Chapter 35
Chasing the Dead: Adventures in Amateur Genealogy
If the essence of conversation is communication, then the Irish failed the test, dealing as they did in evasion and obfuscation. Irish conversation was like one of those Celtic designs in the Book of Kells made up of a simple form like a serpent that tied itself into thousands of ornamental knots before finally eating its own tail.
Patrick McGinley, Bogmail
Sometime before kindergarten, an important stage of psychological individuation occurs for children — or at least it did for mine. This is the moment at which the youngster realizes, “I can make these big people nuts if I just repeat incessantly a phrase, gesture, facial expression, or song.” Singing a round is often the vehicle for this malicious discovery. Rounds are those circular songs like ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ that course endlessly along the same lyrics with individual voices starting at different times to create a musical cascade and parental insanity.
One day while being tortured thusly as we drove over hill and dale and back again with our three children and their goofy friends, a deeper potential meaning emerged. Rounds are how we articulate the messages of our lives. Not that as adults we drive people crazy singing ‘Frere Jacques’, but that as we go along life’s bumpy congested highway, we are all singing ‘rounds’ where the lyrics contain our collective connected stories of mean teachers, odd friends, a night in New York, the big game, a betrayal, a triumph, a first job, a second wife, and on and on. We warble with each other our existence in a repertoire of ‘same old, same old’ stories, conversational set pieces.
Our rounds greet every new acquaintance and not a few old ones blending in their variations along the way. We practice and expand our part with a chorus of stories from high school to college, composing a strumming of our roster of experiences across our word hoard that is remarkably like those little kids in the back of a car singing the same song over and over. Each of us circles the subject of our life: Three Blind Mice gives way to a recitation of our woes; Baa Baa Black Sheep to the tale of how we grew up. We repeat the ‘lyrics’ of our life at cocktail parties, job interviews, and therapy sessions. We carve several totemic stories, perhaps an even sparser set of themes, and they form the bulk of life’s conversations. (Quoting from the New Yorker or sampling from Threads is not the same: those are cover versions.)
Our personal chants define us; they carry to all whom we can make listen what we most want others to know. In turn, we are supposed to attend to all the songs of the other singers in our circle: how they met the love of their life, lost her, found another, almost did this but really did that, saved the day, got religion, lost religion. (That hearing theirs is rarely as interesting as crooning our own is the way of the world, isn’t it?) These adult rounds all sound remarkably the same, a collection of counterpoints. We are the song that never ends; especially if we are Irish, the nation of shanachies — storytellers — and bards and barroom bores.
That seemingly inescapable consistency explains in part why we grow sick of ourselves especially we enter our forties. The rhythm that was once compelling now sounds like just a wail of complaints about our lives from the creeping decrepitude of our bodies to the deadening sameness of our days. Hearing our own whining harmony, we understand — if only for a nanosecond — how others who lacked our inbred attachment and affection for ourselves might be a little sick of us. The inner voice shrieks in discovery, “If I am tired of being me, imagine how the other characters dragooned into my opera feel.”
Traveling Ireland with three of the people who knew me best during my formation resurrected both that fear AND the old rounds. We told the tales of our youth — misdeeds, missed chances, and magical moments all as inflated variations on a theme, sort of the disco version of our original Clancy Brothers folk song of a life. We each sang parts introduced decades earlier from wisecracking younger brother to cool firstborn. Like my kids on those car trips, the leading and following, stopping and starting, left me in exhilarated exhaustion eager for the song to end, but unwilling to be the first to pause. We were a much bulkier, hairier version of those psychotic Von Trapps. How could we stop telling the old stories? What would be left?
Some inherited rhythms surfaced in our round as we spun around Ireland. We are not the first to carry on this way. There’s a taste of my father in an emphatic putdown of John’s, the zaniness of my Uncle Eddie appears in a giggling joke from Jim, my mother’s gentle smiling spirituality beams out of an observation of Brendan’s about our fate. These surviving phrasings reminded me of all of those loved ones that already had fled this earth. Perhaps somewhere in these verses that we express to each other even earlier relatives live on. We can’t know but maybe the way those Elliott brothers of Mullananalt circled in conversation echoes in the counterpoint of our current crew. Down through the ages, perhaps each of us learns a part in the family polyphony only to transfer it to various successors before falling silent. This circular interaction probably would continue as we all dined that last night in Ireland in 2010, just another stanza in our song. Or so I thought. What breaks a round is revelation of a new story, a rejoinder to the sameness of our stanzas.
I had made reservations for a farewell repast at The Cove, a two story restaurant in Portnablagh, a beach town up the coast. I’d had a glorious meal there in the 1980s. Or was it the 1990s? Or both? Or a different restaurant? I was definite that the windows all face Sheephaven Bay with its sea of blues, grays, and greens that now and then go purple under the perpetually moving sky. I wanted the trip to end in beauty.
As usual, on the way there John was suspect of the TomTom, my GPS device by now at least attaining the rank of an honorary family member; perhaps a quirky 2nd cousin once removed. And like a wayward relative, the device eccentrically yet efficiently came through when we least expected it. The mechanical voice sent us through a U-turn on a pier before insisting to my amazement that we had arrived. . Even I was surprised. I recalled a restaurant on the lane to the water, but instead it stood as proclaimed across the shore road. Old TomTom had nailed it.
As we entered, the owner greeted me warmly as “Mr. Elliott” for I had made the reservation. I told him there would be four Mr. Elliotts dining and he smiled and said, “You can never have enough.” Settling into the décor of muted pastels with an over-sized portrait of Dr. Spock upstairs in the bar, this seemed just the right place for our valedictory meal.
The early August evening of Donegal, the tiredness of all the day searching and talking, my looming break of the quartet in the morning with my dash to Belfast all combined to produce an elegiac air to the proceedings. That concurrency shook us out of the routines of conversation. Brendan initiated the break by saying that he would wax esoteric, and the announcement was fitting. We had learned to preface our remarks during the trip so that their reception would have the best chance of a successful landing. We would announce that what we would say next was going to be controversial, or that we knew another disagreed with the forthcoming, or we recognized that the only person really interested in what we were about to say was probably just the speaker, but we were going to go ahead and keep talking anyway. This framing of our remarks fit them to the contours of our company. Brendan announcing he would be ‘esoteric’ warned us not to snap or snipe but to give him the leeway we would want when our turn for indulgence came.
He recalled a Joseph Campbell lecture he had attended decades earlier in New York City. Campbell had spoken of two types of hero’s quests: The person who goes forth and the person who stays home. The courage our mother had personified in leaving Ireland seemed the first type to him. He was persuaded of it even more after this trip but he also wanted to note how he had gained a greater respect for all the people who stayed — the dead and the living. He didn’t want to simplify the situation as he might have previously. And we concurred with his observation; we arrived in Ireland with one model of how our families came into being, but we were leaving with our minds changed about many parts of the past.
Our assumptions about our mother made her more daring than the siblings and friends who stayed. We all believed that her emigrant courage as evidenced in her shipping across the Atlantic alone and without prospects was one of the gifts that she bestowed upon her six kids and her eleven grandchildren. Brendan wanted to give the other side its due. Staying was an act of faith. Never being able to find a sliver of separation from all the obligations that came from remaining in the hometown must’ve been hard for the stayers. What of the Sweeneys who stayed and stayed in Donegal? The Kenyons who did the same for centuries as weavers before they launched from Manchester to New England? The Elliotts and Ryans who took the top of windswept hills and turned them into a living? While I appreciated his appreciation of the complexity of these lives and worlds on this side, his deft changing of mind impressed and touched me even more.
So much of our lives is incessant argument, a plea for acceptance of our explanations as the official version of reality, our ‘song’. From the street corner philosopher to the Oxford academic, the idea is to nail the individual ‘truth’ to the door of our collective existence. Brendan seeing the other side’s merit, the complexity of these lives, refuted many pat criticisms of him. With his dark eyes twinkling over a half-moon smile, he suggested that we toast both groups of heroes. In this retreat from assurance, Brendan set the tone of our last night’s reflections. We all tried in the words that followed to make sense of not just our trip, but all the journeys represented in our family’s past. But we realized that any meaning sought in those journeys would prove almost necessarily inconclusive. It was as our Dad used to say, “The more I learn, the less I know.”
John then echoed this prudent doubt by raising the role of happenstance in all the lives we sought to grasp. He used his own life as an illustration. While at Citibank in the 1970s, he knew an older executive who prodded him to move nearer to New York City from the Jersey shore to Summit, NJ — a town of bankers and brokers. John capitulated eventually and he and this Pied Piper commuted into the office via a red Triumph sports car. Then they coached a Little League team together where John met another Citibank honcho who was an affable opposing coach. That introduction led to the second exec putting John in charge of a big project at Citibank, which in turn proved the launching pad to his later promotions, hires, and successes culminating in several CEO roles.
Wasn’t the same randomness likely to be true for all these Elliotts, Kenyons, Connaghans, Ryans, and Sweeneys? Wasn’t it also true, therefore, that we could never know what prompted one to stay and another to go, made one’s life meteoric and another’s immovable? If what we had sought on this trip was the complete list of magic ingredients of our heritage, the full formula for why we turned out the way we did, we’d failed — at least in part. John’s rejection of certainty was appealing to me not just for its sensibility but also for its intimation of mutability. He and we could change our views, and even hold contradictory or paradoxical ideas. I could hear a sweet sound in our buzz of conversation and it wasn’t the familiar lilt of our usual rounds.
What we were hearing and saying was a rejection of everything in our understanding of the past being deemed incontrovertible. Genealogy proceeds from a deepening appreciation that those people that we pursue up the family tree (or down in Australia) are our history, and, therefore, our life is contingent upon them. If they made different decisions or even if they suffer or enjoy different outcomes because of systems over which they have no control, then our lives would be different. Genealogy yields to the inevitable incompleteness of this understanding. To apprehend where we stand is to appreciate that the accidents that formed our family’s past may look in a ledger like deliberate choices. Historian John Lukacs once wrote: “Human understanding is a matter of quality, not quantity. … The purpose of understanding differs from the scientific purpose of certainty, and of accuracy. … (H)uman understanding of other human beings is always, and necessarily, imperfect.” That imperfection was part of what John was admitting as he turned into a more metaphysical detective before my eyes.
And the happenstance went beyond these accidents to the randomness of the genes affecting our genealogy. Philosopher Will MacAskill drives home that point with this disconcerting passage on what happened right after we were just a gleam in our parents’ eyes.
“Consider that a typical ejaculation contains around 200 million sperm. If any of the other 200 million sperm had fertilised the egg that you developed from, then you would not have been born. Instead someone else — with 75% of the genes you would have had — would have been born in your place. A one out of 200 million event involves extreme luck. So, much as I’m sure you don’t want to think about such things, even if your father’s ejaculation had occurred milliseconds earlier or later, it would almost certainly have been a different sperm that fertilised your mother’s egg. And so any event that affected the schedules of your biological mother and father on the day that you were conceived, even if only by a tiny amount — such as a longer line at the supermarket, or an additional car ahead of them on their way home from work — would have had the result that you wouldn’t have been born.”
A longer line at the supermarket? Happenstance to the max! My brothers and I did not discuss wayward sperm at that dinner but we did note how our understanding of our own lives was opaque, grasping the meanings of our previous generations a shadow game in a cave. Quality rather than quantity of understanding mattered; not finding a particular gravestone or scribbled parish record might be regrettable but that’s the reality of genealogy. Winning an ineffable knowledge of our past could be at once profound and incomplete. The very good bargain in this trip was a journey with some of the people I loved most in the world that let me come away loving them more. That experience made me conclude that love might be the most important ingredient in our fates, the harmony that dominated any discord from those accidents. To gain this harmony in Donegal that bright August evening made the four of us supremely lucky.
Now at The Cove seated at table with delicious local foods, and sensuous aromas abounding, John went further. He challenged us that far from understanding our ancestors’ moves we probably couldn’t even be sure about our mother’s motivations. Was she like Brendan’s hero on a quest in her journey from birth to immigrant and at least partly illiterate laborers in Scotland to arriving in Carrowcannon to the convent school in Strabane and then away to England and finally to America? Or was she just a ‘ciotach Colleen’, a left-handed girl touched by the fairies — as legends hold for that type, a traveler moving point to point pushed by circumstance rather than pressed by destiny?
John was saying that for all we spoke to her about this earlier life, mysteries remained regarding our mother. Did the new young school teacher in Falcarragh in 1939 propose marriage to keep her there? Who was the other suitor who withdrew due to his parents’ opposition? What was the nature of their reticence — age, religion, class? Was that part of what drove her to leave? Was she already burning to escape the claustrophobia of that village where everyone knew everyone else’s business? Without knowing these facts how can we judge the gravity of her situation and the thrust she needed to escape its drag? We’ll never know for sure what she was after.
Her confidences to us all did not lower these barriers to knowing. But we did acknowledge some inconsistency between these stories and the woman we came to know. At some point, our mother slipped from daring to designing, from careering to careful. Interest in the past is not confined to the choices that explain the paths. We also want to know what made those people change. What are the circumstances that make us drop down the scales in our songs from ‘Wild Man Blues’ to ‘Home on the Range’? For our mother, perhaps having reached her quest — that close family all about her — she turned naturally to more conservative constructions of behavior. Is that just what happens to heroes?
This question had consequence if applied to the four of us around the table. Had we ever been those searching heroes or were we also just pushed around by the universe? To use Brendan’s idea and John’s insight, what had happened to our quests? Compared to our mother, our grandmother Mary Ryan who sailed on the Lusitania, to that great-grandfather James Elliott who came steerage to America, how did we stack up? What had we attained and created? Was our imputation of some grand design in our achievements simply our invention? Instead like all of these ancestors did we simply achieve some unexpected accord of willingness and accident, which we then declared to be a victory? Was that a lesson to my kids: heroism is found in how we react to happenstance, how we convince ourselves that we intended to end up where we did? Is the reality of a genealogical quest like Slavoj Zizek’s Parallax View where accepting irreconcilable differences between two perspectives — intention or accident, in this case — is the closest we get to an objective truth? The quantity of such questions became proportionate to the excellent quality of the red wine we drank while considering how much we did not know.(John was steadfast in having his Coke Lite; everyone should have a designated driver like him.)
The answer mattered because one of my goals at the start of this trip had been to make some meaning to impart to my children. I wasn’t sure if they would consider these inconclusive conclusions to constitute success. Or if they would care; your children have their own lives to figure out. Our pursuit of genealogy was never intended to find some famous or even mildly interesting ancestor to divert them if only for a few moments from their more humble existence.
I wasn’t offering them some link to the 13th Baronet of Caveness that might distract them from the 14th parking ticket they had just suffered. And I didn’t chase the dead to find a connection that would justify their own lives to others. I wanted my kids to know why and how these people had bothered to keep going, but now down a bottle of wine this evening, we brothers had to admit we never would know that answer completely. And I would have to explain to my kids that while no grander insight than ‘love thy family’ had emerged, the quest was worth the effort. The exercise of trying to understand our lives and each other was what mattered, not the hope of some grand answer.
That is why our eagerness to keep searching the past was unabated. Jimmy talked of perhaps another exploration. There were mysteries to be pursued even in Clare on Kilcarroll Hill where this had all started for me. Reports had surfaced that maybe a great great great grandfather was executed by the British and that it was to his brother, a crusading priest named Father Rohan, to whom we owed the rescue of the Ryans. Now that was a promising story. We were not professional researchers or amateur re-enactors. We didn’t expect to end up on a TV show or even for anyone else to care about what we had learned. Exploring our personal genealogy allowed us to consider the variety and vicissitudes of human behavior even if it failed to yield any grand design, any big answer. Perhaps that was something I could give to my kids: focus on the journey not the quest — and wait until someone else declared you a goddamn hero rather than anointing yourself.
John had toasted us all, the Brothers Four, up in the bar. He was glad that this inquiry included us. Now I toasted him as the leader of the searching that would never end. We had survived to sit around a table and keep on considering what had been and what might have been. We had chased the dead and they had captured us with their shadowy evidence of having lived. But we had also captured each other, renewed our claims for affection, our leases of love. In the necessary separation of our lives earlier, we forfeited some admission of similarity. In the egocentricity of young adulthood, we forgot both the differences and samenesses. Now we could sit at peace with how we were and were not alike. The world might lump us as the Elliotts but we understood that the truth — like each of us — was more complex. We rediscovered the love that is not dependent on being just like the others, but laughs and delights in the idiosyncrasies of each.
This dinner — like this trip — reminded me that I first learned about love from my family, my mother and father, my grandparents, my many Irish aunts and uncles and great aunts and uncles, my cousins older and younger. And from my brothers. Whoever I am, whoever we are, was forged in part by those experiences. Three in a bed, six in a car, two in a fight, all round a table. The words we spoke to each other — words outside of those usual lyrics, the usual song we sing –tiled our minds, and the deeds we witnessed for each other furnished our imaginations. Almost sixty years old that evening, I wished I had realized this a little better a lot sooner. Yet solace comes from writing this down to spread the news among the living who can share it with the dead.
Why? Because John and Jim are dead now — 2022 and 2015. Mike who read an early version of this tale was the first gone in 2014. In writing this, my pursuit of understanding includes those souls. What I wouldn’t give to have that dinner again. My apprehensions about arguing during those early car rides in Monaghan seem so stupid. Who wouldn’t exchange a fortune to be again with a brother questioning, laughing, or even singing a round?
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