KITTY SHEEHAN
“The Irish cannot be psychoanalyzed, because they’re chronically unable to tell the truth about unfortunate matters.”
Frank McCourt’s audience howled when he said this at a 1998 lecture in Minneapolis. I laughed along with them. I knew it was true and was happy to make it a joke.
After McCourt’s rollicking talk, I waited in line for him to sign my copy of Angela’s Ashes, the Pulitzer-Prize winning account of his Irish childhood in the slums of Limerick, featuring his complicated and somewhat ruthless mother, Angela Sheehan McCourt.
“I’m a Sheehan,” I told him when I reached his table. “My grandmother came from Ballyporeen.” He responded by bowing his head and making the sign of the cross. Once again I laughed, silently congratulating myself upon sharing a joke with Frank McCourt.
“We should find out if they’re pourin’ the Bushmills nearby,” he concluded, as he handed me my book.
The signed copy was a gift for my mother, Betty. When she read it, she laughed out loud at almost every page, read passages to me, and used phrases from the book like, “Oh your bladder’s all up in your eye” when they fit the occasion. I’d never seen her enjoy a book more.
“It explains everything about Tom’s family, Sheehans or not,” she told friends when describing the book.
Tom, my father, didn’t agree. He didn’t believe a word of the book and found no humor in it. And he usually found humor in anything. His parents, Thomas Sheehan and Bridget Cull, were sent to America from Ireland as teenagers and never saw their own parents again. He’d grown up hearing stories of the crushing poverty they’d left behind, and to him there was nothing funny to be said about it. Many of McCourt’s countrymen back in Ireland shared these views.
This made the whole thing even funnier to my mother, whose parents, Lewis and Florence, were English, Scottish, and Irish. You had to go back a long way to find their roots, and no one had really bothered. Both were born in Iowa.
So, we have a bittersweet Irish childhood memoir that may or may not be true, but certainly portrays its author as a victim of indifferent parents: a mother too busy gossiping and doing unsavory things to care about her children, and a father who can’t hold a job, spending every cent he finds on alcohol.
A book about the Irish and their alcohol. But not a word in it about any of these people being depressed.
My mother finds it hilarious. My father declares it all a lie.
Denial. Not just a river in Egypt, to paraphrase Stuart Smalley.
When Angela’s Ashes was published in 1996, my parents had been married for forty-three years. She was an alcoholic; he was depressed. Neither would acknowledge either. To the outside world, both were funny, smart people.
They were the perfect guides for teaching me how to mask pain and transform it into depression.
Almost as soon as they’d met in 1950, a kind of mayhem began: a succession of sudden deaths in their families.
The first was my father’s older brother, Edward “Red,” on July 26, 1950, at age thirty-two. He was a strapping athletic hero from New Haven, the most talented of the trio of Sheehan brothers. My father was playing ball in Iowa, at age twenty-eight, when he learned of his adored brother’s unexpected death from a brain aneurysm. I think it was an aneurysm. I’m not sure. No one has ever really explained it to me. His brother left behind three sons and a wife, all in Connecticut. My father had very little contact with any of them after the funeral. I’m not sure why.
My parents were married in Nevada, Iowa, my mother’s hometown, on October 10, 1953. Six days later, my father’s father died in New Haven without warning, from a heart attack. I think it was a heart attack. I’m not sure. No one discussed it.
Two years later, in 1955, my mother’s only sister, Janice, died at age twenty-eight. She’d been born with a “heart condition” and that’s what eventually killed her. I only knew her as the pretty woman in the burgundy organza dress, standing beside my mother in wedding pictures, with a softer, somehow more refined smile.
Janice was married to a sweet man named Stan. Stan had given my mother the two place settings of wedding china he and Janice had received, a pattern called Westvale by Syracuse, still in their boxes and tissue paper. My mother later gave them to me, along with the two place settings of her own china she’d received, Olympia by Lenox, also still in boxes from the same store. She offered no explanation.
My brother Dan was born on December 26, 1955. He was named after my father’s favorite song, Danny Boy. His middle name was Edward, after Red. My parents adored him. He was sick with fevers and odd viruses almost from day one. I came along May 1, 1957. I was named Ann Marie. Six months later, my mother decided I somehow wasn’t an “Ann” and had my name legally changed to Kathleen Ann Marie. The plan was to call me Katie, but Dan pronounced it Kitty, and that’s what stuck.
My brother and I had fun together, playing outside with neighborhood kids, riding bikes, and hanging out with the adults who came to our house often for parties. We were always there for the beginning of the parties, as the men and women smoked and drank and told stories, making each other scream with laughter. My parents often took us with them on weekends when they went to their favorite bars, the Amvets, the Lincoln Club, and the Country Club.
Friday night, July 10, 1964, we were all at the Country Club when my mother got a phone call from her brother saying she needed to come to Nevada immediately. Her father, Lewis, had a heart attack at home. He died instantly. I think. I was seven. My brother and I didn’t go with our mother that night. She was crying when she hugged us goodbye in the front yard, still in her purple summer party dress and dangling gold earrings. I’d never seen her cry before.
My grandfather chain-smoked and gambled, losing huge sums of money more than once. He never drank. He gave me dice every time I saw him, which I put in my pockets and then into my white leather jewelry box with the twirling ballerina inside. He was a livestock auctioneer and wore a grey fedora all day. He delivered pigs to farmers in the back seat of his Cadillac. No wonder he had a heart attack at age sixty-one.
At home, my mother was angry or sad most of the time after my grandfather died.
A year later, on October 12, 1965, my father’s mother, Bridget Cull Sheehan, died at age seventy-five from cancer. I have no idea what kind. It wasn’t discussed. My father flew alone to New Haven for his mother’s funeral. He brought me back little salt and pepper shakers from the airplane and a board game of the New York World’s Fair. The trip for his mother’s funeral was the last time my father went home to New Haven. I don’t know why.
After that, he spent many nights sitting alone at our kitchen table with a beer, listening to big band music on the radio.
So, by the time my parents were forty-three and thirty-eight, each had lost an idolized sibling, both their fathers, and one mother. Since no one was talking about it, I still knew nothing of death, funerals, grief, or why the adults in my house didn’t say much to each other anymore.
We sailed along this way for the next twenty years. Denial is a powerful wind.
Outside our house, my parents were the life of every party. When I was old enough, I was too. In Iowa, you’re old enough to drink whenever you decide you are. For me, that was eighth grade. Alcohol was readily available in most of my friends’ houses. Our parents didn’t know we drank until we were in high school. The legal age was eighteen then, and since I’d had a few years experience, I took my place at the bar beside my elders fairly easily.
My parents were only in good moods if they were drinking. When my mother wasn’t drinking, she was exasperated with life. I drove her nuts with my adolescent bouts of brooding, sassing, and knowing it all. My father drove her nuts, and she let him know it. The only time she was nice to him was when they were out.
In 1977, my brother Dan was diagnosed with cancer. I was twenty. Within a year, on July 27, 1978, he was dead. The first thing my mother said after he died was, “He never saw me cry.” Earlier, she had bolted when the priest came in to perform last rites, saying, “Well, I’m not watching this.” My father and I were left to witness my brother’s last sacrament.
This death I can tell you all about. I was there. I made all the phone calls to my parent’s bosses and friends that night, telling them what had happened. I planned his funeral because my parents could not.
I don’t know how my parents felt about losing their young son to cancer before he had a chance to become anything but their son. I couldn’t bear to make them sadder by asking them about it. The silence flooded every corner of our house: the empty chair at the dinner table, his boyhood bedroom, my girlhood bedroom which was used as his sickroom, the couch he’d spent most of the summer on, covered with a flannel hospital blanket, not talking. All the places he no longer occupied were wrapped in a cottony web of quiet sadness and isolation. I fled back to Iowa City for my senior year of college at the end of August.
As soon as I could, I filled the emptiness with another male, one I married. I was desperate to bring gaiety back into our family. That was the main qualification for a husband, to make me laugh. And even more importantly, to make my parents laugh. For a while, this plan worked.
One day, my father decided to stop drinking. He didn’t talk to anyone about it. He just did it. As he’d gotten older, he wasn’t that much of a drinker anyway. My mother had surpassed him long ago as the real drinker in the family. I was a close second. I knew he was hoping his sobriety would magically make my mother stop drinking. It didn’t.
Her drinking became my problem. I hosted an intervention at their house. After the few people who were brave enough finished speaking, she told us all to get the hell out unless we wanted to stay for a drink. We left and went to a bar to debrief.
She didn’t speak to me for a couple months, and when we spoke again it was as if nothing had happened.
My father’s anxiety began to eat him up. It presented as a kind of dementia, and that’s how my mother treated it. He began repeating himself incessantly, asking the same questions over and over. He didn’t want to leave the house. He couldn’t focus on a book long enough to read a page. None of us mentioned the possible reasons for his anxiety.
Eventually, predictably, but entirely out of keeping with family tradition, I found myself single and sober in a therapist’s office for the first time. Both of my parents were now dead.
As I described my parents to her, the therapist listened intently.
“We’re Irish,” I began, with a wry smile. “So, you know, no one talks about anything. You know, whatever bad can happen, will happen. We whistle in the dark, as my father always said. We expect the worst, so when it comes, we’re not surprised. Nothing surprised her, my mother always said. We panic if we have nothing to worry about. My family is the ultimate contradiction, like all Irish families. Creative and colorful, and wildly self-destructive. My father used humor to shield his pain. My mother’s weapon was booze, with a chaser of anger.”
I went on, trying to get her to laugh.
“I mean, my mother’s modus operandi was to not talk about things, laugh them off if pressed, drink, and deny,” I explained.
I didn’t add that this was also my former personal roadmap.
“Do you realize a lot of what you’re describing fits under the heading of depression?” the therapist asked me.
“Yes,” I ventured.
And with that yes, I changed the course of the rest of my life. I had a name for my family’s affliction of the mind and heart: depression.
I no longer wish someone had told me about depression sooner in my life. I cherish the wisdom gained from learning how hard it is to pin it down. It’s stealthy. It can spend years patiently sneaking up on you. Then it may hide itself in a bottle. It doesn’t care how long it has to hang around; it waits. If you ignore it, it busies itself by spreading its web into more corners of your life, blotting out light as it goes.
But you can get a broom and knock it down. If no one has helped you name this feeling, say it to yourself. It’s okay. There is help available, so much help. Tell someone, and boom, just like that, you aren’t alone, which can be a miracle.
You can still be the funny, self-deprecating life of the party. But now you have depression to use as material. The possibilities are endless.
Back to the china I inherited from my mother and my aunt. Last year, I searched the Internet, bought additional sets of each, and combined it all to make enough place settings for eight. I took the beautiful cream dishes with silver rims out of their boxes and threw the boxes away. I washed and dried each piece carefully. I set a sparkling table. I lit two candles, and sat down with my husband and friends to use those beautiful objects, the ones that had been stored away for more than fifty years, for the first time.