Family lore

On mortality, history, and who gets to go home

Last week I crossed the Irish sea to meet up with my Dad and his brothers and sisters, plus a few cousins, just outside of Dublin. The trip was a homecoming of sorts. Before I arrived my aunts and uncles managed to find the house where Nora, their grandmother, was born and raised, 10 kids and their parents in a single room. My family is from County Mayo, in the West of Ireland, where the famine, or what the Irish call the Great Hunger, was felt most acutely: more than 50% of the population either died or moved away. Nora herself left for the US as a newlywed, presumably to escape a life of desperate poverty.

I grew up proud to be Irish. My name, and my three siblings’ names, are all Irish; Dad chose them. Every summer at family reunions in Florida we’d sing Irish folk and drinking songs. We are (were, in my case) extremely Catholic. And unlike some other Americans with Irish heritage, I know specifically where we come from. My great uncle, Father Bill, after whom my dad is named, has traced my grandmother’s side of the family, the O’Malleys, back for many generations. He’d perform mass for us at those family reunions, right in the vacation rental; we didn’t even have to change out of our pajamas.

I haven’t been to those family reunions in a long time, the demands of adulthood always getting in the way. I regret that now, as I become ever more aware of how little time we really have together. My dad’s youngest brother, my beloved uncle Chris, died suddenly and unexpectedly this past New Year’s Eve. And Dad’s brother Kevin died in plane crash over 30 years ago. That leaves eight of the Keating siblings still earthside, and all of them, all of us, are getting older.