At 8:48 a.m. on September 11th last, New Yorkers and all Americans were about to face the most frightening morning of our lives - a morning when our presumed national security was turned on its ear. For me personally, writes Eileen McMahon, a feeling of doom had arrived a few hours before the attacks, as I watched two burly men in black suits remove my mother's body from my parents' New Jersey home. My mother, an Irish immigrant, lost her battle with cancer in that still-dark morning.
A thunderclap of sadness and shock struck my heart as I walked outside to the street where my mother no longer lived. With my sister, I walked around and around our old street, my mind playing out the scenes of my life in the orange and black half-light of dawn. We kept circling, somehow hoping that the sun would be gracious enough to delay the break of day - the day when my mother would be dead.
Ironically, of course, the sun shone brightly that morning as TV announcers with giddy voices mused about the beautiful clear day that lay ahead for everyone. As I was getting dressed to go to the funeral home with my father, my attention was drawn to the television news, where it was made clear that a lot more people were going to be lost that day. Inoculated by personal grief, I matter-of-factly turned off the TV and left the house.
Plume of smoke
As my father and I approached the funeral home, we drove past people standing out in the streets, staring at a huge plume of smoke rising from the New York skyline. I looked at the smoke for a moment, then turned away; it seemed intrusive and disrespectful of our sorrow.
Then I wondered what my mother would have made of this new world where her children and grandchildren were no longer safe. As I held her garments in my arms, the funeral director asked questions about her country of origin, last place of employment and occupation. With a boulder in my throat, I pushed the answers out, thinking: this would not do, it would not do at all. How do you summarise this woman's life?
Lena McMahon, née Richardson, was a hearty and wilful Irish girl who left the fields of Co Limerick in 1959 for the streets of New York. Like most other Irish immigrants at the time, she may as well have landed on the moon. She had never seen a black person before, or for that matter, ever spoken to a Protestant. Like thousands of her generation, she married an Irish-born husband, danced at the City Centre in Manhattan on Saturday nights, and on Sunday afternoons sat cheering the hurlers on from the blue sideline seats of Gaelic Park. There were so many new Irish in New York that they could insulate themselves socially and geographically.
You found them in the Bronx and Queens, of course, but a fair number landed in New Jersey - Jersey City, Kearny, the Oranges. Many of these towns had an Irish-American club and an Ulster club. The Scots were there as well, but according to my mother, they were tough people who drank too much.
A gifted seamstress, my mother immediately found work with B. Altman in Manhattan, a high-end department store long since gone. After two days in the job, word came down that the big boss would like to see her in his office. She was sure she was up for the chop. It turned out that she would be moving upstairs to the prestigious fifth floor, fitting haute couture on the New York ladies of the day. "Not bad for a kid from Limerick," she would later remark.
Angela's Ashes
Another kid from Limerick, Frank McCourt, was on the New York scene around the same time. My mother was not impressed by the McCourts: Pulitzer Prize or not, the Limerick they were from bore no relation to hers. But one day, she finished reading Angela's Ashes and said: "You know, he's got all the places and names right so he is telling the truth. . .in most of it." Though she disliked the brutal depictions of a poverty-stricken family, she locked herself into a room every night for a week reading it. It was the first book she read from beginning to end. Think of a a child discovering Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye. That is what McCourt, by way of his mother Angela, did for my mom. Angela's Ashes was singularly responsible for her awakening to the power and beauty of books in the last few years of her life.
Watching the St Patrick's Day parade in New York last weekend, I focused on the weathered faces of my mother's generation carrying banners and showing solidarity for the firefighters and policemen lost in the World Trade Centre attacks. As usual, it occurred to me how this particular group were as Irish as the day they left Ireland - the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s. Incredibly, I was fortunate enough to experience a 1950s Ireland in my visits there in the late 1960s and early 10970s. Led into Shannon airport on our mother's tight lead, we four American kids were let loose on my uncle's farm - cows, chickens, just-born kittens discovered in the sheds, wellington boots, haystacks, Massey Ferguson tractors, rosary beads, scapulars, turf, chamber-pots, choc ices, Smarties and six kids to a Volkswagen.
Magical places
Down the rabbit hole we went with our mother to revisit the magical places and people of her childhood, a wonderland for which she had prepared us in the darkness of our bedrooms at night. Thanks to her, I travelled in this time machine until some time in the late 1970s, when it all changed thanks to television, central heating, and of course, Dallas.
It is now six months since my mother died and there are all all kinds of September 11th tributes to remind me. Still, I quite enjoyed watching the parade move along Fifth Avenue, like any other year. Perhaps I found solace in the proud and tough faces of her generation as they marched with the grit that has weathered many storms before.
I am thankful that some things never change. But mostly I am thankful for my mother for being Irish to her boots and making me understand all the wonderful implications of that fact.