embers and became lodged in the dark recesses of my mind.

It would be about sixty years before the answer came. My son Conor had become a police officer in the New York Police Department, and he used his talents and connections to try to track down the grave of Margaret Mary, if indeed there was such a grave. There was! She was buried alongside twenty-three other children of indigent families who couldn't afford individual plots. The mass grave was in St. John Cemetery in Queens, New York, which is the world capital of dead people, as there are more than four times as many people in the ground of that borough as there are walking the streets. One family had generously erected a monument with slots to enable each of the families to slide in a plaque bearing the name of their child to mark the place of interment.

So came the day in 1997 when the tribe McCourt trekked to St. John Cemetery, Queens, New York, to finally memorialize and mark the ground where the baby bones of Margaret Mary lay buried. There were Frank and Ellen, Mike and Joan, Alphie and Lynn, Diana and myself, my sons Conor and Cormac, and grandchildren gathered around. My wife, Diana, had kept some of Angela's famous ashes, and we scattered them on Margaret Mary's little grave. It was here that my old Catholic indoctrination kicked in. In my imagination this angel was in the bleakness of nowhere lonely and distressed. She was floating through the darkness wondering if there was a love anywhere, trying to see through the impenetrable mists and rain, crying out in the permanent fog for her mother or someone to hold her, hug her, and tell her she was loved. Year after year she wandered in the cold stygian nothingness encountering nothing, nobody, total oblivion. Then one day a door opened, and suddenly her life after death was flooded with sunshine and there on the other side were her brothers and their children and her mother smiling in warm greeting. As her mother's ashes came floating down on the grave she was gathered in her mother's arms and away they went into the soft sunlight of another caring world as I recited, with a slight shift of pronoun, this beautiful poem by Yeats:

TWO

Christmas in Limerick

There's a legend of sorts in Limerick, Ireland, about a saint named Munchin who sometime in the sixth century took to building a church in town. One day his workmen came upon a heavy stone that they couldn't lift. Munchin asked some of the townspeople for assistance, but they refused. Luckily for the saint, a group of Nordic strangers happened by and helped put the stone in its place. Afterward Saint Munchin prayed that the strangers would flourish in Limerick and that the natives would perish, or at least have a very hard time. As was the case with many a pious Irishman who followed, old Munchin knew how to hold a grudge. And so the Curse of Saint Munchin began and was soon preserved in verse, part of which reads:

I don't know how Saint Munchin's blessing on strangers missed us, but it did. Flourish we didn't. And prosper? Not the chance of a patch on my trousers.

As mentioned, Margaret Mary's death was the reason the McCourts left Brooklyn, America, and sailed to Ireland and, after a few unscheduled stops, settled in a town called Limerick, which then had cornered the market on death, destitution, and despair.

The voyage happened something like this: We piled our meager clothes into what they called a steamer trunk, and off we went to the big ship. That must have been 1934, and I have been told that the whole world was in a state of dark despair and depression even for people whose little sisters had not died. There was a fellow named Adolf Hitler over in Germany who had gotten himself the position of führer on the promise that he was going to make Germany great again. Americans, including the much-honored Charles Lindbergh, the motorcar magnate Henry Ford, whose photo Hitler kept in his office, and a man named Fred Koch, who built some oil refineries for the Nazis, much admired him. And then there was a man named Thomas Watson, whose company IBM helped with the statistical problems of transporting Jews to concentration camps and killing them. He got a special medal from Hitler that he returned after several years of consideration, during which time several million Jews were exterminated. As far as I know, none of the Jews who were killed were given or returned any medals. There were also groups of ordinary Americans who supported Hitler, swept up no doubt in his talk of purity of race and white supremacy.

The McCourts, who headed for Ireland against the tide of Irish headed for America, knew nothing of this. We were adrift in a sea of hopelessness, sailing in the wake of Margaret Mary's death, the mother never to be right and whole again, and the father perhaps already plotting his escape with drink and distance. I don't know if the mother blamed America for MM's death or not. But I do believe she thought that in Ireland, God's grace would never have allowed such a thing to happen. That was the irony of our journey. For in Ireland, God's grace would be in short supply, because death was no stranger to our family.

The voyage across the Atlantic, though, did excite us children. Frequently I performed a disappearing act, but Mother always knew where to find me: always in the crew quarters on top of a table, singing an old Irish song for bread:

George Bernard Shaw once said that the USA and Great Britain were two countries divided by a common language. In the USA, when they called me cute it had to do with the fact that I was blond and blue-eyed, with perfect little white teeth, and with the kind of complexion that was the desire of many a woman. I was also energetic, quick to smile, and polite.

In Ireland, cute is not exactly what I just described, nor is it a compliment. The various meanings are all pejorative and include cunning, devious, manipulative, charmingly criminal, and deceitful. The Irish cute is also often coupled with another unflattering word so as to be more descriptive, which the Irish like to be. One of the most common examples of this compound phrasing is cute hoor, which is applied to many of our native Irish politicians, who will not only take your money but try to convince you that they are pleasuring you in the process. Now hoor, of course, is the Irish way of pronouncing whore