For Thomas Lynch, St Patrick's Day is usually a chance to cement his identity as an Irish-American. Occasionally, however, an even stronger tie has intervened
Every so often the brother calls, ranting about having to get on a plane, fly over to Shannon, drive out to west Clare and cut a finger off. I blame myself for this. "Not the finger again, Pat," is what I say. He says he wants to leave it in Moyarta, the graveyard on the Shannon estuary where our people are buried, in the ancient parish of Carrigaholt. He wants to leave his severed finger there - a part of himself - against the loneliness: the low-grade, ever-present ache he feels, like a phantom limb, whenever he's away from there too long. Will I come with him, he wants to know.
I blame myself for this. I know how it happens. I know it is only going to get worse. Lately he's been saying maybe better a thumb. "Better yet two thumbs, Tom! That's it, both thumbs - one for the future and one for the past - there in Moyarta, that's just the thing. One for all that was and one for all that yet will be." He's waxing eloquent and breathing deeply.
"Never mind the thumbs, Pat," I tell him, but he knows it makes a kind of sense to me. There's something about the impulse to prune and plant body parts on the westernmost peninsula of a distant county in a far country that goes a step beyond your standard tourist class. The brother is nothing if not a great man for the grim reaping and the grand gesture. Maybe you're thinking the devil of drink, but neither of us has had a drop in years.
Ireland happened to Big Pat in 1992 the way it happened to me in 1970, as a whole-body, blood-borne, core experience; an echo thumping in the cardiovascular pulse of things, in every vessel of the being and the being's parts, all the way down to the extremities, to the thumbs. The case he got, like mine, is chronic, acute and likely terminal. The symptoms are occasionally contagious. He became not only acquainted with but also utterly submerged in his Irish heritage - a legacy of Lynchs and O'Haras, Graces and McBradys, Ryans and Currys, and the mighty people he married into - shanty and lace-curtain tributaries of a bloodline that all return to Ireland for their source.
Of course, there are more orderly ways to do it. You can dress up one day a year in the shamrock tie and green socks, haul out the beer-stained jacket, get a little tipsy cursing the Brits and the black luck of the draw into the wee hours, from which you'll wake headachy and dry-mouthed the next morning, and return to the ordinary American life - the annual mid-March Oirish.
Once, as luck would have it, I found myself in Manhattan for the St Paddy's Day parade. I stepped out from my hotel into 44th Street, near Fifth Avenue, thinking it was a day like any other. It was not. Maureen O'Hara was the grand marshal. There were cops and crazies everywhere. Cardinal O'Connor, may he RIP, said Mass in St Patrick's, and I had to cancel a meeting with editors downtown. The sheer tidal force of Irishry, or of Irish impersonators - 150,000 of them, all heading 40-some blocks up town - made perambulation against the grain of the parade impossible.
For most people, this March excess is enough: the pipers and Claddagh blather, the cartoon and caricature of what it means to be Irish and American. The next morning everyone returns to business as usual.
Or you might, after years of threatening to make the trip, get together with some other couples from the usher's club and take the standard 10-day tour, bouncing in the bus from the lakes of Killarney to the Blarney stone with a stop at the Waterford factory, a singalong in Temple Bar; you'll get some holy water and retail relics at the Knock shrine and some oysters in Galway, where you'll buy one of those caps all the farmers are wearing this year, and spend a couple of hours in the duty free, buying up smoked salmon and turf figurines, Jameson whiskey and Belleek before you fly home with the usual stories of seeing Bill Clinton or Bono in a bar in Wicklow or of the man with the big mitts and droopy earlobes you met in a chipper in Clogheen who was the image of your dearly departed mother's late uncle Seamus, or the festival you drove through in Miltown Malbay - fiddlers and pipers and tin-whistlers everywhere - the music, you will say, my God, the music! Enough for most people is enough. Some photo ops, some faith and begorras, maybe a stone from the home place, a sod of turf smuggled home in the suitcase, some perfect memories of broguey hospitalities and boozy light - something to say we are Irish in the way that others are Italian or Korean or former Yugoslavians: hyphenated, removed by generations or centuries, gone but not entirely forgotten, proud of your heritage - your Irish-Americanity.
Enough for most people is enough. But Pat was thrown into the deep end of the pool. He landed in Shannon for the very first time on the Sunday morning of March 29th, 1992. A few hours later, instead of hoisting pints or singing along, or remarking on the 40 shades of green, he was helping me lift the greeny, jaundiced, fairly withered body of Nora Lynch tenderly out of the bed she died in, out of the house she'd lived all her life in, out through the back door of her tiny cottage, into the coffin propped in the yard, on sawhorses assembled for this sad duty.
While most Americans spend their first tour rollicking through bars and countryside, searching none too intently for ruins or lost relations, Pat was driven straight away to the home that our great-grandfather had come out of, a century before, and taken into the room in which that ancient had been born. For Pat it was no banquet at Bunratty, no bus ride to the cliffs of Moher, no golf at the famous links at Lahinch, no saints or scholars or leprechauns. It was, rather, to the wake of Nora Lynch, late of Moveen West, Kilkee, Co Clare, her tiny, tidy corpse laid out in a nunnish blue suit in a bed littered with Mass cards, candlesticks and crucifixes assembled on the bedside table, her bony hands wrapped in a rosary, her chin propped shut with a daily missal, folks from the townland making their visits; "sorry for your troubles", "the poor craytur, Godhelpus", "an honest woman the Lord've mercy on her", "faith, she was, she was, sure faith"; the rooms buzzing with hushed talk and the clatter of tableware, the hum of a rosary being said in the room, the Lenten Sunday light pouring through the deep windows.
Big Pat stood between an inkling of the long dead and the body of the lately dead and felt the press of family history, like the sea thrown finally against the shore, tidal and undulant and immediate. He sighed. He inhaled the air, sweet with damp mould and early putrefaction, tinged with tobacco and turf smoke, hot grease and tea, and knew that though he'd never been in this place before, among these stones and puddles and local brogues, he was, in ways he could neither articulate nor deny, home.
He and his Mary, and me and mine, had booked our tickets two mornings before, when the sadly anticipated word had come of Nora Lynch's death at half twelve in Moveen, half seven of that Friday morning in Michigan, March 27th, 1992, four months into her 90th year, one month after she'd been taken to hospital in Ennis, six weeks after our father had died in the middle of the February of that awful year.
We had buried our father like the chieftain he was, then turned to the duties of the great man's estate, when word came from across the ocean that Nora had taken a turn for the worse. Two days of diagnostics had returned the sad truth of pancreatic cancer. The doctors were anxious to have her moved. In dozens of visits to Moveen since 1970, I had become Nora's next of kin, a cousin, twice removed, but still the first of her people to ever return to Ireland since her father's brother, my great-grandfather, had left, at the end of the 19th century.
Neither her sisters nor her sisters' children had ever returned. Her dead brothers had left no children. Nora Lynch was the last - the withered and spinsterly end of the line until, as she often said, I came. Two decades of letters and phones and transatlantic flights had tightened the ties that bind family connections between Michigan and Moveen. So when it looked as if Nora was dying, they called me.
We deal with love by dealing with the ones we love, with sickness by dealing with the sick and with death by dealing with the dead.
And after Nora died it was the brother, Pat, who came to help me conduct her from one stone-walled incarnation to the next. We carried her out of her cottage to the coffin in the yard and processed down to the old church in Carrigaholt, where Fr Culligan, removed from his tea and paperwork, welcomed her with a decade of the rosary.
The next morning Pat sang at Mass and followed us to Moyarta, where the Moveen lads had opened the old vault, built in 1889 by Nora's grandfather, our great-great-grandfather, Patrick Lynch. In the century since, it has housed the family dead, their accumulating bones commingled there in an orange plastic fertiliser bag at the side of the grave. And after the piper and tin-whistler played, and after Fr Culligan prayed, and after we lowered her coffin into the ground, we replaced the bag of our ancestor's bones, Nora Lynch's people and our own, three generations of kinsmen and women, and rolled the great flagstone back into place.
Our Marys repaired to the Long Dock bar, where food and drink had been prepared. And we stood and looked - the brother, Pat, and me - from that high place, the graveyard at Moyarta, out past the castle at the end of the pier, out over the great mouth of the Shannon whence our great-grandfather had embarked, a century before, and landed in Michigan and never returned, out past the narrowing townlands of the peninsula, Cross and Kilbaha and Kilclogher, out past Loop Head and the lighthouse at the western end, where, as the locals say, the next parish is America.
It was then I saw Pat's thumbs begin to twitch, and the great mass of his shoulders begin to shake and wads of water commence to drop from his eyeballs and the cheeks of him redden and a great heave of a sigh make forth from his gob and the hinge of his knees begin to buckle so that he dropped in a kind of damaged genuflection there at the foot of the family tomb into which poor Nora's corpse had just been lowered.
"Oh God," he half-sobbed through the shambles of his emotions, "to think of it, Tom, the truth and beauty of it." And I thought it a queer thing to say but admirable that he should be so overtaken with the grief at the death of a distant cousin whom he'd only met on a couple of occasions over the past 20 years, when she'd made her visits to America. What is more, I remarked to myself, given that the brother and I were both occupationally inclined to get through these solemnities while maintaining an undertakerly reserve, I thought his emotings rather strange. Might it be the distance or the jet lag or maybe the sea air? It was his first time in Ireland. It might all have overwhelmed him.
Truth told, I was a little worried that my own bereavement didn't seem sufficiently keen compared with the way Pat had been levelled by his. All the same, I thought it my brotherly and accustomed duty to comfort the heartsore with such condolence as I could bring to bear on such abject sadness. "She'd a good life, a good death and a great funeral, Pat. She's at peace now, and there is comfort in that. It really was very good of you and Mary to come. My Mary and I are forever grateful."
He was still buckled, the thumbs twitching and the face of him fixed on the neighbouring grave, and he was muttering something I made out to be about love and death, because all he kept saying was: "In love and in death, together still." He was making an effort to point the finger of his left hand at the stone that marked the grave next to Nora's.
I thought he might be quoting from the stone and examined the marker for love and death. It was clean white marble, lettered plain, the name of Callaghan chiselled on it and not much else that was legible. And then it came to me: his wife Mary's name is Callaghan.
"To think of it, Tom, here we are, 4,000 miles from home, but home all the same at the grave of our great-great-grandparents; and the Lynchs and Callaghans are buried together, right next to each other. In love and in death, they are together still. Who'd have ever imagined that?" "Yes, yes, I see, of course." "To think of it, Tom, all these years, all these miles." "Yes, the years, the miles." "Who'd have believed it, Tom?"
I helped him to his feet, brushed the mud from his trousers and said nothing of substance for fear it might hobble the big man again. At the Long Dock he embraced his wife as a man does who has seen the ghosts.
Because we cannot go to Moveen this March, because Pat got himself elected president of the funeral directors' association, because I'm finishing a book about the Irish and Irish-Americans, because we are bound by duty and detail to the life in southeastern lower Michigan, we head downtown to celebrate the high holy day in the standard fashion.
A local radio station has a St Patrick's Day party it broadcasts from the lobby of the Fisher Theatre, on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. There's a crowd; Paul W. Smith, the drive-time disc jockey, makes his way among the guests and celebrities and local business types who are keen for a little free air time to hawk their wares in their best put-on brogue.
Pat does Danny Boy and I recite a poem about a dream of going home, because here we are in a city of immigrants or their descendants from every parish on the globe, all of them wearing the green, hoisting Guinness and humming sweet ditties about the Irish. I see my mother's cousin Eddie Coyle and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the self-described "first six-foot, six-inch Irish- African-American".
We laugh and glad-hand and then get on our way for Corktown, on the southwest side of the city, and the annual Mass at Most Holy Trinity, where the blessed and elect, the great and small, will gather to give thanks for the day that's in it.
The Taoiseach is in Washington DC to give the president a bowl of shamrocks. In Chicago they dye the river green. There's music and marching in Melbourne and Moscow and Montreal.
And out across the world the roseate Irish everywhere are proclaiming what a good thing it is to be them, possessed as they are of this full register of free-range humanity: the warp spasms and shape-changing of their ancient heroes, their feats and paroxysms and flights of fancy, their treacheries and deceits, sure faith and abiding doubts - chumps and champions, egomanias and inferiority complexes, given to fits of pride and fits of guilt, able to wound with a word or mend with one, to bless or curse in impeccable verse, prone to ornamental speech, long silences, fierce tirades and tender talk. Maybe this is why the couple of hundred million Americans who do not claim an Irish connection identify with the 45 million who do - for the licence it gives them, just for today, for a good laugh, a good cry, a dirge or a dance, to say the things most in need of saying, to ignore the world's heartbreaks, the Lenten disciplines, their own grievous mediocrities, the winter's last gasping hold on the soul, and to summon up visions of a home place where the home fires are kept burning, where the light at the window is familiar, the face at the door a neighbour's or friend's, the sea not far beyond the next field over, the ghosts that populate our dreams all dear and welcome, their voices sweet with assurances, the soft day's rain but temperate, the household safe for the time being from the murderous world's worst perils; home among people at one with all immigrants, all pilgrims, all of the hungry and vanquished and evicted strangers in a strange place, at odds with the culture of triumphalists and blue bloods.
Who's to know? As for the brother, as for me, after making the rounds at the union hall, to which all had assembled for corned beef and cabbage, we made for the road home before rush hour hit, singing the verses of The Hills of Moveen, counting our blessings as we had come to see them: that here we were, the sons of an undertaker who was the son of a parcel-post inspector who was the son of a janitor and prison guard who was the son of an ass-and-cart farmer from a small cottage on the edge of west Clare to which our own sons and daughters do often repair, for the sense that it gives them of who they are and where they've come from and where they might be going still.
On the way in the road were the cute fools puking out their excesses of spuds and green beer or leaning out of their car doors, pissing their revelries into ditches or being taken into custody by the police. We drove past them all, out beyond the old cityscape of slums and ruins and urban renewal, out past the western suburbs, with their strip malls and car parks, bearing the day's contentment like viaticum, singing the old songs, that Wild Mountain Thyme, with its purple heather, Pat tapping the time with his thumbs on the dashboard, out towards Milford, where the sun was declining, where the traffic was sure to be thinning, and the last light of the day would be reddening, and the false spring oozing from the earth might hold a whiff of turf smoke, a scent of the sea, and our Marys would have a plate of chicken and peas, a sup of tea, our place by the fire ready and warm for us to nod off in the wing-back chairs, the brother and me, dreaming of the ancients and our beloveds and those yet to be - Nora and Tommy and Mrs Callaghan and all the generations that shared our names; the priests and the old lads in the stories, our dear parents, gone with years, and our wives and daughters and sons, God bless them, and the ones coming after us we'll never see, bound to the bunch of them by love and death.
Thomas Lynch is an essayist, poet and funeral director. His books include The Undertaking, Bodies in Motion and at Rest and Still Life in Milford. This is an edited extract from Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans, which will be published this summer by Jonathan Cape