Tag: Irish

Illumination

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

I sat in my lawn chair and listened to a free concert of Lerner and Loewe music performed by the Millennium Park Orchestra and Chorus. A beautiful summer night in one of the most luminous spots in one of the world’s great cities. This is about as “First World” as it gets with wine, gourmet foods, good friends and not even an entry fee to get in. Millennium Park is a triumph, a “must see” when you visit Chicago. It is an evolving blend of artwork, interactive sculpture, landscaping, and performing arts, all surrounded on three sides by the rich and varied architecture of the Chicago skyscrapers. It never gets old.

Framing the north end of the park, along Randolph Street, are four prominent office buildings: the Blue Cross Building, the white towering AON Building, the old original skyscraper Prudential Building, and behind it the newer cousin, known as Two Pru (2 Prudential Plaza). There are scores of other residential creations on and behind Randolph, as well, but these are the office buildings. And the Pritzker Pavilion, home to a summer series of concerts, sits at their feet. As night falls and their lights come up, you can’t help feeling very fortunate to be there, in such a riot of lights and colors, all soaring above you in your little musical island of privilege.

It was during their renditions of songs from Camelot, a story now linked as a memory, however faulty, to the Kennedy years, that my mind began to wander. For some reason, I thought of those famous lines from an obscure poet named Emma Lazurus:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Those words of kindness are written at the base of the Statue of Liberty and taught to generations of American school kids as our nation’s spirit of welcome and offer of a new beginning to those seeking to leave behind a weary world. The golden torch she holds high is that “lamp beside the golden door” to democracy and freedom. Our Camelot.

And yet, those words express only a wish and, like most wishes, are not entirely true and really never have been. Historically for most immigrants, as soon as the stop at Ellis Island was behind you, and you were officially welcomed on the path to naturalized citizenship, you pretty quickly found that you were not all that welcomed by whomever happened to get here before you.

You were a threat. A threat to my job, my neighborhood, my set of beliefs. Maybe you didn’t speak my language, didn’t attend my church. Rich people don’t often emigrate, so you were poor and probably would end up draining the tax coffers in some way. You didn’t have many skills and you may have brought illnesses with you. You were not schooled. You looked different. You were Irish, or Italian, maybe Polish, or a Jew, and you were a threat.

So you took the abuse. You made neighborhoods in the cities and built the ghettos of your particular clan for the safety in numbers it offered, and you took the low work. You worked and married someone like you and started a family. You bought a two flat or a bungalow and you celebrated your culture in the taverns, the church halls, and with parades. And you worked. You and your children and their children earned your way in over several generations.

My wife’s paternal grandfather was such an immigrant. Thomas Hawkins came from Ireland around the turn of the 20th century, passed by the “Irish Need Not Apply” signs all along the Eastern seaboard and made his way inland to Chicago; the CTA hired him to work at a bus barn near North Avenue and Cicero in some entry level job. At the end of his first shift, he asked the foreman if he should come back tomorrow. The foreman, a bit puzzled, said yes. Again the next day and the day after that, he repeated his question at day‘s end until the foreman, now exasperated, told him “Look, man, you have a job. Show up here every day but Sunday.” It had never occurred to young Thomas that there was anything but day work, work as he knew it from the old country.  A steady hourly wage, a defined work week, and benefits were entirely new to Thomas and millions like him.

But only a dozen years later, this same immigrant would feel himself American to the core, as did his fellow Irish Americans. His son, Marty Hawkins, my wife’s father, told the story of being a little boy sitting on the front porch steps while his dad and friends had a beer and discussed politics. It was Irish brogues all around. One of them remarked, in a thick brogue that “The trouble with this country was that we’re letting too many foreigners in!” Young Martin looked up from face to face, knowing that every one of them was from Ireland. I asked him what he said or did and he told me, “I didn’t say anything.” A wise young man.

——————

Building lights work differently at night for office buildings than they do for residential buildings. Condos, apartments, and hotels have many more dark windows than lighted ones, what with people travelling, un-booked hotel rooms, being part time or weekend getaway places. It is unusual to see a horizontal string of illuminated windows in such a building running more than four or five windows in a row.

Office buildings, at night, tell a different story. Most offices are open architecture these days, so you will see whole floors of lights flick on or off. And as I sat there for several hours at my concert, it occurred to me that the different floors of lights going on or off reflected the movement and progress of the cleaning personnel who were cleaning those offices. If you wondered who make up those cleaning crews, you need only get on board a southbound Metra in the morning, a train taking you out of the city, not in. Onboard you will find the cleaning crews, some white, and some black, but overwhelmingly Mexican and Central American women, tired at the end of their long night shift and on their way home.

—————-

It seems far from Camelot now, under the brutal and profane thumb of a president who is trying hard to sell his dystopian vision of a white, privileged, isolated USA, where immigrants pose not just a threat to our economy, but also bring crime with them. He is selling fear and specifically fear of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. He has blurred immigrants into those seeking sanctuary from violence. He has separated mothers and fathers from their children. He has abandoned and betrayed our role as world leader.

Sadly, there are many who have bought into his vision of a “walled off” America and to that crowd he has become a sort of Messiah. Equally as sad, he is using his vast presidential powers to enable and empower mean-spirited trolls at the national level who are as devoid of character and compassion as he appears to be. Most of them seem to have lifeless eyes, as if their soul has been removed. They are working hard to dim the lamp of welcome atop that statue in New York Harbor, to have it go dark altogether if they can have their way.

But as I watched those office windows light up, it struck me that this is why the haters will lose: the immigrants will simply outwork them. Just as immigrants before them, like the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews and others, they will take every lousy job that comes along, make minimum wage, go without healthcare and dental plans, and keep working. They won’t take vacations, they will drive old cars and fix them in their driveways on Sunday. They will work two jobs, take on odd jobs if they can. They will pool their family wages in a weekly effort to survive in America. And they will keep working.

You can see them cutting the grass on your local golf course, wiping down your car at the car wash, running the kitchens of the local eatery, landscaping your house, cleaning your hotel room, scavenging the alleys for old metal, picking the crops, and cleaning the offices at night. And they will keep working. They may clean the offices now, but they know that education is key, and their children will work civil service jobs and entry level management positions and work in those same offices their parents once cleaned and their grandchildren will become the leaders and professionals and they will carry their work ethic into generation after generation. And that’s why they will win, winning for the United States in the bargain.

So as long as those office lights keep shining in the night to mark the progress of the immigrant workers, their glow will have to replace the dimmed lamp of freedom from the Statue of Liberty. And someday soon, when this madness is swept away by the millions of Americans who really understand the value of liberty and the meaning of democracy, perhaps the golden torch will regain its luster and we will once again welcome the world’s immigrants to our new and better Camelot.

 

Famine Walls

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

 

 

 

I was standing at the base of a rocky green mountain in the austere, blustery region of Ireland known as Connemara, my eyes tracing the low rock walls that started from the base of the mountains and wound their way to the top. They were straight walls, about the height of a man and maybe two feet thick, made of countless stones and with no earthly reason for being there. There was a wall every hundred yards or so, each tracing a route to the top of the mountain.

I was listening to the tour guide explain how these walls came into being and I found myself getting angry. These were Famine Walls and they were built during the Famine of the 1840s as a means to keep the hungry masses out of the estates of the landowners. We learned it was the usually homeless Catholics who built the walls, for a few scraps to eat. According to our guide, massive, largely pointless work projects like the Famine Walls and the Famine Roads kept the masses barely alive during the four years that the potato crop failed. The British rule had proclaimed that the poor had to work for sustenance and not be given charity. And that stoked my growing anger.

I have a long fuse. It takes a lot to provoke me and I think the last time I threw a punch was in eighth grade, but the anger was welling up and I could not tell you from what source. I am a second generation American of Irish descent and a Catholic, but that wasn’t it. I grew up in a mostly Catholic, largely Irish Chicago neighborhood, but it seemed in the 1950’s and 60’s that it was more important to be an American, just as it had for the generation before. The things we took pride in were American things: landing on the moon, winning the world war, JFK, our position as world leader, our great democracy.

On top of that, immigrants to the United States have always known the importance of assimilation, of becoming part of the American Dream. With assimilation comes access to better jobs, more education, bigger homes, and opportunities denied to those just “off the boat.”   The Irish knew this better than most, and cemented themselves into power in Chicago and elsewhere. It seemed to me that only in the last twenty or thirty years and with a new generation on board that we amped up our celebration of heritage, with bagpipes, Irish dancing, and an ever escalating emphasis on St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish.

So I was much more American than Irish. But the anger was there, anger against the British. Those were the same British I had been taught were America’s Best Friends. Our Cousins. Our staunch allies in two wars, the country that produced Winston Churchill, that stood alone against the Nazi menace. The same country whose language we spoke.  Now I was both angry and confused.

Those British who managed to turn the Great Famine into a near genocide were long gone… gone even before my grandparents were born in Ireland, but there was a connection to them I did not recognize until that day. And it was not an intellectual connection, but an emotional one.  But from where? Was it some faint echo of the emotions of my ancestors who perhaps had to help build those walls? Was it a lost fragment of the passion that caused someone in my family tree to pick up an IRA rifle in 1918?  Was it the dim memory of the shame and hatred one feels when you are part of a class that others look upon as lesser beings because you are poor, or Catholic, or both?

We are who we are, as defined by our behavior, our values, our duties and station in life, and those we love; but we are also the accumulation of so many other lives already lived and ended.  Our DNA is the blueprint that dictates our physical appearance, our health, lifespan and more. That accounts for tall people and short people, red hair and no hair, ears like car doors, and all things physical.  It is passed along, parts of it refined, parts of it suppressed from generation to generation, strands from mothers and fathers comingling with their pasts and forming new variations that become us.

But do memories, thoughts, and feelings somehow come along for this genetic ride? Can the anger, shame and fear felt by the hungry workman on the Famine Walls be passed along not just in stories and songs, but in our souls?  Can powerful memories somehow imbed themselves in that complex genetic coding, invisible and undetectable to even the most intuitive of scientists? Or are these feelings only lurking like ghosts at the foot of that Connemara mountain, waiting to inspire emotions only when you actually get to that place on the map?

I’ll never know. My anger cooled and I shifted my attention to the more pleasant things to see and do in Ireland; especially the precious time we could spend with my sisters’ families. My sisters returned to Ireland as young women and have spent their adult lives there, raising their families. They retain their American pride, but they are much more Irish than I, and that’s as it should be. But I still recall the unexpected visit from an anger I did not even know existed, and I wonder if, in fact, I am more Irish than even I know.

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Roots-Grandma Wogan

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

When I try to remember my Grandma Wogan, I always end up in the same place and it’s probably where my siblings and most of the Monroe Street neighbors end up, too. I can see her on a warm summer day, sitting in her wicker chair in which she logged thousands of hours. She would be on the front porch of

the two flat, the porch guarded by two white stone flowerpots filled with petunias, wearing her print dress with an apron, glasses on, her white hair in a bun, and she would be rubber-banding newspapers. The Daily News, the Austin News, The Austinite, or Goldblatt’s circulars, depending on which boy had which paper route. Her hands were always busy, as befitting someone who was an expert seamstress for many years.

She was a caring, loving, old time Catholic grandmother, who bore on her back the lonely burden of young widowhood, making it somehow work for her two sons without the social welfare benefits so many enjoy today, and going it alone in her adopted country. But she mostly kept whatever joys and pains she felt to herself. To be honest, she was not warm, at least not outwardly so and certainly not given to outbursts of any kind; maybe that was the cost of dealing with her lot in life, which she met with determination and courage, and usually all alone.

But she was not dull. At the risk of making a generalization, there are two words not often used to describe the Irish: nuanced and subtle. She could be blunt, as was her way, but it made for some pretty good stories. My mother told me how she and my dad shared the news of my impending arrival with her. She is said to have responded, “So, two wasn’t enough for you,” referring to my older sister and brother. And yet, upon my arrival, again according to my mother, she swooped me up in her arms and I was not seen again for about the next twelve years. My mother was a little prone to hyperbole.

My father told the story of her being invited to her relatives, the Lancaster’s, for dinner. Theirs was a fancy home off Columbus Park, and the husband was the all-powerful Alderman Lancaster. In those days, power descended from the Lord God Almighty through the Mayor of Chicago to your Alderman and finally to the local Police Commander and maybe the Catholic Pastor.  According to my father, she was uncharacteristically quiet throughout the fancy dinner, served by maids on fine linen and china. When asked by Claire Lancaster how she liked the evening, she replied, “Well, you’ve come a long way since you used to haul a loin of pork to your father’s tavern.” That was their last invitation.

————

Mary Maeliff

My Grandma was born on July 17th, 1881 but we never celebrated her birthday. She never cared to and I never knew why and, by extension, I guess we learned to overlook it in a house full of birthdays every year. As a consequence, we lost track of how old she was, and I think maybe she did, too, but she was just shy of 95 when she died on April 9, 1976.

She was born in County Westmeath, Ireland in a little nothing of a village called Tinnymuck, near the larger town of Moate. My Irish brother-in- law Jim will be only too happy to tell you that Tinnymuck translates into “Pig’s House,” the better to get a rise out of his wife, my sister Mary Ann. I found Tinnymuck on my first visit to Ireland years ago, and the “village”, once located after asking directions twice from the locals, consisted of four houses in a row and dog named “Doogan” who I had to kick out of my way in order to drive the car down the road. If ever I wondered that I might be descended from wealth, that visit took care of it. My father’s cousin, Mary Colgan, now deceased, lived in the house then, a humble home with the smell of countless turf fires burned into the walls.

Grandma and her sister Kate left the hunger and joblessness of Ireland in 1905, seeking the America of hope and freedom that countless other Europeans sought. My brother Terry found her ship’s passage documents and most notably that her Captain was also the same Captain Smith whose luck ran out a few years later as skipper of the Titanic. Glad you dodged the iceberg on their trip, Captain.

Kate and Grandma worked as maid and cook for a Protestant businessman, we were told, until she met Thomas Wogan, a man from Tullamore. They were wed in 1914, and the Marriage Certificate said she was 28 years old and he 29. The numbers don’t work, by the way, because she was 33, but if we want to start arresting every woman who fibbed about her age, the jails would be overflowing.

He would be dead four years later of tuberculosis that he probably carried with him to the New World. She was left with her sons Bill and Tom, my dad, then about six months old. She and her husband had purchased a two flat at 5347 Monroe, where three generations of Wogans ended up living until 1968. I can’t even begin to imagine how scared and alone she must have felt at that time in her life. There was no welfare network back then, no social security, and probably little or no insurance. My father told me that she was advised to sell the house, but she didn’t.

A word about two flats, that marvelous economic engine that allowed immigrant generations to own a property, many for the first and only time in their lives, and pay for it with rental income while keeping a roof over their own heads.  Three bedrooms and a single bath on each floor, a wooden back porch, coal furnace, and hot water radiator heat. The west side was and is a virtual sea of two flats. Having grandparent owners on one floor and your family on the other was quite common. The Lithuanians and Bohemians in Cicero took it a step further, adding a basement or “Garden” apartment and renting the top two floors, building their wealth and security faster.

My Grandma lived on the first floor and rented the second floor to make her mortgage payments. Years later, in the 1950’s I believe, she added a basement apartment as an additional rental unit. She took in sewing to buy the groceries and she toughed it out for all those years.  She worked outside the home once, during World War II at Simpson Electric. Because single apartments were scarce after the war, she also took in “roomers”, single men looking for a private bedroom and breakfast, the original “bed and breakfast”.  I remember a parade of them as the occupant of one of the three bedrooms. They could tie up a bathroom mightily in the morning, and more than once my brothers and I ended up using the standpipe in the basement. First class accommodations.

—————–

These are some of my favorite Grandma Wogan stories……………………

Wash Day

She was locked in mortal combat with Mrs. Stack, the grandmother of the Junius family two doors east. On wash day, if she looked out her back window and saw that Mrs. Stack had hung her bed sheets to dry on the clotheslines that crisscrossed the small back yards, it was if she had spotted an enemy sail on the horizon. She would moan that “The Stacks have their laundry out, the day is gone!” Then quick to the basement to get her sheets out of the washer and put a shot across Mrs. Stack’s bow.

Baseball

She loved baseball and the White Sox and listened to them in her back bedroom on summer nights on an old Philco Radio. The radio was a rounded four foot high wooden box, with about fifty knobs, only two of which ever seemed to do anything. She had a television, but didn’t trust it, having been around before even the invention of radios. I can still see her clapping her hands when Nellie Fox got a hit and drove in “Leetle Louie” Aparicio from second base. What mystified me was how she learned the game. Baseball is perhaps the most complex of modern sports and she really did know what was happening on the field. My dad and uncle both played ball into their late teen years, so she picked it up from her sons, I guess.

Don’t mess with my religion

Grandma Wogan was very devout, praying always to the Virgin Mary and fingering her rosary beads at least once a day while muttering to herself the Hail Mary’s, Our Fathers, and Glory Be’s. So when Vatican II came along and made so many changes in the 1960’s, the biggest of which were turning the altar around and killing off Latin (which needed killing, in my opinion) she was understandably a bit confused. One day, walking back from church, she sked me, “Who’s this fella Yahweh they’re always talking about? Does he live in the parish? “I didn’t quite know how to answer her.

Apparitions in the night

She managed one stormy night to scare my cousin Billy half to death. By brother Bill,  our cousin Bill and I had been awarded the most coveted sleeping spot in the whole house… the pull out bed on the screened in back porch. On hot summer nights, it was as close to air conditioning as you were likely to get. One particularly bad stormy night, with lightening flashing and thunder booming, my cousin Bill awoke to a sight my brother and I had long grown used to. My Grandma Wogan in her white flannel  floor length nightgown, white hair undone and falling around her shoulders, walking through the kitchen saying prayers and tossing holy water (holy or not an excellent conductor of electricity) from a small vial about the house. It was her way of asking God to spare 5347 Monroe and perhaps smite someone else’s house.

The lightening flashed and lit her up like an apparition from the Other Side and Cousin Bill must have been sleeping soundly, because he let out a yell and bailed from the bed, headed toward the back door. We caught him in time and needled him for weeks about it.

The Apple Story

I have told this story to my grandsons and, for whatever reason, it has stuck with them. I was watching my Grandma eat an apple and she simply consumed the entire thing. Stem, seeds, core and all. I was probably ten and I remarked to my Dad that I had seen her do this. He sort of shrugged, looked at me with a smile and said, “You’ve never been hungry.” It struck me that I hadn’t ever known hunger, never in my life for more than a short time. None of us had, but she remembered what it felt like to not have food, and for your body to miss it and to let you know it missed it. She could remember going to bed with an empty stomach. And she was never going to let food go to waste again.

Housing Arrangements

My siblings needled me about being “the king” because I got to sleep in the front bedroom and the rest of them shared bedrooms upstairs. Over the years, however, I shared the bedroom with my brother Bill, and later my sister Mary Ann occupied the back bedroom, after the parade of ”roomers” ended. The basement apartment, always smelling damp, was occupied by a string of renters, some memorable and some notorious. The last one was my Uncle Jimmy, who kept Eskimo Pies in his sort-of freezer and built models of all sorts. You can’t get cooler as an uncle than that.

The Phone

I always thought it ironic that in my business we made and received millions of phone calls over the years, but Grandma never made a single phone call in her life. In those days, phones could only be leased, not purchased, and the phone company kept a strict control over ownership of phones. My Dad knew a guy in the Linesman Union who rigged up a bootleg office phone in my Grandma’s flat, then ran a buzzer from the legitimate line upstairs to this illegal extension. The extension had neither a ringer not a dial because the phone company was known to dial into homes and check the voltage. Too much voltage and they knew you had more phones than you were paying for each month. They would send an inspector over and he would locate and remove the device. Small wonder no one liked the phone company.

Grandma Wogan never did get the hang of telephonic communication. When the buzzer rang she would pick up the handset and say hello, but if the call was for me or one of the other kids, she would hang up and call your name, disconnecting your call. The few times the call was for her was when a relative named Tom Byrne called in to report on the death of someone. She would listen to Tom, whom we christened the “angel of death”, and then say “Ok, Thanks” and hang up. Not one to waste words, Grandma Wogan.

Last Rites

I remember when I was ten or twelve, she got sick and my parents called for a doctor, then a priest. Over her headboard hung a crucifix that also served as a handy kit for entering the next world in a properly Catholic fashion. The crucifix was about two inches thick and made of wood. Push Christ’s body up and to the right and the front part of the cross swung out to reveal all of the pieces and parts needed for Extreme Unction, or Last Rites. Candles, a little holy water, a small purple stole.  I’ll bet you that crucifix hung in every Catholic home in Chicago. We might not have a first aid kit handy, but by God, we weren’t shoving off without the Last Rites.  She didn’t die, by the way.

My Grandma the Physician

I cannot verify these little tales, but here is what I was told:

She fixed my Uncle Bill’s forehead which had been slashed somehow. She used scotch tape.

She noticed one of the newborns, Bill, I think, was tongue tied and solved it with a snip of her sewing scissors. My mother was horrified, but it worked.

This one I can verify: When I was twelve I caught a bad cold. No problem, Grandma fixed me up a hot toddy. Warm whiskey and lemon juice in an eight once glass. I drank it down and lost two days that I flat out don’t remember. Mom was not too happy.

——————

It occurs to me that I only really knew my Grandma Wogan as Grandma, from the time when she was about 70 until her death. I did not know her as a girl, a young immigrant, a young wife, or a young widow. I did not know much about her life through two World Wars, the Roaring Twenties and the GreatDepression, her years of motherhood. In the same way, I only knew my parents from their mid-thirties through the rest of their lives. I can look at pictures of them as children or as beautiful young people, but I can’t know, no one can, what they were like at that point in their lives. Would we have been friends if somehow we were the same age? Would we have been alike or different from each other?

Only one sort of relative knows your story from the beginning through today. Only your brothers and sisters make the journey with you from start to finish, know you as a child, a teen, a young adult and all of the stages of your life. For that reason alone, we should value each other all the more and count ourselves blessed that there are those out there who know us best, celebrate our successes and forgive our faults.

————

Special thanks to my brother Terry and my sister Mary Ann for providing the research on this.

A Mother’s Quiet Act of Love

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

In 1963, my brother Gil was standing in formation at the Oakland Staging Area in California. This was the final stop on the way to Vietnam for countless thousands of young soldiers, and he assumed that his orders would take him there, along with all of those standing in the formation. He was eighteen, an enlisted Army volunteer, and had been trained in communications at Fort Gordon, Georgia after doing “basic” in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He was probably going to be assigned as a radio operator (RTO) in an infantry unit, which meant that he would be target number two, after the officer or sergeant leading the unit in the field.

Gil was really my half-brother, as his father, Gil, Sr., had been killed over Japan in June of 1945. My mother remarried in 1948 to my father, a young widower and single parent and father to my half-sister, Maureen. Six more children, including me, followed.

Gil, like his dad, was slightly built and about 5’6” with curly blondish hair. He kept his father’s last name, Finn, in part to honor his dad’s memory and sacrifice, but also because of the V.A.’s ever-changing rules and because my mother knew he would receive an insurance inheritance from the V.A. upon turning twenty one. A name change complicated that reward. The words “half-brother” or “half-sister” were never used in our house, anyway.

—-

Gil heard his name called out and took a step forward. Whoever called it out handed him new orders. He would be going to Korea, not Vietnam. He didn’t know why, and the Army isn’t given to long explanations, so off he went, returning a year and half later with some exotic stereo stuff and some cool silk suits and some great stories. But returning alive, unlike some 50,000 others.

A few years before my mother died, we were sitting at a party in my sister Rita’s back yard, when the talk somehow drifted to Vietnam. Someone talked about the “tunnel rats”, the slightly built G.I.’s who weaseled down Viet Cong tunnels to flush out the enemy. My mother, nursing her “highball”, (never more than two!) casually mentioned that that was why she had kept her son out of Vietnam. A bit cynically, I suppose, I asked her how she managed that.

She had read an article in Life Magazine on “tunnel rats” and figured her slightly-built son Gil would end up as one. She told us how she had researched the “sole surviving son” act, the same one that is the premise for the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, and that she had written her senator, who I believe was the legendary Everett Dirksen at the time. On the premise that Gil’s father had been killed in World War II, Gil was a sole surviving son, and therefore exempt from combat. The Senator had enough juice with the Army, and Gil got his orders changed.

We were astounded, and Gil most especially, who never knew why his name was called that day. She had kept this amazing story from all of us for some thirty five years before casually sharing it with us. A mother can show her love in countless ways, but I have never forgotten this quiet, determined act of love, nor the strength if took to actually pull it off; and then to be content for so many years to keep it to herself.

Happy Mother’ Day, Rita Wogan.

Close to Death…a reflection on losses

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

We were in Dublin, Ireland, having just awakened from a jet-lagged midday nap. This was a family trip, planned for months by my wife and me for my brother and his wife, a friend who had lost her husband, and one of my four sisters. Another sister remained behind in Chicago, and the other two lived north of Galway, but had taken the train over to Dublin to meet us and spend a few days in the city before all of us headed west to their homes and the real heart of our vacation.

It was the Monday after Easter, a bank holiday in Ireland, and nothing but pubs and taxies were operating. When my Ireland sisters arrived, we were just about recovered from the flight, having napped and showered. Our mother was in a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, scheduled for a routine gall bladder procedure earlier that day and, once we are all together in our room, my sisters urged me to call and see if we could talk to her. I had arranged to call my Muncie based sister-in-law and my brother who I guessed were bedside around then, and my sister-in-law answered on the first ring. The tremble in her voice hinted my worst fear and that feeling of stepping off a ledge from a great height rushed toward me.

My mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words of my sister-in-law from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, my sister’s legs went out from under her. My wife did what she was born to do, and which she does better than anyone, which was to give comfort to those around her. The gaiety of a joyful family reunion spun into a chaos of disbelief, bewilderment, a hundred questions. The next few days were a blur of last-minute travel arrangements, tearful phone calls and a coming home to be all together. It was April, 2004.

———

I was eighteen, and was sleeping in the back bedroom of the two-flat we lived in on the west side of Chicago. I was between colleges and was working as an entry-level guy in the newspaper printing plant below the Chicago Tribune. I had been thrown from the languid pace of the college freshman into the world of hardworking, middle aged, tough men and there had been no orientation session. The work paid exceptionally well, but the hours were brutal and the environment somewhere between downright unhealthy and medieval. Up until that point in my life, it had been the hardest I had ever worked. The army would up the ante later, but I didn’t know that then.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. my mother woke me, clearly panicked. I woke my older brother, and together we ran into the living room, where my father lay on the floor on his back. He was wearing his usual nighttime summer wear, boxers and a white t-shirt. His eyes were fixed toward the ceiling, not focused, as if he were looking far beyond the plaster layer that was eight feet above him. A look of almost amused surprise was on his face.

I was working on pure adrenalin, scared, but not paralyzed. My brother had been in the army and had learned something of first aid and perhaps emergencies. He knelt down next to our dad and began mouth to mouth resuscitation. My mother had found a bottle of whisky (old Irish remedy, I guess) and poured a small glass of it into his open mouth. It ran out the corners of his mouth and onto his chest and then to the floor.

I straddled his chest and had my hands on his heart, which was beating wildly, as if it wanted to get out of his body. I felt it literally banging inside his chest for however long I can’t remember, and then a hesitation, two weaker beats, then nothing. A few moments later he gave up what I later learned was the “death rattle”, a sort of final rush of mottled air in the lungs, tinged by the smell of the whiskey. His big frame seemed to partially collapse under me. My father was gone. It was July, 1968.

——-

I have reflected on these two experiences of loss many times over since then, and especially my proximity to the two events. In the case of my mother, death reached out over 3,600 miles to touch me with its electric shock. In my fathers’ case, death had to reach only a few inches from his face. Same shock. Yet many years later, my personal proximity matters not at all, except as good stories.

I have shared an abbreviated version of these two stories only a few times, and usually only with those grieving for the loss of someone close and that grief aggravated by their not having been there to share the goodbye moment. I have shared the stories in hopes of easing that part of the pain for them. Did it help? I don’t know. I talk a lot and maybe it seemed like just so much more talk to them. Or maybe talk wasn’t what was needed at that time.

I only know that as time works its magic, when I ponder how blessed I was to have those two people in my life and as my parents, it’s the thousand little memories, the good stories, the little lessons and kindnesses they left in their wake that grow in importance and meaning. Where I was when the gift of their lives went away from where I was at that moment drifts into insignificance. Goodbye will always be goodbye, but the smiles remain. And the gratitude.