An emotional homecoming

I was curious, when in 2011, I read a newspaper article about an upcoming event called The Gathering, a year-long celebration planned for 2013 welcoming home members of the Irish diasporas and their descendents.

 

Being the only grand-daughter of my maternal grandmother, Catherine Fogarty, who emigrated to America from Corofin in 1880, I realised I had come ‘home’ before I was officially invited.

My growing up years were steeped in Irishness. Both of my parents were Irish/American. It was an unspoken understanding within myself for about as long as I can remember that I would come home to Ireland, someday.

As a child, my mother would often say to me, “Mary, you remind me so much of my mother,” a woman I never saw nor ever heard speak. She died when my mother was 20-years-old and my mom gave birth to me when she was 45-years-old. And yet I sensed some kind of a thread connecting my grandmother and me.

As a child I would sit and listen to John McCormack records that told stories so sad; the grown-ups thought it was odd that I was drawn to them.

Growing up in America and imagining coming home to Ireland, I didn’t have any fixed idea of what I would find. I only knew I needed to make the journey for reasons that weren’t clear and yet, real.

In 1987, with money my mom left to me upon her death the year before, I made my first trip home, accompanied by my husband and our five children, ranging in age from five to 14.

We arrived in Shannon on an August morning, having flown through the night. The seven of us with our 14 suitcases piled into the rented red minibus and began our drive on the opposite side of the road. Corofin wasn’t that far away and yet, the jet lag and the roadway, pre-dual carriageway, made for a harrowing first experience. The rock walls seemed so close I thought one of us would scrape the side of our face against them if the minibus windows were rolled down. I was so tired I’d lost control of my salivary glands. Luckily, my husband did the driving.

Eventually, we settled in the Irish-rent-a-cottage located just behind the centre of Corofin. The cottage replicated an old Irish dwelling and I loved its simplicity. We did some sightseeing, The Cliffs of Moher, The Aillwee Caves, the beaches of Lahinch and Bunratty Castle. We cooked most of our meals in the cottage and made sandwiches to take with us on our day trips.

We also spent time sitting and reading by the turf fire in our cottage, visiting with shopkeepers and publicans in the village and getting to know some of the local children. There was a wonderful grassy lawn in front of the cottages where our kids played soccer into the lingering light of August evenings.

The one particular person I knew of was a man named Paddy O’Brien. He, together with his brother, Dunny, looked after my grandmother’s youngest brother, Dan Fogarty, when Dan was an old man with no family left. My mother visited Ireland in the 1930s and met her uncle Dan Fogarty and Paddy O’Brien as well. She and Paddy corresponded through the years.

It was Paddy who informed my mom of Dan’s death and it was my mom who informed Paddy of my birth. Paddy was my connection to my family.

I got in touch with Paddy and he came by our cottage for a visit. After our initial meeting, Paddy invited me to go to the grave of my great-grandparents, my grandmother’s parents. I was somewhat startled by the invitation, as I hadn’t thought about people that far back in my family. I was still simply wondering about my grandmother and yet it would have seemed odd to myself and I imagined to Paddy, to say, ‘no’.

So, ‘yes’ was my response. He drove to a cemetery that had a somewhat hidden entrance, not far from the village. He went ahead and opened the heavy, black, iron gate, closing it behind us as we made our way in. He walked to the far right of the cemetery. It seemed to be a place he knew well.

“Sure this is theirs,” he said as his hand worked at scraping away the lichen growing on the face of the stone. Even with his handiwork the names were hard to make out, the stone so very old. My eyes worked at putting the letters together. Gradually I saw the names ‘Patrick Fogarty and Mary Maroney’, my great grandparents, names I’d never heard before. The stone said Patrick was born in 1827 and died in 1910. The stone was erected by their loving son, Dan Fogarty. Dan’s gravestone was next to theirs.

I felt unsure of what to think or how to feel, still being a bit startled by being there. After a time of silence, Paddy asked if I’d like to kneel down and say an Our Father. Again, the feeling of uncertainty and confusion about being at the grave of great-grandparents I’d never thought of or heard about overtook me. At the same time, I was fairly certain saying ‘no’ to that invitation would seem odd, rude, ungrateful or maybe even un-Christian to Paddy. I don’t remember if I said ‘yes’ or if I just knelt down.

Paddy took off his hat, blessed himself and started to say the Our Father out loud.

I thought to myself, ‘I should join in’ when something way more powerful than thinking set in on me. An emotion I was previously unaware of rose up, involuntarily. It seemed to originate in my stomach, as if something dark, heavy and ancient was suddenly stirred. My vision blurred. My breathing became shallow and jagged.

I felt afraid because I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I could not stop it. The stirring began to move from my stomach up toward my throat. I worried that I might throw up. My breathing continued to constrict and open in some kind of erratic pattern I’d never before experienced.

The energy of this anguish moved quickly through my throat to my face, radiating cracks of sorrow that seemed to splinter my skin, a pain too great for my heart to hold.  The screams were silent, the sorrow sickening.

I don’t remember the ride back to the cottage nor any more conversation with Paddy that day.  I don’t know if Paddy noticed anything different about me after our visit to the cemetery. I never spoke to him about it and yet, I’ve never forgotten it.

In fact, that experience has kept me coming back home for the past 25 years, culminating in my husband and I buying a home just down the road from that cemetery, a cemetery I visit frequently.
It’s as if the ancestors I never knew want me to know what was too painful to speak, too frightening to even think about. Their history and mine is, little by little, as I can bear it, opening up to me.

I was never a great student of history, so coming upon the book Trinity, by Leon Uris, was a good place for me to start, as it combined Irish history from 1845-1906 with stories of three Irish families and how the families and the individuals within them were affected by the politics of the time. I remember setting the book down for a few months at a time as I let the grief I experienced in reading about these lives wash over me. It took me two years to finish reading it.

I read PJ Curtis’ book entitled The Lightning Tree, about an old woman that PJ knew when he was a child. I was particularly fascinated because this woman, Mariah, lived in the shadow of Mullaghmore, as did my grandmother. The time period corresponded to my grandmother’s growing-up years and I wondered if they knew each other or knew of each other. Every detail seemed like precious information about the way my grandmother may have lived. I read it twice, wanting to take all the details in. I have a feeling I will read it again.

Plays by Martin McDonough and more recently by Thomas Murphy poignantly portray the savagery of what is called The Famine or the Great Hunger, or perhaps more accurately, The Starvation. Watching these performances, I became a witness to my people enduring hopelessness while desperately wanting to hope. The words of John Connor, the father in Murphy’s Famine, “Help will come”, were words I, as an audience member, wanted to believe. All the while, with the hindsight of history, knowing instead of help, insanity and death were incrementally settling in on John and his family. Watching this drama unfold from a theatre seat is nearly unbearable, much less imagining it to be real. Yet, real it was. So real that close to one million people died and over one-and-half million emigrated and another 100,000 died on board ships that left Irish shores.

The Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon, is cold remembrance.

In Dublin, I toured the Jeanie Johnston, a replicated Famine ship, sometimes known as a coffin ship. At the beginning of the tour, the guide issued a warning, “Some of what you will hear on this tour may be very disturbing.”

I was grateful for the alert. As he began to tell us about what life was like for the passengers on those ships, one of whom was my grandmother, Catherine, I tuned in and out as my heart could bear it.

The Kilmainham Goal tour is as jarring as the Jeanie Johnston. I know I will visit it again, opening my heart and my mind to a little more of the pain that took up residence in me without my complete awareness.

Ciarán O’Murchadha, in his book, Great Famine, Ireland’s Agony, describes the Famine as “a catastrophe of medieval proportions”, as well as, “the greatest humanitarian disaster of the 19th century Europe”.

He goes on to say, “Despite its enormity and its international reverberations, the Famine has figured remarkably little in the general histories of that period. Even in Ireland, academic research on the Great Famine did not begin until the 1950s.”

Perhaps the terror of it happening again or a mistaken, yet understandable belief, that talking about it will cause more pain, has kept it silent.

We know now that mourning is a dynamic process, done in the doses we can tolerate and over however long it takes, can eventually lead to healing and recovery.

As unexpected and confusing as my experience was that day at the cemetery with Paddy O’Brien, I am grateful to understand that somehow the pain of my great grandparents, who lived at the time of the Famine, and the pain of my grandmother, who left her family, country and culture behind was still alive in me. It has helped me to heal and, I hope, my ancestors to heal, as well.

If the grown-ups in my childhood could read this, my attraction to sad John McCormack records might not seem so strange to them.