She’d been lying on the floor for three days when I found her.

“Jesus, Anna! Are you alright? Can you hear me?”

“Oh Fergus, you’re here.”

It had been a Sunday evening like any other. I’d had dinner at my parents’, washed the dishes, cleaned the sink, then drove two miles down the road to visit my ninety-year-old godmother. Anna O’Donnell lived on the sixth floor of Episcopal Place, an independent living apartment building nestled at the foot of a lovely park in one of Birmingham’s historic neighborhoods. On the other end of the green was a church where my AA home group met on Sunday nights. I always stopped in to see Anna on my way, and every week, she handed me a white envelope stuffed with twenty one-dollar bills.

“For your meetings,” she’d say with her sweet, innocent smile.

I’d long ago stopped trying to convince her that twenty dollars was more than most any recovering alcoholic would drop into the AA baskets in a single week. She knew that. She’d been spoiling me my entire life, and nothing pleased her more.

My sister Niamh and I were miracles to our “Auntie Anna,” who came to America from Ireland with our mother as Sisters of Mercy in 1960. For ten years, they taught together at a Catholic elementary school in Alabama. Anna became the mother superior and our mother the school principal.

This faithful, elfish little nun, raised on a sheep farm in the middle of nowhere in County Donegal, left the order in protest over the way the higher-ups treated my mother when she left to marry my father, a Catholic priest. Anna had nothing to her name, but she managed to find a good teaching job that provided an apartment and a modest income. She never married nor learned to drive a car, and what little money she had left over, she gave away, mostly to us kids, it seemed. She even helped pay my private school tuition when my parents could afford only half.

During the summers, when my parents took Mom’s high school students to Ireland, Anna would move in for three weeks to look after me. We’d watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents each morning, followed by her soap operas. In the afternoons, she’d give me Irish lessons. She was proud of her native tongue, and I was happy to learn something I could show off to Mom and Dad when we greeted them at the airport.

Some days, we’d walk down to Funtime Video to pick out the evening’s entertainment. R-rated movies were just fine with Anna, though occasionally they created uncomfortable situations. When I was about ten or eleven, we watched Colors, a film about gang life in 1980s South Central Los Angeles. There’s a particularly noisy sex scene that caught me off guard and made me want to crawl under the floor and bury myself because Anna was sitting on the couch just behind me. When the scene finally ended, and I mustered the courage to peek over my shoulder to gauge her temper, she seemed neither shocked nor upset. She didn’t say a word. And I never complained about her soaps. We got along famously.

Many afternoons featured cab rides to Red Lobster for shrimp scampi or to Service Merchandise for something special, like a new calculator watch. We cooked together, and at night I’d sleep on the floor of her room beside her bed.

I loved being with Anna. We were great friends.

A surprising force

One day she was walking from her apartment down to the Piggly Wiggly for groceries when a man knocked her to the ground and snatched her purse. As he was running off, the tiny Irishwoman shook her cane in the air, shouting, “Give me back my bag, or I’ll break your bloody neck!”

The thief was most certainly home free, but he must have been so completely surprised or simply so impressed that he dropped the bag, just as Anna had demanded.

Over the years, Mom and Dad were always hosting lively dinner parties. As is the Irish custom, after eating, each person is required to do a “party piece.” Recite a poem, play an instrument, sing a song, tell a joke. Anna usually offered a rendition of O’Donnell Abu or another Irish song. But at some point, somewhere, she came across a little poem which became her signature. The best part was how deliberately this wee woman recited the whole thing, including the author’s anonymity, enunciating each word, carrying the drama all the way through, and really bringing it home with the kicker at the end:

The Mouse on the Barroom Floor…. Author…. Unknown…

Some Guinness was spilled on the barroom floor

When the pub was shut for the night.

When out of his hole crept a wee brown mouse

And stood in the pale moonlight.

He lapped up the frothy brew from the floor,

Then back on his haunches he sat

And all night long you could hear him roar:

“BRING ON THE GODDAMNED CAT”

The room would erupt. The head of UAB’s English department, John Haggerty, would roar with laughter. Every single time. It never got old.

During our Sunday visits, Anna would share with me some of her fantastical interpretations of neighborhood events. From her perch atop the sixth floor, she observed many aspects of local life—which planes were coming in—“I was here saying the rosary watching you land;” what the across-the-street neighbors were up to—“They had a roaring party last weekend, but something must of soured because she hasn’t been back to see him since;” and what was happening up the road at Park Tower, where Dr. Haggerty lived—“John Haggerty was up very late last night. His light was on past 1 am, so he must have a good book. Or, perhaps a visitor from out of town…”

Anna, the Hitchcock fanatic, had her own personal Rear Window.

One of my larger anxieties about coming out as gay at the age of 31 was my fear that all of this would change, that Anna would look at me differently. Such a change would be too much to bear. But when I went over on a Sunday afternoon, with plenty of time, I’d scarcely finished my confession when she said this:

“Fergus, I love you no matter what. And besides, for all I know, I could be a lesbian. I just never bothered to find out.”

The fall

On that Sunday night I came over and found her on the floor, she told me she’d fallen on the Friday.

“You’ve been lying here for three days? Why didn’t you pull the cord?” I said, gesturing to the string dangling from her wall that, when pulled, rings the front desk and then the paramedics.

“Oh, I don’t want strangers tromping around my apartment,” she said.

This was classic Anna. Dad claimed it was the old Irish attitude she’d grown up with in the borderlands, where you never knew whom to trust, where anyone could be an informant for the British.

“Anyway, I knew you’d be coming this evening,” she said.

After a few more events too much like this one, Anna agreed to move into an assisted living community across town where she’d have someone around the clock making sure she was alright.

Not long before she died, I told her I had no doubt it was because of her prayers, because of the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of rosaries she’d said for me over the years, that I was still alive.

“Anna,” I said. “After you’re gone, I might be in real trouble.”

She laughed softly.

“After I’m dead,” she said, “my prayers will only be more powerful.”

As I finish writing this essay, with my husband sitting beside me, ticking off his 822nd consecutive day of Irish lessons on Duolingo, I can say, with confidence, that Anna’s words were true.

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What is it about Ozymandias?

It’s the one poem everyone remembers.

When I was thirteen, I had the retrospectively excellent, yet at-the-time horrendous fortune to have my own mother as my eighth grade English teacher.

Mrs. Tuohy was infamous for having her students memorize one new poem each week. We started with Shakespearean sonnets, then moved on to Petrarchan ones. We learned more Hopkins and Yeats than anyone, though we got a decent dose of Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Keats as well.

My Irish mother, a former nun, would not tolerate anyone half-assing these assignments.

“If you don’t know it, there’ll be wigs on the green!” she’d warn us, referring to hairpieces left on the grass following a brawl or a duel.

At the time, every student hated memorizing those poems. Hated it! But years later, at alumni holiday parties and reunions, even in grocery aisles and in airports, students would approach my mother to thank her for making them memorize all those poems. In the event some grateful alum would recite a poem to the beaming Mrs. Tuohy, it would usually be Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

That sonnet, about a ruined statue of the Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses II, is a haunting allegory about the futility of prideful obsessions with legacy.

Just the other day, a friend from high school told me in an email that he misses my mother and often mentions her to his wife when they read poetry to their daughter. He said one time they came across a statue of Ozymandias’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone” on a Texas prairie, and he was delighted he was able to recite most of the poem from memory.

I am not surprised he remembered. Because if there is just one poem any given alum can still recite, that poem is almost always Ozymandias. To this day, classmates and I joke about this phenomenon. It’s funny to us because it’s true, and because not a single one of us can say why!

Maybe there’s some scientific explanation. Maybe some linguist or neuroscientist will tell us it has something to do with the iambic pentameter or the rhyme scheme or whatever.

Or, perhaps, there is a mystical reason behind it.

Perhaps we remember this particular poem because its moral has prepared us for this moment in time.

When we studied Ozymandias thirty-five years ago, none of us could have imagined America in the state it’s in now. None of us could have conceived we’d be governed by a clownish narcissist more outrageous than any doomed king Shakespeare ever dreamt of, a president who throws tantrums over reflecting pools, gilded statues, triumphal arches and ballrooms, a ruler whose craving for recognition and gaudy legacy makes Ozymandias, the king of kings, look like an anonymous philanthropist.

I wonder if the story of that ruined statue, with its frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, got latched in our brains in order to become some sort of bearing to orient and remind us that the madness of our current moment is by no means without precedent, that, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, There is nothing new under the sun.

Anyhow, and whatever the case may be, the following year, with another teacher, I read Frankenstein by old Percy Bysshe’s wife, Mary Shelley, whose stepsister had a child with Lord Byron. Mary and Percy were also very close to that rakish aristocrat. And though I recall some innuendo about the extent of their relationship, I was unable to find evidence that any such prurient rumors are true.

Nonetheless, it is agreed upon that Byron did enjoy intimate relationships with a number of other women and men. I remembered this the other night while watching an old episode of Jeopardy, which is how I came up with the correct response to this clue in the Final Jeopardy category, 19th Century Poets:

In 1824 he was refused burial in Westminster Abbey for “questionable morality;” in 1969, he got a memorial stone there.

“Lord Byron!” I belted out. “Who is Lord Byron?!”

Then, turning to my husband, Michael, who was seated beside me on the couch, I bellowed: “Byron’s morality was questionable! Oh, very questionable indeed!”

Michael was belly-laughing because my phrasing evoked an inside joke between us. It is a Tuohy family tradition that every year, on the Feast of the Epiphany, we watch John Huston’s movie The Dead, which is based on the short story by James Joyce and set at a party in Dublin on that feast day. When someone at the dinner table mentions the composer Verdi, the prudish crone Mrs. Malins, tut tuts, “I heard that Verdi’s morals were dubious. Oh, very dubious indeed!”

Now, anytime anyone mentions the words Verdi, dubious, morals, or indeed, Michael and I guffaw.

Oh, and speaking of performative puritanism, I’m currently reading Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain. I was delighted the other night to come across casual references to Keats’s ballad, La Belle Dame sans Merci, which Mom introduced to us all those years ago.

The beauty that will last

I could go on and on about the ways her drop-of-the-hat recitations remain with me still, how each year, the first green shoots evoke Hopkins’s Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush, how the rusting of foliage always brings to mind Yeats’s The trees are in their autumn beauty. How every day Mom lived with Michael and me on hospice, she astonished us with how much she still knew, how it became clear to us that poetry was her primary language, how so many verses are simply woven throughout the fabric of her soul.

One morning, near her last end, she called me over to where she sat in her wheelchair by the windows overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. Watching God’s grandeur stretched out before us, a cardinal among the birds gathered at the feeder, the morning sun burning away the milky mist rising from the river gorge, she began reciting verses the Irish schoolteacher and revolutionary, Patrick Pearse, wrote just before the English executed him:

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,

This beauty that will pass;

“But ya know, Fergus,” she said quietly. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe the beauty ever really passes.”

Those words inspired the name of this Substack series, The Beauty That Will Last, because the beauty that Elma Tuohy left for us very much remains.

As for the legacies of prideful despots, Nothing beside remains. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away…

I am currently writing a family memoir about my Irish parents, a former Catholic priest and nun, and their remarkable story of resistance, romance, and redemption during an age of American upheaval. Each week, I share a new reflection inspired by their faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

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This is the final chapter.

December 20, 2023

Mom stayed in bed, so we watched Jeopardy in her room. I made beef stew, and just before we ate, we prayed the usual, “Bless us O Lord, and these, thy gifts, for which of thy bounty, we are about to receive, through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

“And God provide for the wants of the poor,” Mom added. “And the homeless. Dad worked for the homeless.”

“He did,” I said.

“Is he really dead, Fergus?”

“Dad?” I asked

“Yeah,” she said.

December 29

(My sister) Niamh and the boys are visiting for Christmas.

Last night Mom told us all to be quiet while we were watching Jeopardy.

“Shush!” she said. “I can’t hear what they’re saying!”

She then looked to Michael with a frown.

“This is our apartment, isn’t it?” she asked him. Then, motioned her hands towards Niamh, me, and the boys, she said, “These people are invading it!”

December 30

We ate dinner watching Jeopardy. Mom keeps saying she misses Alex Trebek.

“And now…here is the host of Jeopardy!…” says Johnny Gilbert, before Mom interrupts.

“Alex Trebek!” she shouts, rendering Ken Jennings’ name inaudible.

Michael was on call. His pager went off, and he had to take a phone call and was on his computer at the dining room table.

“Who’s that talking back there!?” Mom barked.

I turned and saw Michael’s eyes were wide, looking to me, and so I intervened.

“Michael’s working!” I said.

She threw up her hands. “Well, I wish he told us he was doing that!” she said.

January 6 (The Feast of the Epiphany)

Got Mom up early and to the toilet, and she had a bowel movement. It felt like a victory because she’s had one in bed the last several days, and we’ve no caregiver today. Got her into her chair, and she watched Jeopardy all morning. Corned beef and cabbage for early lunch at 10:30. Then ice cream. Then Ireland with Michael all afternoon and an early cocktail hour for her at 2:30. She was happy as a clam. She kept commenting on the show while I was in the living room peeling spuds and Michael was putting together the new composter.

“Fergus, I'm on a holiday, and I’m loving it!” she shouted one time.

Bella has been very under the weather all day. I’ve never seen her this way. Yesterday, Michael found a big tumor on her tongue and took her to the vet. We’re waiting on the bloodwork to come back on Monday. Poor Michael, God be with him, and God be with Bella. Ease her suffering. Heal her if it be your will. I don’t want her to leave us just yet. But please ease her suffering.

January 19

Last night putting Mom to bed: she had been in pain and was lying in bed since 2 pm, having had a bath that morning, she was tired of sitting up. Her leg pain was bothering her. We had dinner at her bedside and watched Jeopardy. She was still in her clothes, so I encouraged her to let me get her up to the bathroom and change her for bed. She agreed begrudgingly.

“I wish I were dead,” she said on the toilet.

I was buzzing around getting her meds and new clothes and tooth brush, etc.

“I feel like killing myself,” she added.

“I hope you don’t…Mom, it probably won’t be long more.”

“Before what?”

“Before God takes you to heaven.”

“Oh, stop being so practical!”

January 23

Before Final Jeopardy, during the usual commercial for brain supplements, Mom says, “I had to stop giving Dad Prevagen because we couldn’t afford it.”

February 4

Friday night we were having dinner in the living room watching Jeopardy. Mom turned to Michael and said, “Did Bella die?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. She was a good dog. The only dog I ever liked.”

After Jeopardy, she looked to me. “Are you going to get Dad?” she said.

“Oh, what do you mean?”

“Are you going to get Dad?”

“Oh, from where? Do you mean pick him up?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure, Mom,” I said. “Let me get you some ice.”

Then I put her to bed.

February 6

We ate chicken thighs and Spanish rice watching Jeopardy. When it was over, Ken Jennings said, “We’ll see you tomorrow,” and Mom said, “I mightn’t be alive.”

After a brief moment, she added, “I should have said, ‘Please, God!’”

February 15

“The nurse is coming in a few minutes,” I said to Mom.

“Why is she coming? I don’t want her bothering me!”

“She’s not bothering you. She’s a blessing. We need her.”

“I don't mean to get angry with you, Fergus. I'm sorry.”

“That’s okay mom,” I said. “I'm sorry to get angry with you too. Here’s your iced water. I'll bring you an uisce beatha (Irish for whisky) as soon as the nurse leaves.

“Thank you, Fergus,” she said. “You’re a wonderful friend.”

Taylor, the music therapist, came by later and played lovely Irish music.

“Where did you learn that?” Mom asked. “Did you grow up in Ireland?”

Taylor played Raglan Road, Danny Boy, Four Green Fields (always brings me to tears), Molly Malone, and Song for Ireland.

“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Mom said, quoting Shelley. She was in tears herself at the end.

Next time, for St Patrick’s Day, we’ll have a few more-upbeat additions—Wild Rover, Whisky in the Jar, and Finnegan’s Wake. Mom is chuffed!

Watching Jeopardy, the clue was: “The road to hell is…”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Mom said.

It made me think, am I on the road to hell here?

February 22

Mom got in bed around 4:30. Michael and I ate our spaghetti in there with her watching Jeopardy. She didn’t touch her curried rice. We said prayers with her and kissed her goodnight and then he and I watched two episodes of Fellow Travelers.

Afterwards, I went in to check on Mom and she was surprisingly still awake. She was confused about the time, whether it was morning or night, and I said, “It’s bedtime.”

She was struggling with the remote. I asked her if she wanted to watch television and she said, “No turn it off.” I did and told her I love her, and we had a big long head to head hug and I went into my soul.

“Where’s the dog?” she asked.

“Bella died,” I said.

“What?”

“Bella died.”

“Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, we miss her. She was a good girl.”

“She was very good,” she said. “She wasn’t spoiled or anything.”

“Good night,” I said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I hope so,” she said.

I left and filled up my water glass in the kitchen. As I started towards the stairs, I heard Mom say, “She was a very good dog!”

February 23

I checked on Mom and she said she wasn’t feeling well. She said she was lonely and I hugged her and she told me the love of her life had died.

Then she said her bones were sore and I asked did she want to lie down and she said yes and she wanted a pain pill. I helped her to the potty and bed and Michael got home and we watched Jeopardy together. My favorite, Deb Bilodeau, won.

Mom didn’t eat any of the curry rice I brought her. “I already ate my dinner,” she said, so I removed it.

“Thank you for getting it for me though,” she said.

She was a bit crabby tonight, but not too bad. Must be the pain.

February 27

Mom didn’t want dinner, but Michael and I brought ours in and watched Jeopardy with her. A certain contestant was on the Tournament of Champions. I remember Mom hated him during his season. She thought he was so smug. She remembered him tonight and expressed her dismay. “I can't stand that fellow!”

Amazingly, he was defeated. Glad she won’t have to see him again.

February 29

Mom has been staying in bed all day lately. Michael and I brought our pork chops into her room to watch Jeopardy. I gave her some pork and rice, but she didn’t eat any. At the end, Michael got up with his dishes to wash his hands.

Mom said, “Oh, Michael, don’t do those. I’ll do them later.”

March 1

Watched Jeopardy with Mom and Michael. Afterward I put back on Our Planet 2. Mom was watching a herd of wildebeest chased by lions.

“This is the worst Jeopardy ever!” she said.

March 6

Mom was loopy this morning when I went in at 6 am to check on her. Saying something about a program she was watching, something about Jeopardy, but it was mostly mumbles. I pulled the covers back over her as she'd pulled them mostly off in the night. She was in a pleasant mood, though. I went back in at 7:15. I think she'd fallen back to sleep a little, but I'd heard her talking to herself. She said she had some pain.

“Would you like a pain pill?”

“I had one already.”

“You haven’t yet today.”

“I did. Your lovely niece gave me one.”

“Look at that red bird,” she said a moment later, pointing out the window.

Then:

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can,

Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

Looked it up—it’s Coleridge.

Now she’s back there saying, “Sit down Bella!”

In the afternoon, she had a lovely FaceTime with Niamh. “I love you darling,” Mom said twice.

Later, I went in and her eyes were rolled up in her head. I thought she was leaving us.

“Mom?” I said.

“Oh hello,” she said. “I was watching a cottage in Ukraine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, they were renovating it.”

I went in this evening to check on her, and she said, “I love you Fergus, you’re so handsome. But that’s not why I love you. I love you for your soul.”

April 1 (Easter Monday)

(Mom has been nonverbal for a few days)

Last night I knew her death was imminent and asked Michael for help bringing down a mattress.

“Mom,” I said. “We’re going to have a slumber party tonight, you and I.”

Michael helped me make the sheets for my bed on the floor beside her. I fell asleep around 10:30. It might have been her breathing that awakened me a couple hours later. It was raspy. There were maybe ten raspy, kind of punchy breaths in a row, like something was happening, and then normal breathing would resume. Then it would start again a few minutes later and quiet once more. I laid back down and tried to go back to sleep but the cycle continued and I just couldn’t sleep. Around 2:10, she made a slight gasping sound. I rushed up to see, and then one of the cycles started again. About 2:15 there were a couple, I’m not sure how many, slightly gaspy breaths spaced out. And then the breathing stopped. The whole time I was stroking her hair and forehead saying, “I love you Mom,” and praying.

She was like a beautiful little child. Her skin was so soft and her face so sweet and innocent. I stroked her forehead and knee as she died. Then I called Michael.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, can you please come downstairs?”

“I’ll be right there.”

It feels like a lot of very important, very good things happened in the last few weeks. Maybe that’s why she didn’t die back a few weeks ago, when she said she thought she might. We needed those conversations. She said to me, “I love you unconditionally.” I said to her, “You are my anam cara (my soul friend).” We needed her to light up like she did with Niamh’s call.

I listened to a Ram Dass lecture on grief in bed. It helped me see that Mom and I share a love that passes all understanding.

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Ordinarily, when a doctor recommends hospice, it’s because the physician believes the patient has six months or less to live. That was certainly the case when we moved Mom home with us. Her beloved husband of 51 and a half years—the former Catholic priest who endured excommunication and exile from Ireland because of their deep love—had just died. Three days before we were set to travel to Ireland to spread his ashes, Mom fell and broke her hip, and refused to eat or cooperate with the physical therapists. Even my husband Michael—a palliative care physician—believed she had only weeks to a few short months.

Right around this time, Michael accepted a job in the mountains of western North Carolina, where we owned a cabin and had vacationed for years. His new employer was gracious enough to give him eight months before he needed to start because of his mother-in-law’s predicament.

As we pick up in May 2023, Michael has to move up to North Carolina on his own, while Mom and I stay in Birmingham. I make regular trips up to see him, sometimes with Mom, sometimes solo. Mom is waning, but the stubborn Irishwoman wasn’t quite ready to go yet—despite what she told me all the time!

May 4

I was in the den working on an essay and heard Mom stirring in her room.

“Fergus,” she said in a weak gurgle.

I jumped off the couch and ran in.

“Yes? Are you ok?”

She was half out of the bed, and her face was wan and tired.

“I need help. I can't get out of bed.”

“Do you need to use the potty?”

“Yes.”

Her back was wringing wet. I lifted her up and onto the potty. She peed for quite a bit. Changed her diaper and gave her a dry shirt and tucked her back in.

“It’s like the flu,” she said with that low gurgle. I got her her nasal sprays and asked whether she needed anything else.

“An Ensure, please.”

This was her favorite morning beverage. I brought it in and sat on the bed with her and held her hand.

“I think I'm going out this time,” she said.

“Going out where?”

“Well, to heaven or to hell.”

“To heaven, Mom. You’re going to go to heaven!”

Then I cited the last verse of Ag Críost an Síol, the Irish prayer we say together each night: “Ó bhás go críoch, ní críoch ach athfhás—From death to end, not end but new life.”

She smiled. We sat together a little while, and I got up.

Later, after Jeopardy, we were watching the news when a Wayfair commercial came on with a woman wearing a purple dress. The volume was off, so I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

“She’s an awful eejit,” Mom said. “Look at the width of her.”

Soon after, watching an Ireland with Michael episode called Beyond the Pale, the host visited the Irish National Stud and discussed the Japanese garden, which represents the course of life from oblivion to eternity and everything in between.

I looked over at Mom, and she was fixed on the show, smiling.

“Thank you, Fergus, for reminding me of this,” she said.

May 8

At 4 pm, when Jeopardy was finished, I gave Mom her glass of scotch.

“When you’ve finished your whisky, I’ll heat up your broth,” I said.

She put her hands on her breasts and looked at me questioningly.

“Your chicken broth,” I said.

“Oh, I thought you said my bra!”

May 10

Last night, we were watching the news when a commercial for children with cleft palates came on.

“Oh, God love them,” Mom said. “Oh, God love them.”

I was glad to see this show of sympathy, especially contrasted with the way she talks about Jeopardy contestants.

“What would you like for Mother’s Day?” I asked.

“I’d love a steak, but I know it’s not good for me.”

“That’s alright, Mom,” I said. “You’re on hospice!”

June 28

Last night after Jeopardy, we watched Fantastic Fungi on Netflix. The narrator said psilocybin mushrooms are useful for treating alcoholism.

“Oh, I’ll have to get those,” Mom said.

She loved that movie. Then we began watching Our Planet II.

“Nature red in tooth and claw,” she said, quoting Tennyson.

July 5

I came home about 3:30, and Sandra, the hospice CNA, was just getting Mom’s bath prepared. When she and Tonya, Mom’s caregiver, went to get Mom, Mom gave them some guff. I understand she refused her bath on Monday, and it was a substitute lady who didn’t know how to push back. I went in to assist this time.

“Mom, you’re being pampered!” I said. “I wish I had somebody coming by to give me a bath every other day!”

“Yeah, but it’s in the middle of Jeopardy!” she said.

“Mom, look, they paused it for you.”

“Do I have uisce beatha?” she said, using the Irish word for whisky.

“Yes! I’ll have your glass ready when you’re finished with your bath.”

September 13

Yesterday I was in North Carolina. Rose, the caregiver, texted asking me to call Mom because she was sad about Dad, so I called in the afternoon. By this time, Mavis’s shift had begun. Mom was glad to hear from me, and we had a nice brief conversation. She said she was sad, but she was watching Jeopardy and getting distracted, so I told her I’d call back later.

When I called back, she was alternately very sad and then somewhat normal.

“I feel like committing suicide!” she said.

“I understand.”

Things got better as we talked. We prayed Ag Críost an Síol, and just when we finished, she said:

“When I die, I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want that to be the end!”

“Maybe you should go out and enjoy the porch.”

“Oh yes.”

“Mavis can take you out.”

“I can go out myself.”

“Well, Mavis can help make sure you don’t roll off down the stairs.”

“I don’t care for her.”

“Can I speak to her?”

“She’s not here. Oh wait, she’s right here beside me.”

October 9

Up in the mountains for a few days. Mom had finished her breakfast and the newspaper and was looking out the window when I heard her speak:

“The very shadows on the rocks have the power to haunt me as they pass,” she said.

I looked up the verse but couldn’t find the source.

In the car coming back to Birmingham, Mom was a bit loopy. Her legs are giving her lots more pain lately, so I gave her two 5 mg oxy when she woke up rather than just the one. Then another before we left and another when we were most of the way home.

“Are you going to live in North Carolina?” she said.

“Yes, I’ll move there to be with Michael. We want you to come with us too.”

“Oh, lovely,” she said, smiling. “I’ll see if I'm up for it.”

“Well, we just want to be together. Mom, you told me a week or so ago you were dying. Is that true?”

“What?”

“You told me you’re on your way out.”

“I wish I were!” she said. “I want to be in heaven with Dad. But if you don’t find me there, you can look in the other place yourself!”

We ate dinner together. Pizza for me. Mashed potatoes and chicken nuggets for her. I looked over, and she had her fork in her scotch. There was a lump of mashed potatoes at the bottom of her glass.

“I need a spoon,” she said.

“For what?”

“For my scotch.”

“You’re not going to drink your scotch with a spoon!” I said.

Then I turned on the television.

“Isn’t Jeopardy wonderful?” she said.

November 7

Yesterday, watching Jeopardy with Mom and (my sister) Niamh:

“She shouldn’t wear that belt,” Mom said of a contestant with a large buckle above her waistline.

I turned to Niamh and said, “She’s always commenting on people’s appearances. Especially the women!”

Niamh nodded with wide eyes.

“Oh, don’t I know it!” she said.

November 15

Note from Fergus: On this day, I packed the car, locked the Birmingham house, and drove with Mom up to the mountains to join Michael full-time.

December 3

Just got Mom up and ready for church. I set her by the window and gave her the Asheville newspaper as I prepared her breakfast.

“I hate that name, The Citizen Times!” she said.

“Try to focus on things you like rather than things you don’t like,” I said. “It will bring you more joy.”

“Oh, joy!” she said, lighting up. “That in our embers is something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers what was so fugitive!”

Wordsworth.

December 17

I told Mom’s caregiver that Michael did a rural track in medical school.

“I’m sorry, what is that?”

“A rural track. He lived in a trailer in Eastern Kentucky.”

“Hey, there’s some pretty nice trailers.”

I knew I’d put my foot in it. I just stood there trying to think of something to say, to ameliorate the way my words had probably sounded. But I was at a loss for anything sincere. I turned this over in my mind several times on the way to the river. Finally, I concluded I should have just apologized, saying: “I’m sorry I didn’t realize how pretentious that would sound.”

Later that evening, watching Jeopardy, there were categories called “Double Y” and “Trailer Parks.” Oh my lord, what is this synchronicity all about?

Yesterday when we got home from a hike, I gave Mom her scotch.

“This is good, Fergus,” she said. “I’m going to go out with a bang.”

Next week, I’ll be back with Jeopardy-related entries from our final four months together.

Stay tuned.

I am currently writing a family memoir about my Irish parents, a former Catholic priest and nun, and their remarkable story of resistance, romance, and redemption during an age of American upheaval. Each week, I share a new reflection inspired by their faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“I don’t want to live anymore. I just want to go be with him!” Mom said to me every day after my dad died in April 2022.

That August, three days before we were set to travel to Ireland to spread his ashes, she fell and broke her hip. And although her surgery went well, she refused to eat or cooperate with physical therapists, so her doctor recommended hospice, and my husband Michael and I moved her in with us.

Last week’s essay about journaling inspired me to look back through the diary I kept during the twenty months she lived with us. Among the many threads running through those pages was our daily Jeopardy date. She and Dad had watched it together every afternoon, even after the Alzheimer’s robbed him of his ability to answer the clues.

When Mom moved in with us, we carried on the tradition. Watching Jeopardy every day became as certain as the sun rising in the east, and if anything ever threatened that certainty, the consequences were nothing short of apocalyptic.

There were ninety-three Jeopardy-related entries in my journal, and so, just for fun, I pulled some of my favorites to give you an idea of what a character my mother was.

I’ll share more next week, and more the week after, too.

August 17, 2022

Mom didn’t want dinner, but she did have a Dove chocolate. Michael cooked our Home Chef meal—bánh mì—and then the three of us watched Jeopardy. Mom said a contestant was “a nerd,” and then, when Ken Jennings announced the Final Jeopardy category was Tech History, she said, “Oh damn.”

October 31

Safe trip home. Michael and I got in the door and found Mom sitting on the couch wearing a witch’s hat with a sort of black veil that Niamh had brought by for her earlier. Mom and Rose, the caregiver, were watching Jeopardy, and Niamh came by again later in costume.

November 2

I heated up some chicken and rice for Mom and served her in the den. When I came in later, I wondered why Bella was licking the New York Times, which was lying on the couch, and then realized Mom was spooning her food onto the paper for her.

We watched Jeopardy. Mom always used to criticize Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings because she misses Alex Trebek so much. She hasn’t complained about the hosts too much lately, but she does let us know her thoughts on the contestants.

November 4

I fed Bella dinner, then heated some gumbo for Mom and beef stew for me. We watched Jeopardy, and Mom criticized the lady on the far right over her dour expression.

“She looks like she’s going to the guillotine!”

This was the Tournament of Champions, and I remembered this contestant from the regular season. She’s a brunette of Irish extraction. Very smart but either very shy or not much personality. I was endeared to her tonight, for some reason.

But not Mom!

Mom liked the handsome Ken doll meteorologist from Minnesota. I remember when they first introduced him in the regular season, I thought they said he was a urologist. When I found out otherwise, I was somewhat let down. “Oh, he’s a weatherman?”

November 16

Mom ate a little pork chop, some rice, and veggies with Michael and me as we watched Jeopardy. She threw some of her dinner onto the floor in an overhand motion for Bella.

November 17

Mom and I watched Jeopardy and then a nature show called Wild Babies.

“Were you a wild baby?” she asked me.

“You should know,” I said.

“You were a wild baby,” she said. “You were three hours in the birth canal!”

“I bet you were a wild baby too, Mom.”

“Oh no,” she said. “I was born in Ireland where everything is peaceful.”

I guffawed.

“You mean the land of ‘Great hatred, little room?’” I said, quoting a Yeats poem she had taught me.

She laughed and told me she was happy I remembered the Yeats.

November 29

We watched Jeopardy, and the fellow Mom doesn’t like (one of the many!) won again. He’s won about $600k in 15 days and is ahead of where Ken Jennings was at this stage in his streak. Afterward, we watched The Great British Baking Show.

December 5

After Jeopardy, we watched the rest of Saturday Night Live. A sketch about Props the Pig came on, a funny bit on Weekend Update where Sarah Sherman plays a loony child talking about a cartoon featuring a pig with two dads. She says one is a doctor, and the other one stays home making spaghetti.

“That sounds like us, Michael!” I said.

Then Sarah’s character became very upset, saying, “And then they anally enter each other!”

Mom was sitting between us on the couch, and I cringed.

It only got worse as Sarah kept repeating, “Anally entering each other! Anally entering each other!”

I looked at the closed captioning that Mom was reading, hoping the text would move quickly, but it just lingered: “They anally entered each other!”

Then Mom spoke up: “That show is definitely forbidden by the Catholic Church!”

December 23

Mom always comments on the way everyone looks. Usually critically. I think it’s an Irish thing. God love her, people said plenty of horrible things to her when she was a girl, so I have some sympathy for her, but it still drives me nuts. Especially when we’re watching Jeopardy.

“If this man wins, he should use the money for a haircut.”

“Jesus, that woman’s huge!”

“Look at him, he’s so smug! I hope they beat him.”

“This fellow won’t stop moving!” she said of an older man.

“Mom!” I said. “I think he may have Parkinson’s. And two days ago you said you loved him!”

She doesn’t like multi-day champions, especially if they’re men. She usually pulls for the woman unless the man is a challenger and looks kind and doesn’t have any weird tics.

“The poor woman, God love her,” she said about today’s third-place contestant.

Another thing she does, especially when watching news shows, is comment on the color of men’s ties.

“He’s got a red tie! Uh oh!” she’ll say, making a horrified face. “Oh good, that one’s wearing blue!”

She got onto me this morning for wearing red pajama pants.

“I don’t like these red Republican pants,” she said.

“Mom, it’s Christmas!”

After Jeopardy, we watched The Wonder, a kind of gloomy tale set in 1860s Ireland shortly after the Famine. It’s about a girl named Anna O’Donnell who’s eaten nothing for months and is believed to be a miracle. The film is very good. It captures a lot of the dark Irish psychology—all the weird superstitions I’ve seen come out through my godmother (also named Anna O’Donnell!) and Mom especially, but from others too. Dad, I think, had broken free of a lot of that stuff, maybe?

“The Irish are very superstitious,” I said.

“That’s why the Catholic Church took off,” she said without a second’s hesitation.

There’s a scene early on where a journalist from London passes a nurse on the road.

“Those two will fall in love,” Mom said.

Only a short while later, the two meet in the boarding house, and he goes into her room.

“I knew that would happen!” Mom said, nodding her head in satisfaction.

Near the end, a panel including the parish priest, the local doctor, and other community leaders convenes to hear a final report from a nun as to whether a miracle was actually occurring. Each member looked severe and grim.

“Bloody men,” Mom said under her breath.

After I got her to bed and we said our prayers and said goodnight, I turned on the television for her.

“CNN,” she said.

It was a special on Taylor Swift, which I knew would not interest her.

“You might prefer MSNBC now,” I said. “It’s a news show.”

“Okay.”

Jamie Raskin was on, and she said, “Oh, I like him!”

I kissed her goodnight and went into the bathroom and was trying to set a slow drip in the faucet when I heard Mom speak.

“Jamie Raskin is wearing a red tie!” she said.

“Oh Jesus,” I said to myself.

“For Christmas,” she added.

January 2, 2023

Got home from North Carolina, and Niamh was here with Mom and Debra, the caregiver. Michael and I unpacked, and then I sat down with the ladies and watched Jeopardy. It was fun, but Mom kept shushing us whenever anyone spoke.

She ate nothing for dinner, possibly because she had an apple and several chocolates with Jeopardy. We rewatched the episode while Michael and I ate leftover New Year's stew—Michael made it, and it was delicious.

Then we watched The Banshees of Inisherin. Mom kept talking about how gloomy it was, and I kept telling her it was a comedy. I was a bit annoyed because she can’t keep up with the plots of shows and films very well anymore and makes comments about characters—usually critical comments—that don’t match what’s really going on. As I type this, I see how ridiculous it is of me to be bothered because she cannot help it.

We had a nice tuck-in. Mom told again how grateful she is. We get on each other's nerves sometimes, but I love her and want her to be happy. Her sadness breaks my heart.

January 4

Got home from kayaking, and Mom was in good spirits. She’s been really lovely lately. I fixed her a scotch and ran down to CVS to get her meds and grab some onions from the Piggly Wiggly. It only took 20 mins, and when I returned, Michael was home. I started the dinner—just a ground beef, rice, and veggie concoction I threw together— took a shower, and we ate, watching Jeopardy. Then we watched news coverage of the continuing House GOP fiasco.

Putting Mom to bed, she was in good humor. So sweet and loving. Amazing how our moods can shift—that goes for all of us. I'm happy I can recognize moods more readily and regularly. Spiritual progress.

February 17

When I got home, Mom was sitting in her wheelchair watching Jeopardy. Mavis the caregiver had curled her hair, and it looked good. She looked a bit subdued but not miserable. I kissed her and chatted for a minute and then went upstairs to get some work done. I went back down at 4:00 to say goodbye to Mavis, who’d just poured Mom a stout glass of scotch. I told Mom I was going back up to work and reminded her the priest would be bringing communion at 4:30. Her eyes got huge, and she looked at the scotch.

“I’d better do something with this!” she said.

“Do you want me to put it in the fridge?” I asked.

“No, you can take it just before she arrives.”

March 14

After dinner and Jeopardy, we watched episode five of Poker Face.

Mom didn’t like it.

“This is so uplifting!” she kept saying with over-the-top sarcasm. “Great program before bed! Is this supposed to be a tragedy?”

“It’s far less depressing and violent than what you watch on CNN all day!” I snapped. “And before bed!”

“Well, CNN is reality!” she snapped back.

When the program ended, a song with these lyrics played the outro: “Catch a boat to England, baby…”

Mom shook her head.

“No, no,” she said. “No, no.”

April 17

Happy heavenly birthday, Dad!!!

Every time Johnny Gilbert says: “And now, here is the host of Jeopardy….”, Mom shouts, “Alex Trebek!” with her adorable smile. She really is like a child again. In a good way.

She used to talk a lot of shit about the contestants she didn’t like. Lately, we don’t get that as much, but yesterday she took a few shots at one young woman.

“She looks like she just came out of the shower,” said Mom.

When the young lady won the game, Mom said, “Good! She can get herself a hairdryer now.”

***

At this point, it’s been eight months since the doctor told us Mom likely had less than six months to live. That seemed nearly certain at the time, but when Mom came home, she began eating and perked up. The love and care and routine allowed for it. There were noticeable changes. Her body got smaller and smaller. Before long, I could easily carry her from her chair to her toilet and to her bed with little strain. Some days she was lucid and others she was way off.

But one thing remained certain, and that was Jeopardy.

We’ve still twelve months to go.

There’ll be more next week. And again the week after.

Stay tuned.

I am currently writing a family memoir about my Irish parents, a former Catholic priest and nun, and their remarkable story of resistance, romance, and redemption during an age of American upheaval. Each week, I share a new reflection inspired by their faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for helping this community grow.

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Author’s Note: As I continue writing my parents’ love story, I’ve been spending a great deal of time with my father’s diaries. Revisiting them reminded me of this essay, first published in the Medium publication Ellemeno in 2024, about why I’ve made a habit of keeping a journal myself.

After leaving my career in business to become a writer, libraries became my office, which is how I had the good fortune to cross paths with a hopeful ex-con, a flatulent lady hippie, and a man performing The Pee Pee Song in its proper venue.

These characters and others came back into my life while I was working on a story in my local library. I was sitting in a hard wooden chair at a table that was low to the ground, almost like a kid’s table. I like this spot because it’s in the middle of the main room, where I have a good view of all the action.

Around lunchtime, a young woman wearing a backpack walked in and sat against a far wall. One of the regulars, a gregarious fellow with silver hair, popped up and walked over to greet the newcomer, cheerily informing her there were more comfortable seats available than the one she’d chosen. She replied that she needed the privacy afforded by that wall because she was a hospice social worker and wanted to be sure no one could see any confidential patient information.

“Oh, I know your company!” the man said with great enthusiasm. He told her he had a family member who’d been a patient and that he knew the music therapist quite well.

It was at this point that I realized I’d met this social worker before. She’d come to my home to see my mother a few days before she died. I also knew the music therapist. She’s a gifted musician who learned several traditional Irish songs to sing each week for my mother, who was a proud Corkwoman.

“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought¹,” my mother would often say, quoting Shelley, when the musician had finished some dirge about English oppression or a lover who’d left for America. Mom taught poetry and was always reciting verses from the seemingly infinite trove stored in her mind.

As the social worker and the silver-haired man continued their conversation, I opened my journal to record the scene. In journalism school, I had a narrative writing professor who suggested writers carry a notebook at all times for scribbling down interesting observations.

“Anytime I’m not sure what to write about,” he said, “I’ll open my notebook, and something delicious will jump out.”

This sounded like great advice to me. I’d recently finished David Sedaris’ Theft By Finding, a collection of diary entries that showed me how ordinary observations can become stories.

Opening my digital journal, I noted the scene that had just played out. I scrolled back a few years to review other observations I’d recorded while writing at libraries in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, before I moved to the mountains.

The first one I came across was from April 2019:

Yesterday, I worked at the downtown library and chose a table on the ground floor where I found a green bud in the chair on which I was going to rest my backpack. I picked up the chair and knocked the bud onto the carpet. Later, a man with a vacuum came by, but I noticed when I was leaving that he didn’t happen to hoover up the weed. I hope someone finds it and puts it to good use.

Back in the same spot today, there was a lady behind me talking on her phone, telling a man on the other end she’d just gotten out of jail. She sounded delightful and upbeat, saying that on her first night out, she found an apartment at an extended-stay motel for $50/week and that she really liked her counselor and her husband, who “didn’t fool with drugs—not suboxone or nothing.” She told the man she needed help getting her things out of some apartment and asked if he could assist. Her volume was up so loud I could hear his tone. He didn’t sound too keen early on, but I think he must have agreed in the end.

The next entries were from a few months later. I was working at another library that sits across the road from an exclusive country club in a posh suburb.

Today, I worked at Emmett O’Neal Library, sitting at the table nearest the window facing the fire station and flower shop. Deep into my work, I heard an older man approach the table behind me and speak to the man sitting there.

“Excuse me, do you have the arts section there,” he said.

“I don’t know, alright!” the seated man barked. “You have enough sections already. Jesus!”

The older man just puttered off, not seeming too bothered.

The angry fellow was about 50, wearing a golf shirt and a ball cap. The skin on his neck was reddened, which made me think he might have just come off the course. Sitting in an armchair near us was another older fellow who turned his head to see what was happening. I’d figured out before that he’s the father of a woman I went to high school with who now serves in Congress. He often sits in the same chair reading the paper and sometimes chats with the older man who just got yelled at.

A couple of minutes passed, and the angry man got up in a huff and walked off. Then, the older man returned. Seemingly unbothered, he sifted through the abandoned newspaper for a few minutes, and then he left.

Another entry from the same library:

The congresswoman’s dad was sitting in his usual plush chair reading something on his phone when the older man, who I think is a retired lawyer, sat down at the table beside him and struck up a conversation. The father tried to explain his daughter’s support for the missile strike that killed Suleiman, telling the older fellow she voted against “Nancy’s resolution.”

The old guy was shuffling through a newspaper, not seeming to be paying too much attention. Then he said —

“She what? She flip-flopped?”

“No! She did not flip flop!” the father snapped back.

“Well, the stock market is doing good,” the other man said.

Dad asked him if he owned any Intel stock.

“No, I don’t have many individual stocks, mostly funds.”

Dad said something I couldn’t hear, and the two started arguing.

“It acts like a bond.”

“No, it doesn’t!”

“Yeah, it acts like a bond!

“No, it…”

“Yeah, like I said, just like a bond!”

“You know what, I’m sick of this fucking…!” the old man said and stomped off.

The father seemed totally unflustered. He just looked around at the rest of us, as if to say, “Can you believe this guy?”

As I was leaving, I stopped into the bathroom. I was standing at the urinal when someone in the stall began singing words to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride” —

“It’s time to pee,

Pee pee pee pee,

When I pee, it burns,

When I pee, it hurts,

The pee pee song.

pee pee pee pee.

Diarrhea, poo poo,

Poo poo poo poo…

It took me forever to finish my business because I had drank a tall bottle of green tea. I tried to hurry because I really didn’t want to be standing there when this guy came out. When I finished and was washing my hands, he spoke to me from inside the stall —

“Hey, dude…”

Then the bathroom door opened and the older man came in and went to the urinal, which made the other guy shut up, at least until I exited. I didn’t wait around to watch the door to see who it was when he came out.

According to my journal, I spent the next several afternoons back in the Birmingham city limits working at Avondale Library, which sits on the edge of a lovely park with walking trails and has a large pond with ducks.

I grew up just a few blocks away. During breaks from writing, I’d walk around the baseball fields where I played as a kid, allowing memories to return to my mind. I thought our league must have been the most integrated organization in the whole city back then, as each team seemed to be about half Black and half white. None of that seemed at all strange to me at the time, even though the rest of the city surely wasn’t that way.

Working there one afternoon, I noted the following:

The feminist lady who wears the tie-dyed dresses asked to sit with me today because, she said, she needed a power outlet.

“Of course,” I said.

She smiled and sat down. Then she put in her earbuds and started singing “Just Another Country Song.”

A few minutes later, she stood up and farted.

“Oh, are you leaving?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said and then disappeared, leaving all her things on the table.

I thought she must have gone to the bathroom. I was happy to look after her belongings until she returned, but she took quite a while, and I needed to get home. I packed my computer and papers, and then she returned, lugging a giant black printer, which she dropped on the table with a thud.

“Perfect timing!” she said.

A few days later, in February, I was back there again:

There was an AARP tax help day wrapping up when I arrived. I could hear two ladies in the conference room beside my table arguing about Donald Trump. I couldn’t hear all they were saying, just bits and pieces.

“You gotta be able to pay your way to come here!” one said.

The other said something I couldn’t make out.

“So what?” said the first lady. “What’s wrong with that? The whole country going that way.”

“I hope not!” the other said.

“I’m not saying you are, but the whole country is.”

“I hope not!”

Then the arguing stopped, and one came out wearing a lanyard ID around her neck. I caught her eye and said,

“I hope not, too!”

She looked at me, a bit surprised, and smiled.

“You heard us arguing?” she said. She seemed a little embarrassed, but then she laughed.

“Just a little bit,” I said.

“Whew!” she said, framing her hands around her afro. “She got my dandruff up!”

A few weeks later, the pandemic caused all the libraries to close. I had to work solely from home and began feeling stir-crazy, so I got my real estate license and went into business with a friend just to get myself out of the house.

When my husband and I moved from Alabama to the Blue Ridge Mountains, we brought with us my mother, who was by then on hospice. The 18 months she lived with us, along with the many adventures I experienced during my stint in real estate, introduced many more crazy characters and scenes to the pages of my journal.

And now, the libraries are open again. So here I am, sitting at this little table with a view of all the action. Packing my laptop into my bag, I glance over to see the social worker still in her spot by the wall. On my way out, I stop by and say hello, and we have a delightful conversation. She tells me she wishes she had the ability to memorize poems like my mother and I do.

“Oh, that was just my mom,” I say. “I don’t have her gift for memorization.”

I tell her that after Mom died, I added a recurring daily task to the reminders app I use to organize my life. Here are a few lines of advice I borrowed from the writer Garth Greenwell:

MEMORIZE POEMS. Do it. You are going to INTERNALIZE this beauty. When you read Melville closely, you understand that he had completely downloaded Shakespeare; the same with Baldwin and the KJV.²

There is another recurring daily reminder I keep. This one says simply:

Write in your journal!!!

And so now, here we are...

References:

¹ Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Ode to a Skylark. https://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Shelley/ode_to_a_skylark.htm

² From GARTH GREENWELL STYLE WORKSHOP; October 2020; NOTES + SIX DAILY PRACTICES FOR WRITERS

I am currently writing a family memoir focused on my Irish parents, a former Catholic priest and nun, and their remarkable story of resistance, romance, and redemption during an age of American upheaval. Each week, I share a new reflection inspired by their faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“Jaysus, there’s no fuckin’ money in that!” my Uncle John thundered some 22 years ago when I told him I was planning to go into the priesthood.

The brash retail executive was racing us across Dublin in his new Saab as I gripped the handle above my window with both hands. John always drove Saabs, and he always drove them fast.

I wrote about Uncle John last week in an essay called Our Irish Uncle Tony Soprano. He was a character. He was the quintessential Dubliner. You should check it out.

John’s words stayed with me, but I cannot claim they influenced my decision not to go to seminary. That was a matter of timing.

After I landed back in the States, the bishop of Alabama approved me to move forward with the seminary process, but there was a strange diocesan rule that limited each parish to one seminarian per year. My parish was something of a priest factory, and there was already a line. I was told it would be two years before I could begin.

In the meantime, I needed to find a job. By complete chance, I found myself in a career preview presented by American Express Financial Advisors. The VP in a bespoke suit gave a fantastic sales pitch for the profession, complete with a slide displaying his latest pay stub. I was intrigued. Entranced, really.

“Jesus, bless us and save us!” my Irish mother cried, crossing herself with dramatic flair when I told her I took the job. “Don’t you know the love of money is the root of all evil!”

They took the soup!

The idea for this story came to mind when I came across a recording from a Sunday dinner with my parents in 2013, a few months before we’d travel to Ireland and visit my uncle and his wife, Mary.

“You get on great with John,” Mom said. “Business men!”

“We’ll talk high finance,” I said with a posh flair. “D’ya remember what he said to me when I told him I was going to seminary?”

I repeated the story, and my dad—a Catholic-turned-Episcopal priest—roared laughing.

By this date, Mom had softened on my career choice, and she chuckled too.

“My brother turned you away from the hound of heaven who was pursuing you,” she said, referencing a poem by the Catholic mystic Francis Thompson about his trying to evade God.

“You settled for the mess of pottage, Fergus,” said Dad, still laughing.

“What is pottage?” I asked.

He was referring to the story in Genesis about a hungry Esau giving up his birthright for a bowl of stew.

I suppose if I’d gone to seminary, I might have caught the reference.

“It was like in Ireland when we had the famine,” said Mom. “They’d give up their religion for a bowl of soup. They would join the Protestant Church for a bowl of soup, and then they were called “soupers,” and then they were despised by the Irish.”

“Well, they were Irish, Elma,” said Dad.

“Well, they were Irish, but they were despised by the rest of the Irish,” Mom barked.

If you’ve read my previous essays here you may recall my mother was a fierce Irish nationalist whose opinions of Protestants would make Louis XIV look like Oliver Cromwell. Even after the Catholic Church excommunicated my father, the Catholic priest, on account of his marrying my mother, the former Sister of Mercy, she raged when he suggested they join the Episcopal Church.

“You mean the Church that persecuted us for centuries? Like Hell!”

My mother was not going to be called no souper!

“I can tell you this much,” said Dad, now raising his voice a little. “If I had a young family and ten kids, and they were starving and there was no soup, and the Protestants were giving out soup, I’d go down to the church and become a Protestant for the soup! You can always go back. That’s what people did.”

Mom shook her head.

“Fergus,” she said. “I want to hear about your op-ed!”

The business of journalism

Four years later, I was sitting in the World Room inside Columbia University’s Pulitzer Hall listening to the first lecture of my Business of Journalism class. The professor was a veteran editor at The Wall Street Journal. His co-teacher was an Afrikaner on loan from Harvard Business School. During a break, I introduced myself to the Afrikaner and mentioned I’d sold my financial planning practice to study journalism.

“Was that a smart financial planning decision?” he asked, giving me a look as if I’d just blown my nose into my hand.

He had made a practical point akin to what Uncle John had so many years before, but without the humor and charm.

He didn’t understand. I’d spent more than a decade climbing ladders. Only after I reached the top did I realize they leaned against the wrong wall. One weekend at a Palm Beach yacht club, I caught a glimpse of what might be down the road for me, and I thought it looked simply gross.

These experiences set me on the path to graduate school to study journalism, a far less lucrative craft.

Whirling dervishes

The following semester, I took a course called Covering Religion taught by a former New York Times religion columnist who assigned me to the Manhattan Sufi beat. His co-teacher Haroon put me in touch with a lovely group of Sufis who invited me to a Friday night dhikr ceremony for young Muslims.

It was already dark when I descended the stairs from a Soho sidewalk into a basement beneath a nightclub that was just getting going. The room was very clean but unfinished. The drywall was unpainted. Naked load-bearing beams stretched from the concrete floors to spaces between exposed air-ducts in the ceiling.

On the floor sat the imam, a bearded man in his mid-thirties. He wore white robes, a white head covering, and a kind smile.

“Hello, my friend,” he said, ushering me to sit on the rugs where he and five or six thirty-somethings, men and women, sat smiling. “You are welcome here.”

He asked if I were a Christian and I told him yes.

“Do you know that in Islam, we consider Jesus and his mother Mary very special prophets?”

He then gave me a gift—a rosary of ninety-nine beads—one for each of God’s ninety-nine names— fashioned from the pits of olives eaten by nuns at the breaking of a Ramadan fast.

He explained to me how the night would go, that we would be singing the ninety-nine names of God and singing verses from the Qur’an.

Soon he began chanting softly and calling on others to sing. A young woman with an angelic voice began, then a man, then others. Soon we were standing and twirling and spinning. I lost track of time and space. I felt as though I might have levitated or left the room even. I felt a sort of bliss or transcendence.

When I returned to the room—or to my senses, rather—I wasn’t sure if ten minutes had passed or three hours.

As I began writing a story about my experience, I learned that Sufi orders once occupied a central place in the religious life of the Ottoman Empire. Today, their influence has diminished substantially in many parts of the Muslim world, while more conservative movements have grown. When I asked Haroon why this shift had occurred, he told me essentially this:

“When all those lovely Sufis were busy twirling and spinning and becoming one with God, the British and French were mechanizing their armies. That changed everything.”

That notion broke my heart. In a sense, they too were forced to take the soup.

Awakenings

I’ve come to accept the possibility that I may never be able to pay all my bills by writing alone. Very often, way too often, there’s no money in that. Especially now.

For me, it was never a financial planning decision. It was a spiritual decision. And like most things that are worthwhile, writing is not always fun. Often it is painful.

But on the best days, writing transports me out of time and space into some other realm. I get to figure out how I really feel about things. I get to hang out with my parents every day at my desk. I get to be vulnerable and overcome my fears. I get to laugh. I get to play.

There may be no money in it, but Jaysus, it’s priceless.

Each week, I share a new reflection inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy. If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last October, my sister Niamh and I traveled to Dublin for the funeral of our uncle, John Hannon, the eldest of Mom’s three younger brothers. We used to call him Uncle Tony because he was so like Tony Soprano—in all the best ways. He was a big bear of a bloke you never wanted to cross, but also a generous, hilarious family man who’d go to the mat for his people. Like Tony’s daughter Meadow, John’s daughter Ingrid was the apple of his eye.

Our uncle John was the quintessential Dubliner. He was brash and gregarious and sidesplittingly funny, deftly wielding that famous lightning-quick Dublin wit. A few years back, when he picked up my slender sister from the airport, the first thing he said to her was, “Jaysus, there’s more meat on Good Friday!”

Then, turning to Niamh’s young sons, Aidan and Dylan, whom Niamh had brought to Ireland for the first time, John said, “Sorry lads, you’re going to get an education you don’t need!”

Among the many quips the boys would hear from their cantankerous great uncle were:

You couldn’t drive a nail! (shouted at another motorist)

That man bottles his pee and sells it for perfume. (said of a certain politician seen on the television)

He wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. (ibid)

She’s got a face that would turn milk sour. (target unknown)

You’re as awkward as a new whore! (said when someone dropped a butter knife during tea)

Many of our Alabama friends remember John from trips my parents led to Ireland each summer for Indian Springs School, where Mom taught literature and poetry for twenty-something years. John and his indisputably better half, our indefatigable Aunt Mary, welcomed the students and faculty warmly into their home year after year.

They did the same for our whole family. As John’s brother Noel said at the cemetery, it was John and Mary who kept our side of the family connected after all the other Hannon siblings left Ireland.

And if hospitality was the Hannons’ specialty, Mary was the reason why. It was she who kept that blessed Irish tradition alive, overruling any grumblings from her oft-curmudgeonly husband.

As my cousin Keith said in his brilliant eulogy, his father married up. Indeed, it was lovely to hear Mary’s kindness and charity honored also by the priest in his homily. I was delighted to spend time with Aunt Mary’s very large Clancy clan, who came in from all over to surround her with love.

Ya can’t go out lookin’ like a Mary Banger

Mary and John’s hospitality stretched back many years before Niamh and I came along. In 1969, they took our mother in for three months when she left the Sisters of Mercy while trying to figure out whether to marry our father or run away from him so as not to ruin his vocation as a Catholic priest.

Having already burned her habit, Mom’s only outfit was an exceedingly modest skirt that reached her ankles. One evening, as she was leaving the house to visit a friend, her wide-eyed brother stopped her at the door.

“Jaysus! Ya can’t go out looking like a Mary effin’ Banger!” he roared, using the Irish slang for a frumpy old woman (and certainly not censoring the middle word, as I did here).

Aunt Mary hemmed Mom’s skirt into a mini, introducing Mom to a style she’d wear nearly daily well into her eighties.

All is forgiven

When Mom was on hospice, John often called to check on her, and the first thing she’d say to him was, “Ahhh, it’s so wonderful to hear the Dublin accent!”

“Well, it’s the only one I’ve got!” he’d say.

She’d laugh, and then they’d ramble on about other things, and she’d tell him two or three more times how wonderful it was to hear that accent before they hung up.

Not long before Mom died, John called over and thanked his bookworm of a sister for doing his homework when they were kids so he could spend more time on the football pitch. That extra practice helped him land a spot as goalkeeper for Dublin’s Gaelic football team, an organization he’d support as proudly and loudly as any fan there ever was. At the funeral, the team’s honor guard turned out for John, sporting the Dublin blue sashes to bid their stalwart devotee farewell.

That day on the phone with Mom, John’s tone suddenly changed. He became tearful and apologized for all the fights they had growing up. Mom told him she was sorry too, that she loved him, and besides, she’d long since forgotten any sibling quibbles from eighty years before.

I believe that was true. Before she left this world, Mom seemed to let go of all her resentments. And besides, whenever she spoke of her brother, it was his generosity she mentioned most.

“John Hannon would give you the shirt off his back,” she told us a million times.

I can imagine John arriving in heaven, being greeted by his sister and their youngest brother, Emmet. If Saint Peter gave John any quiz at the gates, I can picture Mom sneaking him the answers, then giving him the usual greeting.

“Ah sure it’s wonderful to hear the Dublin accent, John!”

“It’s the only one I’ve got!” he’d say. “Now, will you tell me where I can find the bloke who’s supposed to be in charge of things down on Earth so I can tear into him! Jaysus, does he not know he’s makin’ a right bollocks of it all!”

Keep ‘em honest up there, Uncle John. We’ll miss you. And we’ll be forever grateful to you and Mary for keeping us together all these years. Up the Dubs!

Next week, Uncle John returns for one more story. I’ll share his unforgettable response when I told him I was considering becoming a priest. It sparked a conversation with my parents about vocation that has stayed with me ever since.

I’m currently writing a family memoir focused on my Irish parents, a former Catholic priest and nun, and their remarkable story of resistance, romance, and redemption during an age of American upheaval. Each week, I share a new reflection inspired by their faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for helping this community grow.

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“Be ready to take the flack, Fergus,” my father warned after reading the op-ed I’d just penned as the new chair of Equality Alabama. “Because you’re going to get it.”

He knew. It had happened to him many times over the years when he wrote letters to the editor defending gays or criticizing the government for ignoring the poor and meddling in foreign affairs.

Our friends, Gene and Janet Griffin, understood this even more intimately. This white Birmingham family was outspoken in its opposition to racism during the 1960s, when most white people remained silent. Janet worked with local organizations to improve race relations in town, while Gene wrote letters to the paper decrying racism and the institutions upholding it. For their efforts, the Griffins received anonymous phone calls threatening their children's lives. Then, in 1970, after someone poisoned the water supply of a farm owned by Black Muslims in a neighboring county, killing dozens of livestock, a rock crashed through the window of the Griffin family home. Attached to it was a crude note:

Whats [sic] Good For Cows, Is Even Better For Negro Lovers, KKK

Now that is some hate mail!

I didn’t worry too much about receiving hate mail, nasty comments online, or rocks through my window. My biggest fear about assuming the chairmanship of my home state’s LGBTQ+ advocacy organization when our prior chair—an Episcopal priest—was called to serve a parish in Nevada, was that I would lose financial planning clients. My clients weren’t only my clients—I had a business partner, and they were his clients too.

When I told my business partner I would pass on the chairmanship if he had concerns it would hurt our business, he quickly disabused me of any such worries.

“If we have any clients who don’t like the fact that you’re gay, then I don’t want them as clients,” he said plainly.

And that was that.

Soon afterward, during the first week of Pride in 2013, The Birmingham News’ digital site, al.com, published my op-ed. What follows here is the article exactly as it appeared in June 2013, just weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing:

Total equality for LGBT Americans is inevitable (opinion from Fergus Tuohy)

In an era marked by manufactured fear, distrust and discord, I feel compelled to express gratitude for certain beautiful actions that are often overlooked. In the midst of chaos, one can sometimes catch glimpses of the most moving acts of human compassion: one person selflessly standing up for the dignity of another. In Boston, we saw men and women run toward those bomb blasts to tend to the injured, marathoners detour towards the hospitals to offer blood. These scenes buttress my faith in an inherent human goodness.

During this 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement, stories and photographs of similar scenes re-emerge. We hear again of Jonathan Daniels, the Episcopal seminarian, who threw himself in front of a young black girl, taking a bullet to save her life. We see the photos of young white men and women sitting in at the lunch counters in solidarity with their black brothers and sisters -- all of them taunted, spit upon, and ridiculed by jeering segregationists. Yet, they remained steadfast.

For those heroes, I am grateful.

This week in Birmingham, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community celebrates PRIDE week. And there is a lot to celebrate. Today, 70 percent of Americans born after 1980 and 58 percent of young evangelicals support governmental recognition of same-sex relationships.

Total equality for LGBT Americans is inevitable, it is near and it seems more and more heroes emerge each day. Many are straight men and women in the military, in professional sports, in schools and in parishes who are fed up with the mistreatment of their gay bothers and sisters by the government and other elements of society. These heroes are the clergy and parishes who will march in Saturday’s Central Alabama PRIDE parade. They are the pastors who will offer their spaces to cast out scout troops. They are the parents and friends of lesbian and gay human beings who have had enough of the irrational mistreatment of others and are no longer willing to be silent.

For these heroes, I am extremely grateful.

But even though this evolution toward total equality is inevitable and, importantly, irreversible, there is a lot of work left to do. For as long as institutionalized bullying still exists, the abuse of gay Americans will perpetuate the prevalence of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression and suicide in the LGBT community.

A 2009 study found that eight in 10 LGBT students were verbally harassed at school; four in 10 were physically harassed; and six in 10 said they did not feel safe in their own school. Shockingly, one in five of these students were victims of physical assault at school. Studies have found that gay youths are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts — on average. The rate skyrockets for teens who have been rejected or bullied by their friends or family or schools.

So as we express our gratitude for our heroes, we now call upon more to emerge and demand an end to intolerance towards our fellow human beings. Together, we must protect the safety of our children in their schools by strengthening anti-bullying laws. We must eliminate the fear of being fired for one’s identity by passing workplace protections. We must protect families by ensuring a court will not tear them apart because the parents are gay. We must end the unfair taxation of same-sex couples by recognizing their unions.

Taking on this good work will produce the same result as the actions of the heroes in Boston, of those at the lunch counters, and of Jonathan Daniels: This good work will save lives.

The very next day, a somewhat cantankerous client called me at my office.

“I read an op-ed online yesterday by a Fergus Tuohy,” the man grumbled. “I imagine there are not too many Fergus Tuohys in Birmingham. Would this happen to be you?”

“Ah…yes," I said, taking a deep breath. “That would have been my op-ed that you read.”

“Well,” the man said. “I wanted to call and say how proud I am of you. I think what you said needed to be said, and I think it took a lot of courage to say those things here in Alabama. We need more people like you, and I feel very much reassured that I am doing business in the right place.”

The next evening, at a fundraiser for my high school, several people expressed their delight in reading that piece. A founding partner at a prominent local law firm approached me and said, “I read your article. It was wonderful. Thank you so much!”

I told these stories to my parents at Sunday dinner.

“I thought that you would get lots of hate mail, Fergus,” said Mom. “That was my worry.”

I said I got some ugly comments online, but they didn’t bother me too much. I said it was Joey Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at al.com who worked with me to get the piece published.

“He was very supportive,” I said of Joey, who is straight. “He writes a lot of really pro-gay equality stuff and takes a lot of flack for it. Oh my God, I’ve read some of the stuff people say about him in the comments. They just despise him. It’s because he speaks his mind.”

“Well, Alabama’s a bad place for that kind of stuff,” my mother said.

“Elma, it’s not limited to Alabama,” said my father. “There’re other places where it’s worse even.”

“Well, there’s probably a higher concentration of it here,” I said.

“The Bible Belt,” said Mom in agreement.

“I’m just grateful to y’all that you didn’t raise us to be hateful people,” I said.

“Hey!” said Dad, with a hint of pride in his voice. “We made you who you are, didn’t we? You got your genes from us, man!”

All that talk of heroes in my op-ed, and here I was sitting at the dinner table with two of my own. They were very brave people—the pair of them—for leaving the church with which they had grown disillusioned, for following their hearts and marrying, for enduring years of exile from their homeland because of it all. And then Dad writing all those op-eds to the papers—standing up for the poor, the marginalized, for gays when these sorts of stances were a thousand times more unpopular.

Maybe speaking up when most people want to be silent is in my genes. I just can’t help myself. Anytime I wonder what I need to be doing in dire situations, I ask myself what Dad would do. I don’t come close to his level of selflessness and courage, but he is my north star.

“Well, Fergus,” said Mom. “We had that religious stuff in Ireland too. My father—when I wrote to him and said I was getting married, and he wrote and said, ‘I would love to hear that you are getting married. But that you would marry a priest of God!?’”

“Ah yeah,” I said. “You had your own kind of coming out, didn’t you?”

“We did!” she said. “And then when we wanted to go to Thurles when I was pregnant with Niamh, and Jim’s mom said, ‘Please don’t come to Thurles!’”

“But then,” my mother said. “But then…”

I will leave it at “but then” for now and save the rest for another time.

Thanks very much for reading.

And to all who celebrate, I hope you had a very happy Pride! I snuck this last Pride-related essay in right under the wire. In the spirit of its contents and of my op-ed from 13 years ago, I hope some of you will be inspired to speak up a bit more in defense of your friends and neighbors who might be feeling threatened lately. We need more heroes standing up to the bullies who feel so emboldened these days. As a child of the 1980s, the hero vs bully motif was prominent in so many of the movies I grew up watching. We can’t let those brutes win. We can’t let their meanness go unchecked. We can’t let our vulnerable neighbors and loved ones face that hatred alone.

Let’s speak up together—nothing could be more American!

On that note, I wish y’all a very Happy Fourth of July weekend!

Much love,

Fergus

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The series is brilliant and devastating. At its heart is a question that has haunted me since I wrote my university thesis on the Holocaust: How do neighbors who have lived peacefully beside one another for years suddenly become enemies?

The answer, at least in part, lies in the politics of resentment, fear, and manufactured grievance.

Watching Tip Toe reminded me of an essay I published in Human Parts in 2024. It recounts a routine medical procedure that left me wrestling with a similar question: What happens when fear and suspicion begin to reshape the way we see one another?

For many queer people, that question feels especially urgent these days.

I’m republishing the essay below because it speaks to the same uneasiness that runs through Tip Toe: the sense that progress is never guaranteed and that old cycles of persecution can return when we least expect them.

If you want to understand how some of your LGBTQ+ friends and neighbors may be feeling these days, I recommend the series. Starz has acquired the U.S. rights and plans to air it later this year.

Just be prepared.

It is brutal.

Before you begin: If you’re reading by email and enjoy this essay, I’d be grateful if you’d click through to Substack to tap the ❤️ and, if you’re willing, restack it. Those simple actions help The Beauty That Will Last reach new readers. Thank you for helping this community grow.

Cycles of Persecution

I was in a cheerful mood going in for my phlebotomy that afternoon, that is until the nurse started with her prying questions.

It was my first time in this clinic, and it was just the two of us in this windowless room at back of the hospital’s infusion center. I was sitting in a recliner awaiting my procedure while the nurse sat perched on a stool looking intently at her computer screen. Every so often, she would steal little glances at me.

The nurse was in her mid-fifties, with blondish-brown hair, and a bit country. Around her wrist was a tattoo of a bracelet with three chains dangling off, each with something attached. On one was a cross, on another an anchor. Whatever was on the third, I couldn’t make out.

In any case, this nurse made me nervous. Her eyes kept shifting from the screen to me, to the screen, and back to me again where they finally settled and narrowed.

Is Michael your … um … decision maker? she asked.

Ahem. Yes, I said. He’s my husband.

Oh, she said.

Did I notice her lip curl? Did I detect a sneer?

I’m only asking this cause I’m nosy, she said.

Okay, I said.

There was a pause which seemed very long before she spoke again.

Is it spelled M-I-C-H-E-A-L? she said. Cause that’s how it’s spelled in the system.

No. It’s A-E-L.

Oh, that’s what I thought, she said, and went back to reviewing something on her screen.

Another long minute passed, and she spoke again.

I just knew that didn’t seem right, she said.

Yeah, good catch, I said, showing my annoyance.

Yep, she said. I just knew that wasn’t right.

Many years ago, an older gay friend in Alabama told me he spent most of his life on edge, always scanning new people and situations for threats. He said he was constantly dealing with prying contractors and pest control workers saying things like, Just you livin’ here? No wife, or…

In case my friend or his partner ever went into hospital, they had to keep a special folder stuffed with legal papers, powers of attorney and the like to be sure they’d be allowed visit one another. Everyone knew about the man in Montgomery who’d been blocked by hospital staff from visiting his dying partner after a car wreck.

You are not his family, the nurses told him.

Also in the back of everyone’s minds was the brutal murder of a gay man in a town just south of Birmingham. It wasn’t all that long ago when two men lured Billy Jack Gaither into the woods, beat him with an ax handle, slashed his throat and then burned his body on a pile of old tires.

Billy Jack’s friends said he was well-loved, that he sang in his Baptist church choir and read his illustrated Bible each night before bed. Some said he might have moved to a bigger, perhaps safer city but stayed in Sylacauga to care for his elderly parents who were in poor health. None of that mattered to the killers, of course. When asked why he murdered Billy Jack, one answered plainly —

I had to ’cause he was a faggot.

Stories like these used to make me feel guilty about not coming out as gay until 2010, when I was 31. Congress had just voted to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and a host of states were on their way to legalizing same-sex marriage. It was the safest time in history to come out, and I had little fear of being beat up or murdered.

In fact, it was a phenomenal experience for me. Reactions from friends, family and colleagues were all positive, ranging from polite acceptance to outright celebrations. My bro-ey friends ribbed me about it, as I had hoped they would, and we had great laughs. I got involved right away and served as chair of Equality Alabama, the only statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization in Alabama at the time. And while friends worried for my safety, the worst abuse I ever encountered was a few unkind comments to the op-eds I wrote for the newspaper.

When someone suggested I see a gay-friendly physician, I asked a gay doctor who he’d recommend, and he put me in touch with a woman he trained.

I see all the gays in town that Dr. J doesn’t, she boasted the first time I stepped into her exam room. I liked this doctor and saw her regularly for a few years before a routine blood panel revealed something unusual. After running into several dead ends trying to figure it out, she called me to say she’d like to screen for a rare genetic disorder.

The test confirmed I had hemochromatosis, a condition in which blood cells retain too much iron. It’s colloquially known as “bronze diabetes” because most people who have it are unaware and display no symptoms until midlife when their skin begins to darken from the iron buildup. By that late stage, the tissue in the heart, liver, and kidneys is usually also saturated, and the damage may be irreversible and fatal.

But if caught early, as thank God it was with me, the condition is easily treated with periodic phlebotomies. Yes, with good old-fashioned bloodlettings.

My gay-friendly doc referred me to a hematology/oncology specialist who had me come into his infusion center to give a unit of blood once a week for several months to get my iron markers down to an acceptable level. Unlike the way-too-dim infusion center with the tattooed nurse, this place was on a high floor with an abundance of natural light flooding in through a wall made entirely of windows. The nurses there buzzed around like first class flight attendants passing out fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts to all the patients in their recliners.

My oncologist there was a gregarious older man who wore bowties and decorated his office with diplomas from prestigious institutions. He enjoyed having me in, regaling me with stories about other hemochromatosis patients like the young Black woman who came in with iron markers even higher than mine. Her case was indeed unusual because the condition is almost always found in people of northern European descent and because women usually don’t manifest any symptoms before menopause, as menstruation serves as a natural phlebotomy.

It’s unheard of! he said with a glee in his eyes.

I was amazed how much time this specialist gave me. Michael, who is also a doctor, said this was probably because most of the oncologist’s day would be spent with very sick blood cancer patients, so it must have been a relief for him to be with someone relatively healthy for a bit.

The oncologist told me that even though my condition isn’t contagious, Alabama law required them to throw my blood away.

It’s a very stupid law and a damn shame, he said, adding that he wished he could give it to his anemic patients, or even keep it for himself.

When I later told him I was moving to New York for graduate school, he advised me to go to the Red Cross where my blood would be put to good use. I didn’t tell him that would be impossible because I’m gay and federal law at the time still prevented gay men — even monogamous ones — from giving blood.

I didn’t want to spoil our relationship. I’d noticed the religious pamphlets scattered about and the mail from the Catholic media organization, EWTN. But none of that really bothered me because everything in the world seemed to be on the upswing.

By that time, the Human Rights Campaign had opened a field office in Birmingham and was sending activists and lobbyists to Montgomery where they were building relationships with conservative lawmakers and convincing them not to advance a slew of harmful anti-LGBT bills.

Then came the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015, making same-sex marriage the law of the land. It felt like the arc of the moral universe was bending heavily towards justice.

But very suddenly, all of that changed.

Just after the 2016 presidential election, a friend called me to report something he’d heard happened that morning in front of the hospital. He said a man was dropping his husband off for work, kissing him goodbye in the car, when another man came up to the window shouting —

Hey faggots, this is Trump’s America now!

***

Once the tattooed nurse got my decision-maker/husband’s named sorted out, she got down to the actual business of the day. She found a vein in my arm and put in a line, and then she left. I lay in the recliner watching the dark blood drain through the tube into the glass bottle on the floor. I’d come in feeling upbeat, as I used to somewhat enjoy these visits at the other hospital. But this time I found myself ruminating on how much everything had changed these last few years.

I thought about how when I proposed to Michael in 2017, a lawyer friend advised us to get married in a state that had gay marriage prior to the Supreme Court decision. Because, she said, the court will change with the new administration and may reverse Obergefell. So, we had our civil wedding in New York and our religious wedding at our church in Birmingham after my graduation. I thought of what Michael told me about the book he’d read on the history of the oppression of homosexuals.

The persecutions go in cycles, he said. They’ll probably come for us again during our lifetimes.

It seemed to me they’d already started. I thought of the proliferation of words like pedo and groomer by politicians and influencers, of how a straight acquaintance in a group chat I’m in casually used the word fag, something he wouldn’t have done a few years prior, and how none of my straight friends called him out. I thought of the ascendant George Wallace wannabe down in Florida beginning to make life hell for LGBTQ+ youth and their families.

And then the nurse returned, interrupting my gloomy reverie.

You doin’ okay? she said.

Yeah, I’m fine, I said, gritting my teeth.

As she bent down to check the bottle and the line, I caught her stealing more of those little glances at me. Jesus, what is this woman’s problem?

What will they do with my blood? I asked.

She said they’d just throw it away and I said that’s a shame. She agreed, adding that she’s iron deficient and could use it herself. I told her about how in New York, hemochromatosis patients are allowed to give at the blood bank.

My first oncologist told me the Alabama law is stupid, I said.

Alabama has many stupid laws, she said.

Then she told me her daughter is a mortician, though not a practicing one, and that in Alabama you have to pay to donate your body to science. She said her daughter told her when the time came, she’d just drive momma’s body across the border to Tennessee, even though that’s illegal. I supposed this was a joke, but she wasn’t smiling.

Are you from New York? she asked.

No, I was just living there during graduate school.

I’m surprised you wanted to move back Alabama.

Yeah, well this is home.

Do you have any kids, or plan to?

No, and not in near future. I do have nephews, though, which is great cause you can give ’em back.

This was my standard reply, one that usually elicits a polite laugh. But not from her. I wondered was she always so glum or was it only with people she judged and disdained.

I’m about to have my first grandbaby, she said.

That’s lovely, I said. Congratulations.

She frowned and cleared her throat.

I was raised by two dads, she said.

Oh…oh, wow, I said.

My eyes must have been enormous.

She told me her father married his partner when she was nine. I asked her where and she said in Tennessee, though of course it wasn’t legal then. She said her dad now pastors a church up there. Then she said something about, well he’s my biological father.

Do you get to see him often? I asked.

She swung around, turning her back to me and put her hands up to her eyes. I heard sniffling and throat clearing and then, after a moment, she turned back and told me with a choked voice that he would be down for the birth of her grandchild.

At this, my procedure had finished. The nurse removed the line from my arm and applied a bandage. She then gave me a Coke and some peanut butter crackers and told me to wait 15 minutes to make sure I felt alright before leaving. When the time was up, she returned to say I could leave.

Thank you, I said.

You’re welcome, she said as I walked out. Then she called after me —

Your husband is welcome to come here next time, she said, flashing a hint of a smile.

There would have been no reason to have Michael there. I never needed a driver following a phlebotomy. In fact, I usually went jogging afterwards, as running restores my energy and mood. But I suppose the welcome was the whole point.

Thank you, I said, returning the smile. See you next time.

Leaving the clinic that afternoon, crossing the skywalk towards the parking deck, I looked down at the traffic passing below my feet and felt dizzy. There was some sense of relief over how things turned out with the nurse, but also, I felt angry. I felt so fucking angry.

Does the arc of the moral universe even exist? Or are we instead trapped on some wheel of fortune spinning now into some new cycle of horrors? And what about the old Fergus, the ever-sanguine chair of Equality Alabama? Had he ever really existed? Or was he simply a scared child whistling past a graveyard?

Suddenly, I felt my exhaustion.

I told myself when I got home, I would go for a long run.

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My then 17-year-old uncle John was sitting at the back of the grey stone church in the working-class Dublin suburb of Crumlin. His father—my grandfather—required him to go to Mass once a week and report back on what the priest had said. When the black-robed cleric spat out that proclamation of damnation, John figured he got all he needed and nudged his two mates beside him.

“Well,” he said with a shrug. “Not much for us to do here then.”

With that, the three lads stood up, turned on their heels, and went straight out the door for the football pitch.

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This story came to my mind this week as I was processing events from the Central Alabama Pride parade I attended last Saturday. Like every year, contemporary embodiments of that hellfire and brimstone cleric stood along the entrance to the parade route shouting condemnations at joyous parade-goers on their way into the festivities.

I find the fanatics amusing because whenever I see them, my husband Michael and I are on our way to line up with our church family to walk together in the parade. For many decades, Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church has been ministering to the people on the margins—running support groups for people living with HIV/AIDS, hosting 12-step meetings, feeding the hungry through a soup kitchen and food pantry.

It’s a place where all are welcomed. At any given service, you’ll have lawyers and university professors sharing pews with people off the street. The faithful parishioners who show up for the Pride parade are queer and straight alike, some up into their eighties, many wearing colorful t-shirts sporting words like “Love”.

This year my sister Niamh and her boyfriend Josh were walking with us on our way to line up for the parade. Niamh was very excited. She’d purchased a ton of beads and flair for the occasion and had been handing them out to strangers all day—first at the drag brunch, which was headlined by RuPaul’s Drag Race royalty Raja, and later at the tea dance, an outdoor afternoon dance party DJ ’d by my friend Scott. Niamh had so many rainbow buttons she reminded me of that sweet mom from Queer as Folk, the redheaded waitress at the diner whose over-the-top pride in her gay son was always embarrassing the young man.

As we were about to pass the furious street preachers, Michael was saying under his breath, “Don’t engage. Don’t engage.” But Niamh couldn’t help herself. Choosing from her collection a string of beads featuring a rainbow heart medallion, she approached the irate woman who was practically convulsing as she spat condemnations into her microphone.

Niamh held the beads out to her and said, “God loves all his children.”

The enraged woman turned her back and continued her shouting as we all walked on and met our church family who embraced us with hugs, laughter, kisses—an overwhelming blanket of love.

As we waited for the parade to begin, we mingled with friends from other Episcopal churches and various denominations who’d be walking with us. In the buckle of the Bible Belt, churches figure prominently in the Central Alabama Pride parade. This participation is important because conservative churches most certainly do not have a monopoly on Jesus. Way too many good people have been run out of the faith by pastors ranting and raving about hell and damnation. We want to show these people we will welcome them when others won’t.

I was lucky to be raised by faithful people who saw through all the nonsense. When I came out to them as gay, my dad went straight to the Bible—not to condemn, but to point out God’s love for me. A lot of folks haven’t been so lucky. Over the years, I’ve met many in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous who struggled with the program because it references God, invariably because some pastor from their childhood had used the name of God to tell them they were bad and sinful and going to hell. Some found ways to make the program work. Others did not.

As the parade got moving and we made our way towards the main route, we passed the lady with the bullhorn and then another small gaggle of anti-gay protestors, one hoisting a sign that read “Repent.”

They all seemed so small, though. Especially considering what came next.

Walking on down 7^th Avenue South into the Lakeview entertainment district, the joyous energy swelled. The crowds on the sidewalks became larger, the cheers louder, the radiance on people’s faces ever brighter. There were people of all shapes, sizes, and colors. There were city folks, and people in from small towns and the country. There were parents and smiling children with little rainbows painted on their faces, all beaming and ebullient as they called out, “Happy Pride!”

Children with outstretched arms called for and caught beads from clergy and parishioners and all of us processing on by. Some had two mommies or two daddies. Others had straight parents who just wanted their children to experience the diversity of love, as was the case with one of Michael’s former colleagues we met along the way.

I saw old friends—gay and straight—from all chapters of my life, from third grade to high school, to former financial planning clients I hadn’t seen in years. I ran over to these beautiful people and received hugs and warm embraces. The outpouring of love was simply overwhelming.

When we finally reached the parade’s terminus, Michael and I joined back with Niamh and Josh, and we walked back along the route towards where we began. Joining the crowds, we watched the floats go by. We danced and marveled at their colors and creativity, at the joy and delight radiating from all these happy people who were happy just being themselves. They were proud, unashamed, loved, and loving.

Divine love

At the time that red-faced Redemptorist Father was informing the poor men of Crumlin they were all going to hell, my then 17-year-old father was across town studying at a Roman Catholic seminary. After surviving a near-fatal bout of tuberculosis at the age of six, he knew he would devote his life to God—not out of obligation, but out of gratitude.

My mother, meanwhile, was an 18-year-old novice at the Sisters of Mercy’s Carysfort Training College preparing to be a teacher. Straight out of the womb, practically, her mother brought her to Mass every day. My mother memorized her catechisms at the age of five, a full year ahead of all her classmates, took her first communion early, and decided at nine she wanted to go into the convent. In secondary school, she had boys chasing her all the time, but she had no interest and paid them no mind. At 17, she entered the convent, became a teacher and left for Alabama to staff a mission school.

My parents were about as devout as anyone can be, and in a sincere way too. Neither had any interest in romance, but as they say, the Lord moves in mysterious ways. After bonding over a shared love of poetry and a terrifying run-in with the Ku Klux Klan, while my father sang O Holy Night from the chancel steps, my mother had the horrifying epiphany she’d fallen in love with the priest. My father would soon have an epiphany of his own.

Of course this was the most taboo thing that could happen to an Irish Catholic priest and nun in those days, which is why they kept their feelings a secret from one another for four years.

It’s a terrible struggle, trying to reconcile a deep love—a divine love—with manmade rules that claim such a love is abhorrent. After struggling with their terrible dilemma for many years, my parents finally listened to their hearts.

They chose love. They broke from their restrictive culture. They defied the religious authorities and married, and, as a consequence, they were rejected by family and by their native land, and they lived in exile in America while the hellfire and brimstone theocracy maintained its cold rule over Ireland.

But that rule came to an end.

I remember visiting my parents one day in the summer of 2011 just after they’d returned from a visit to Ireland. They told me the church’s hold over the country was crumbling. They told me how the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny had delivered an extraordinary and powerful speech condemning the Church’s mishandling of numerous sex abuse scandals, how Ireland closed its embassy to the Holy See. The Church that once seemed untouchable was rapidly losing all credibility, and the people of Ireland were positively irate.

“Enda Kenny had great courage,” my mother told me. “Kenny said, ‘I’m a practicing Catholic, and I’m saying this.’” She was animated and gesticulating as she spoke. “Everybody, Fergus, everybody that we know is delighted!”

My father reminded me that the hellfire and brimstone brand of Catholicism was not the way of the early Irish Christians, the ones who preserved all the ancient classical texts while the barbarians hordes were burning down all the libraries on the continent.

“Fergus,” he said, sounding pedagogical. “In the Celtic spiritual world, you had celibate monks living side by side in monasteries with married priests with their wives and children. No problem. That was the monastic tradition in Ireland until the papal bull came in and changed it all.”

Mom looked reflective. Her face fell, and her voice took on a poignant tone.

“The Celtic spirituality was wonderful before Rome ever stymied it,” she said. “Rome had ‘thou shalt not… thou shalt not…thou shalt not…’ where Celtic spirituality was like, ‘I thank you God for most this amazing day.’”

A few years later, in 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular referendum with 62% voting “Yes.”

Radiance

As I was fleshing out this essay, remembering the overwhelming love emanating from the crowds last Saturday, this refrain from an old Episcopal hymn was playing in my mind:

God is love, and where true love is, God himself is there.

Then, this daily reflection from the Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, arrived in my email inbox. In it, Rohr quotes religious scholar Huston Smith saying:

One of the earliest observations by an outsider about Christians that we have is, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ …Outsiders found this baffling. These scattered Christians were not numerous. They were not wealthy or powerful, and they were in constant danger of being killed. Yet they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was uncontainable. Perhaps “radiant” would be a better word.

Radiance. That’s what I saw in the joyous faces along that parade route. That’s what I felt in every embrace. There were people of all kinds—most not wealthy or powerful, some in constant danger of being killed—and what I noticed most about them was their love. Their radiant love. Their uncontainable joy.

Looking now at photos from the parade, that hymn’s refrain still plays in my head:

God is love and where true love is, God himself is there.

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

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“How did you know?” we asked.

This cradle Episcopalian had noticed a slight variation in the liturgy that indicated the service was technically a blessing of a marriage rather than a marriage itself.

The truth was that Michael and I had already been married. Married to each other, yes. But married nonetheless, which is why our ceremony on that ninth day of June in 2018 was technically a blessing of a civil marriage.

Our reasons for the two ceremonies were practical and borne of the sorts of fears and precautions that even the most sympathetic allies might not consider.

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Beginnings

My first-ever conversation with Michael was a bit awkward. We were at our church’s Shrove Tuesday pancake supper at our friend Melanie’s house. After the eucharist, everyone was standing around talking, balancing plates piled high with breakfast fare, when all of a sudden everyone in the living room vanished and it was just Michael and me.

“Um hey, how are you?” I said. “I don’t think we’ve ever actually spoken…”

The cause of our fellow parishioners’ apparent rapture, I have always suspected, was the doings of a few of the parish’s mother hens. One of these feverish yentas had heard me asking around about the tall gangly young doctor with shoulder-length hair who sat on the opposite side of the church from me. To this day, not one of these hens has admitted to any such scheme outright, but I have gotten a few winks and coy smiles anytime I’ve inquired.

In any case, a week after the pancake supper, Michael and I had our first date. I was in the process of selling my house and moving into a new one, and three months later, when I did move in, Michael—who is a One on the Enneagram and therefore not prone to spontaneity—just moved on in too, and without even asking permission!

A couple years later, I insisted he explain his uncharacteristic (and rather cheeky) boldness.

“I just knew it was meant to be,” he said.

Not long after the 2016 election, I was in the process of selling my financial advisory practice and preparing to enter a journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York. Michael would be staying in Birmingham for his job at the hospital and to look after our dogs and our house, all of which he acquired by way of squatters’ rights, I am sure. Well maybe not his job, but the other two for sure.

By this point, I knew I was going to propose marriage, but had not yet decided when. I let my best friend Carole in on the plan and she told me she was going to summon a marching band and belly dancers for the occasion. As one of Birmingham’s most famous bakers and restaurateurs, and the creative genius behind such rag-tag street parties like Spring-a-Ling-a-Ding-Dong and a Bastille Day celebration featuring hyper-dramatic reenactments of the storming of the armory and the beheading of Marie Antoinette, I knew Carole meant business.

With my major career transition underway, I didn’t want Michael thinking I was fleeing to New York to start some new life without him, our dogs, and our house. Coincidentally, it was exactly forty-nine years earlier when my mother—then a Sister of Mercy— fled Alabama for Columbia University to escape my father—then a Roman Catholic priest—in order to save them both from ruin.

One morning, on a whim, I decided that day was the day I would propose. I asked Michael to go with me on a dinner/movie date—first to Carole’s Chez Lulu followed by a screening of Moonlight at the AMC. This abrupt scheduling of the proposal threw a serious wrench into Carole’s vision of the whole affair, as marching bands and belly dancers famously require ample notice for their bookings. Frantic, Carole called the managers on duty, imploring them to do what they could to make the night special for her dear friends.

The following week, I informed my attorney friend Susie Watterson. A veteran lawyer, Susie had been doing estate planning and taxes for Alabama’s gay and lesbian couples for decades. I met her soon after I came out of the closet and began taking on more and more gay couples in my financial advisory practice. I interviewed several lawyers around town before my friend from church, Martha Jane Patton, who ran Legal Aid, suggested I speak to Susie. She and I went to lunch and hit it off. Susie had numerous clients who needed my services and vice versa, so we began hosting joint client events.

The first of these was at The Club, an old 1950s-style dinner club perched atop Red Mountain overlooking downtown Birmingham. This was pre-Obergefell, but several states had already legalized same-sex marriage, and couples from Alabama were traveling to those places to tie the knot. Ever-practical, Susie titled her presentation something like, “Same-sex Marriage: Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should.”

When I told her Michael and I were engaged, she took a beat to congratulate me and then went straight into the legal counsel.

“That’s great news,” she said. “But you need to be sure to get civilly married in a state where it was legal before Obergefell. This new administration will be appointing new justices to the Supreme Court, and there’s a good chance they’ll eventually undo Obergefell.”

At the time, that sounded alarmist to some people. But Susie had spent decades helping same-sex couples navigate the legal system in a state that refused to recognize their relationships, a state that allowed hospital workers to deny visitation and patient information to a kind man named Paul Hard whose husband had just been in a serious accident on I-65, a state whose governor and attorney general later fought in court to allow the widowed Paul’s deceased husband’s family to ignore his will.

So we listened to Susie. That fall, Michael planned a trip to visit me in New York. Unlike places like, let’s say, Las Vegas, New York law requires a 24 hour “cooling off period” between obtaining a marriage license and actually getting married. So the plan was for Michael to fly up on a Friday. We’d go downtown to the courthouse to get our license, enjoy some good food, a couple shows, and the lovely fall weather over the weekend, then come back down on Monday for the city marriage officiant to make it official.

Michael’s best friend from college, Ross, an Episcopal priest in Alexandria, Virginia would take the train up with his four-year-old son, Stephen, Michael’s godson, and be our witness.

I had just one hurdle to overcome. On Friday afternoons, I had an ethics class with the journalist/historian/author Jelani Cobb, who is now dean of the journalism school. I didn’t want to miss his class entirely because I was a serious student who loved every minute of my grad school experience. So I wrote him an email asking if I could leave his class a little bit early so I could meet my fiancé and get down to the city clerk’s office to get our marriage license.

Jelani replied as follows:

Uh, yeah. I think that qualifies as a good enough reason to leave class early.

(I’m going to place this email on the refrigerator next to the one I got from a student asking if she could turn in her paper one day late because she’d just given birth.

Congrats!

Jelani

That Friday, I sat in Hamilton Hall as Jelani spoke to us about the media’s handling of the Central Park Five case. When my watch read 2pm, I raised my hand halfway to catch his attention. Jelani turned to me, gave me a wink and a knowing smile, and I was out the door and off for the 1 train.

What happened next was like something from a 1990s rom com. Michael had just come in from LaGuardia and we’d planned to meet at Columbus Circle Station, as there was little time to spare before the court would close. When the train door opened, I peeked out and spotted his 6-foot-five head way down the platform and yelled his name. When he saw me, he scrambled inside the nearest car before the doors closed.

We each pushed through the crowds from car to car until we met at last and embraced.

“We’re going to get our marriage license!” I explained to the grumbling passengers we’d just pushed past.

“Hooray!” they shouted.

Emerging from the station, we recognized at once the courthouse building from every cop television show and movie set in the city. But when we approached, we could not find an open door. We went twice around the building before someone finally told us it was closed for Veterans’ Day.

“But I thought Veterans’ Day was always on a Monday?”

“(Observed),” Michael pointed out on his phone.

Sitting on a park bench, we began scouring New York marriage law online and found a loophole. State law required a 24-hour waiting period between obtaining a marriage license and getting married, but a justice of the New York State Supreme Court could waive the waiting period by judicial order. Better still, the State Supreme Court was right across the street from the NYC City Clerk’s office.

Michael and I agreed to try our best to put this out of our minds so we could enjoy the weekend in the city and then come back at the crack of dawn on Monday to begin the suddenly uncertain process of getting married.

We were among the very first inside on Monday morning. My classmate Audrey, a talented photographer, met us with her camera, her face beaming. Soon afterwards, Ross arrived with Stephen who was excited to tell us all about the train and taxi they’d taken. They purchased for us boutonnieres of white rose from a jolly flower merchant, which Michael and I pinned to each other’s lapels. Then we took a number and began to wait.

After waiting for what seemed like days, we finally got our license and sprinted across the street to the state supreme court to petition for the judicial waiver of the waiting period. The process was fairly simple and there wasn’t much of a line. I felt particularly reassured when the clerk came out to take our petition and my trusty old gaydar began to ping. He took one look at Michael and me, smiled, and said something like, “You two go have a nice lunch and then come back. We should have it by then.”

While we ate, Ross wandered around outside, first on the phone with Amtrak and then with his wife Liz, explaining that he’d have to catch a later train home.

After lunch, we went back to the court, and the clerk handed us the signed judicial waiver with a smile similar to the one Jelani had given me the Friday prior.

“Congratulations,” he whispered.

With this precious document in hand, we raced back across the street to the courthouse and took another number to put us in the queue to have a city marriage officiant make it official.

For the next two hours, we kept one eye on the numbers being called and the other on the clock, which kept ticking closer and closer to the court’s closing time. Our poor priest/witness had to delay his train twice more before someone finally called us back into a peaceful little chapel room that felt as if it were in a totally different world from the hustle bustle of the courthouse offices.

“Michael and Fergus?” said a man wearing a highlighter green collared shirt, a Mr. Rogers sweater, and a warm smile.

“Yes!”

“I’m Angel Lopez,” he said. “I will be marrying you today.”

What struck me at once was that we were probably Angel Lopez’s two hundred and somethingth wedding of the day, and yet this warm, magnanimous soul treated us as if we were his one and only.

When the business of the day was done, we saw Ross and Stephen off in a taxi and then sprinted to the train station. I had just enough time to get back to my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen to change before my six o’clock Investigative Techniques class in Pulitzer Hall. I arrived a little early and took my seat. As classmates trickled in, each one came to me and hugged me and congratulated me. After a few minutes, my professor, Kim Kleman beckoned me to come see her.

“Fergus,” she said. “Why is everyone hugging you? Is today your birthday or something?”

Her eyes went wide when I told her.

“And you came to class! I’m going to use you as an example next time someone gives me a lame excuse for an absence.”

Truly, I loved that school so much. I was there because I wanted to be there and didn’t want to miss a moment if I could help it. More than this though, was the fact I knew our real wedding would be the following summer at our parish home surrounded by family and our very best friends.

Somehow, we managed to keep the first wedding a secret for the next seven months. Of course, we told our families and the priest, and only the most knowledgeable and discerning Episcopalian would have noticed anything off about the ceremony.

Lessons, hopes, and Pride

Six months before our first wedding, when I first arrived in New York for school, I spoke with a prominent journalist who had covered Trump on the campaign trail. When I told him of my plan to have the two weddings and why, he sort of recoiled, giving me a look of scorn.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, his face now scrunched. “Trump would never undo gay marriage. Some of his closest friends are gay.”

Yeah, like Roy Cohn, I thought.

Donald Trump’s friend and mentor was the lawyer Roy Cohn, a pugnacious, closeted homosexual who had been Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and one of the most prominent figures in the Red Scare as well as a key architect of the Lavender Scare, a coordinated purge of gays and lesbians from the halls of American government.

Cohn-esque tactics are evident in the full-on trans panic the Trump campaign orchestrated to win the 2024 election, when it claimed Democrats want “transgender for everyone.” Cohn’s ghostly fingerprints are all over the “Don’t say gay or trans” bills in red state legislatures. Targeting marginalized groups is the oldest political dirty trick in the books, and it worked.

The moment when that prominent journalist told me “Don’t be ridiculous” has stayed with me because I believe it crystallizes the naïveté of legacy media and its failure to comprehend and communicate to the American public the actual threats this transactional president poses to any number of matters heretofore accepted as settled.

Legacy media’s failures have contributed to the public’s complacency, and the fallout can be seen in the results of a Gallup poll released last week that show that support for same-sex marriage among Republicans has plummeted since 2022.

You might think I am despairing over these attacks on my community. I was, and very much so. But only for a short while. Now, I have hope. And one way I can help you understand the basis for my hope is by bringing us to the Museum of Modern Art.

I never tire of ambling around the halls of MoMA’s permanent exhibits. The Impressionists and Surrealists are my favorites—their art gives me something like goosebumps every time I immerse myself in those masterpieces. Both movements emerged from periods of tremendous political and social upheaval, uncertainty, and transformation. Reading the contextual descriptions posted alongside these mesmerizing paintings reminds me that periods of cruelty and instability often give rise to extraordinary outbursts of creativity, courage, and positive social transformation.

Last Tuesday, as Michael and I celebrated our eight year anniversary (of our second wedding), I posted this picture of us looking triumphant as we process out from our church to the singing of Ode to Joy.

The response was an outpouring of love. So many friends and family sent us beautiful comments and expressions of delight.

People really love seeing happy people. People love seeing people celebrating love. I truly believe that most people are fundamentally good and loving. And regarding our current societal turmoil, I believe the fault lies not so much in ourselves, as in our institutions, including the legacy media, which have let us all down. I believe that a whole lot of folks who voted for the current president do not support his cynical agenda of persecution. And I believe many voters have come—or will soon come—to realize that the America we have today is not the America they had in mind when they cast their ballots in November 2024.

This weekend, Michael and I will walk with our Saint Andrew’s parish family in the Central Alabama Pride parade. We will walk with joy and defiance. Joy because love abounds. Defiance because there is still work to be done.

No doubt many of those same mother hens from the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper will be clucking around us as we walk. I can’t wait to see them and thank them for the happy union they made possible all those years ago.

Maybe this time one of them will even admit to something. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just give me the usual wink and smile, and I’d be very happy with that too.

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This was about seventeen years ago. On a Sunday evening like most others, I arrived at my parents’ house for dinner. Smoke wafted from the charcoal grill on the lawn as I trotted up the footpath to the front porch. There, my beaming father greeted me with a hug and a slap on the back as Irish music played on the stereo behind him.

“Fergus, there’s a problem with my email again,” he said. “Will ye go back into me office and straighten it out?”

“Sure, Dad, of course.”

Passing through the kitchen, I found my mother standing over the chicken with a carving knife.

“It’ll be ready in five minutes, darling,” she said. “Don’t be late!”

I gave her a kiss on the cheek and continued on back to Dad’s office.

That’s when I saw them. Sitting there atop the black metal file cabinet was an assortment of rainbow-colored pamphlets marked with the logo of PFLAG—Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

My gut tightened.

Oh shit, I thought. He knows!

Before you continue: If you enjoy this essay, please click the ❤️ and consider restacking it. Those small acts help The Beauty That Will Last reach new readers. Every story I publish is part of a larger memoir about faith, conscience, family, and authentic living. Thank you for helping others discover it.

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A closet of my own making

This is what terrified me—the idea that if my parents knew I was gay, they would no longer love me the same. That our Sunday dinners would never be the same.

Even though my entire life my parents gave me every assurance they loved me unconditionally, even though my mother’s best friend was a gay man, even though my father, an Episcopal priest, wrote letters to the newspapers defending gay people against the attacks of other pastors, I shoved the fact of my own gayness so far down inside, it took three decades for me to come out even to myself.

Why? Because the political culture told me I could not be gay.

Growing up in the 1980s, I heard horrible things about homosexuals from my classmates, from the media, from politicians, and from those pastors whose hateful sermons poisoned the water in which we all swim.

In those days, everyone told gay jokes, and no one ever thought about calling someone out for it. To do so would open you up to suspicion of being a faggot, and that was the worst possible thing you could be in those days.

For me, it wasn’t a conscious decision to lock away this fact about myself. There was no planning. I suppose it must have been some survival instinct within my limbic brain that clamped it all down until a series of life events finally brought me to the place of peace required to allow me to accept and love who I am.

When I did get there, I told my family, friends, colleagues, and clients, and everyone supported me. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I won’t repeat that story here.

What I will tell you is that the word spread quickly.

It spread first at my church, Saint Andrew’s Episcopal, where my father had served as associate priest in the 1980s and early 90s. Friends from Saint Andrew’s, delighted by their old friend Fergus’ surprising news, invited me to bingo night at Birmingham AIDS Outreach, an agency founded in 1985 to care for the sick and dying. Like many such organizations around the country, BAO was originally staffed primarily by lesbians taking care of their gay brothers too sick to care for themselves. Those women took charge and fought for those men. They raised money for them. They cared for them. They loved them unconditionally.

Over the years, BAO became one of the primary hubs of Birmingham’s queer social scene. The first Monday of every month was (and still is) bingo night, a big joyful event featuring all sorts of hilarity, cash prizes, drag performances—all part of a beautiful phenomenon I learned was called “queer joy.”

That first June, people at BAO kept wishing me, “Happy Pride!” No one had ever said that to me before. I felt so welcomed and included. It reminded me of when I stopped drinking—how the younger me could not imagine life without alcohol, but recovery opened up a whole new world, a beautiful world I never imagined existed. In both cases, I left behind an unhealthy state of being and became a part of a community of millions of people. Happy people. Free people. Courageous people. People who looked out for one another.

I threw myself into this community. I volunteered. I joined the board of BAO. In my work as a financial advisor, I helped same-sex couples with their financial and estate planning needs before same-sex marriage was legal, when hospital workers could deny visitation to partners. I attended fundraisers, awareness meetings, and Pride events.

Thanks to the persistence and irresistible charm of Alabama’s first openly gay legislator, the gregarious Patricia Todd, I eventually became chair of Equality Alabama, a once vibrant but practically defunct organization Patricia was working to revive.

At that time, the Human Rights Campaign had a poor reputation in Alabama. Locals complained the organization raised money in the state but spent those dollars on projects elsewhere. Our team at EA recognized this and helped persuade HRC to invest serious resources in Alabama. Together, and with tremendous support from other likeminded organizations, individuals, and lobbyists, our community activists defeated lots of discriminatory legislation and expanded LGBTQ+ advocacy across the state.

Legacy

One Sunday morning in 2024, about six weeks before my mom died, I went into her room to check on her and found her snug in her cozy bed smiling up at me.

“Good mornin’, darlin’,” she said, her Cork accent unchanged after 60 years living in Alabama. “What’s that on your shirt?”

I looked down at the dark grey Abercrombie tee with rainbow letters I’d picked up in a swag bag at an HRC dinner years earlier. I’d been to many of those events over the years. On occasion, I got to meet civil rights pioneers like John Lewis, who was battered by police in Selma while marching for voting rights. Lewis became a congressman and a staunch ally of the LGBTQ rights movement.

“It says ‘EQUALITY,’” I said to my mom.

“Ah, you’re a divil,” she said with a laugh. “Ya won’t just lie down. You’ve got to have somethin’ political on.”

“I get that from my father,” I said.

Her blue eyes lit up.

“You’re so like him,” she said.

A few years before this conversation, I learned more about what my father and St. Andrew’s were doing for people living with AIDS and HIV back in the 1980s when I interviewed a few of Birmingham’s activists from those days.

Among these was one of BAO’s early board chairs, Bob Burns. Bob laughed as he told me he was elected chair simply because he showed up to the board meeting in a suit. Now BAO is a thriving organization with a sizable staff providing free services to over 800 HIV positive individuals. BAO has also fostered the creation of numerous additional resources for Birmingham’s LGBTQ community, including a wellness center, community center, and a charter school.

Bob told me in the early days BAO surveyed 200 community members about violence, discrimination, and harassment. He said one third of the respondents reported they had “everything happen to them.”

“I was shot at but not hit,” one said. “Does that count?”

“I remember St. Andrew’s was such a bright spot for us when there were so few,” Bob said.

He told me he had conversations with my dad and Rev. Francis Walter, another priest at St. Andrew’s, about strategy. He said St. Andrew’s helped put together Agape House, which became the seed of AIDS Alabama, a remarkable organization that provides affordable housing for people living with HIV and AIDS.

Bob recommended I speak with Frank Romanowicz, who was one of the point people with the Episcopal Church in those days.

“St. Andrew’s was a home for the gay community,” Frank told me. “It was an oasis for gay folks thanks to Jim Tuohy and Francis Walter. They offered hospitality.”

Frank said St. Andrew’s had two support groups for AIDS patients and their families. He said the parish was an essential ingredient for AIDS Alabama getting a $1 million grant from HUD, that the church and the foundation board signed off on it.

Synchronicity

These discussions brought me back to a synchronistic event that happened during my Equality Alabama days. A friend serving on the board of PFLAG invited me to a meeting to discuss how our organizations could work together effectively. PFLAG was founded in 1973 by New York schoolteacher Jeanne Manford after her gay son, Morty, was assaulted because of his activism. Police and civilian violence against the queer community was commonplace in those days.

At this meeting, I met a woman from Anniston, Alabama, where my family had moved when Dad left St. Andrew’s to serve as rector of a church in that town in the early 1990s.

“Are you related to Jim Tuohy?” the woman asked me.

“Yes, he’s my dad.”

“That makes sense,” she said. She then told me my father had served as the clergy advisor to their local PFLAG chapter, which had been founded by a woman named Sue, who had a gay son whom she loved and wanted to support. Sue was familiar with Dad’s way of thinking and may have seen this letter he’d written to the editor of The Anniston Star:

Sue figured this Rev. Dr. James F. Tuohy might be inclined to say yes to her request that he serve as clergy advisor for the new chapter, and she was right.

That’s when it hit me.

Those pamphlets I’d found in Dad’s office years earlier had nothing to do with me at all.

History lessons

I used to think I knew a lot about queer history, but there’s so much I still don’t know. Heck, I didn’t even know how much my own father’s history intersected with it.

Thankfully, a nonprofit called The Invisible Histories Project has been collecting and preserving the South’s queer history. Its digital resources include this short film directed by Bob Huff documenting the first Birmingham Pride parade in June 1989.

Those were hard days. Organizers said they didn’t know if anyone would even show up, but 250 did.

Connecting this event to the movement’s activist origins, one speaker takes the mic and says, “Twenty years ago this month, a bunch of drag queens got pissed off, and they said we’re not gonna take this anymore. Twenty years later, in Birmingham, Alabama, I’m here to tell you we’re still not going to take it anymore!”

It is crucial we understand our history. During the Obama years, when total equality seemed inevitable and irreversible, when corporations were tripping over themselves to gay up their marketing campaigns as much as possible, to see how many rainbows and smiling same-sex couples they could fit on their websites and advertisements, I used to lament how a lot of younger gays didn’t know how bad it used to be, or even seem to care. It seemed to me the younger generation didn’t appreciate all their elders had done to make life so much easier for us.

Some folks were good about reminding one another about people like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the trans women of color who, among many others, fought hard in the early days of serious activism. But all that seemed like ancient history to many who didn’t live through the 1980s or before. At some point, Pride, at large, turned into more of a party than the passionate protest it was at its beginning.

If we’ve learned anything from these last few years, it is that we cannot rely on fickle corporations to stand up for us. Many, like Target—once a supposed ally—dropped us as soon as the political winds shifted.

We certainly cannot rely on our government either. The same pastors whose hateful sermons poisoned the water in the 1980s once again have the ear of the president, and the results have been catastrophic.

A Gallup Poll released this week found that public support for same-sex marriage has declined significantly. While support among Democrats remains firm and has dipped only modestly among independents, Republican support has plummeted from a peak of 55 percent in 2021 to just 37 percent today. The poll reveals support for changing one’s gender has experienced similar declines.

The drop in Republican support is most certainly a result of the relentless efforts by the Christian nationalist movement seeking to undo our hard-won civil rights gains. The people behind these attacks on our community want to send us back to the 1980s—or worse. They want to send us back to the days when it was perfectly fine to beat the hell out of us for being queer or to throw us in jail, when it was fine to let us die from a plague and then blame us for the whole thing.

In my view, it is not a bad thing those corporations abandoned us in our new moment of vulnerability. The Fergus of 2014 would never have said this, but I believe it now—we do not need those corporations. Now that we know we cannot rely on them, we can get back to our roots, which are in protest.

Because we can rely on each other. Just like the courageous trans folks and drag queens in New York who got this whole thing going, just like the lesbians who cared for their dying brothers, just like the young men of Act Up who told Ronald Reagan you cannot and will not ignore us, just like the PFLAG moms who built a massive organization to support their beloved children, we have power in our love, in our solidarity, in our community. We have power in our WHOLE community.

We are resilient. We will survive and we will thrive. And if we’re smart, we will never again let anyone forget our history.

I never want to experience the terror I felt the night I found those pamphlets, the terror of thinking my parents would stop loving me. I never want anyone to experience that.

Eight years ago next Tuesday, Michael and I got married at St. Andrew’s Church. Dad stood by the altar and blessed us, and after the reception, after we ran down the path to the street as friends showered us with lavender, we hopped in the back of a beautiful red Packard convertible sporting a Just Married sign.

Our chauffeur turned to us and said, “Anywhere special you guys want me to take you?”

“Take us to the Pride parade,” we said.

The parade happened to be on the very same night as our wedding, and when we arrived, the crowds cheered for us.

Central Alabama Pride pulls off the most joyous miracle year after year with that parade and its many other Pride events. Michael and I are looking forward to walking with our St. Andrew’s family in the parade next week. Each time we do, we are overwhelmed by the loving energy of the whole thing, how on every new block we’re greeted by more and more friends, queer and straight alike, all cheering from the sidewalks and balconies, all of them emanating the most astonishing joy.

Happy Pride, y’all. Enjoy the festivities. Then let’s get back to work.

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Final notes: I’ve made every effort to verify the facts in this essay. If you spot an error or have additional information relevant to these events, please feel free to DM me. The preservation of LGBTQ history is a collective endeavor, and I would be grateful to hear from anyone who can help deepen, refine, or expand this account.

This essay is not intended to be an exhaustive history. Many people contributed to the events, organizations, and movements described here, and it would be impossible to name them all in this particular essay. While I’ve highlighted some key individuals whose stories intersect directly with my own, many others played vital roles and deserve recognition. This account is shaped by my own experiences and by the stories that form part of my family memoir. I hope future efforts will continue to document and preserve the contributions of others as well.

Dear Friends,

Happy Pride!

I first published this essay on Medium in June 2023, and it went on to become one of the most-read essays I’ve ever written.

In honor of Pride Month, I’ll be sharing a series of essays about my experience growing up gay in Alabama and the parents who helped shape that journey. Some will be new. Others, like this one, were written years ago but still feel relevant today.

I hope you’ll come along for the journey…

Before you continue: If you enjoy this essay, please click the ❤️ and consider restacking it. Those small acts help The Beauty That Will Last reach new readers. Every story I publish is part of a larger memoir about faith, conscience, family, and authentic living. Thank you for helping others discover it.

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An Inheritance of Pride

I decided not to hang our Pride flag this year. The level of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, legislation and violence going around this country right now put a fear in me I’ve never in my life experienced. What if some psychopath shoots up our house? My husband and I just moved my mother here on hospice. What if she gets hurt?

I was 31 years old when I came out as gay. It was 2010, and the momentum towards equality was clearly building. Congress had just voted to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and a host of states were on their way to legalizing same-sex marriage. It was the safest time in history to come out, and I had little fear of being beat up or murdered. My main worry was my relationships with my family and my colleagues might suffer. But even that proved needless.

I came out to my parents over Sunday dinner. My father, an Episcopal priest with a Tipperary brogue, immediately invoked the Bible.

“Well, it’s no secret that David and Jonathan were in a same-sex relationship. That’s King David!” he said, pounding the table with his knife and fork. He went on to list several admirable gays from history, literature, and Irish mythology, eventually ending his sermon by saying he loved me and was proud of me. “This is a cause for celebration!” he declared, raising his glass of wine.

My mother was loving and supportive too, though less exuberantly, while my sister seemed genuinely excited. “When can we go out dancing?” she asked.

I shouldn’t have expected anything less from my family. My parents, both from Ireland, met in Gadsden, Alabama, in 1963 when my father was appointed assistant pastor at St. James Catholic Church. My mother, then called Sister Marion Margherita, taught second grade at the parish school. Soon after my father arrived, he happened upon a Ku Klux Klan rally while driving through town. When he stopped at an intersection, a man in full regalia approached him with a donation bucket.

“I’m sorry, sir. But I am not in sympathy with your cause,” my father said, before rolling up his window and driving off.

“You could have gotten yourself killed!” his pastor Jim Wathen shouted when my father later told him. “You might still get us both killed.”

The Klan had a long history of terrorizing Catholics in Gadsden, having run many out of town in the early 1900s. Threats did come in. My mother told me the nuns returned to the convent one night to find a cross burning in the yard. My father and Jim Wathen kept loaded shotguns in the rectory.

After keeping their feelings secret for several years, my parents finally told one another how each felt. They decided to marry and then faced their own sort of coming out. In Ireland in the 1960s and ‘70s, nothing was more taboo than a priest and nun marrying. Their families took it hard. But their parents eventually welcomed them home.

My father could have remained a Catholic, but he refused to give up his priesthood. “I’m not the one with the problem,” he said to the hierarchy. “You should allow priests to marry.” Of course, that wasn’t going to happen, so they excommunicated him.

My parents tried to start a life back in Ireland, but no one would hire my father there. His own country rejected him, so he and Mom and my infant sister returned to Alabama, where Dad’s former parishioners welcomed them back and helped them get on their feet.

When my sister and I were kids, our parents sat us down one evening for a serious conversation. “If you are ever in trouble, do not be afraid to come to us,” they said. “We love you, no matter what. And if you happen to be gay, do not be afraid to come to us. We love you, no matter what.”

In retrospect, I see the context from which this came. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, and my father, by then an Episcopal priest, was providing pastoral care at his urban church to dying gay men, many of whom had been disowned by their families. He was writing letters to the papers challenging local pastors who claimed the epidemic was God’s punishment on homosexuals.

But even with my parents’ sincere promise of acceptance, I wasn’t ready to come out until I was 31. Our culture gives us a great deal to fear for just being ourselves.

Thankfully, my coming out went very well at work. I had a thriving financial planning practice and was anxious about how my business partner might react. But he was incredibly encouraging, quite notably when I expressed the practical concern that some clients might take issue. “Any client that has a problem with you being gay, I don’t want in our practice,” he said.

When I told my best friend from college, a Rush Limbaugh Republican, he bear-hugged me and later declared his support for same-sex marriage. “Damnit, Fergus!” he lamented. “You’ve ruined my perfect conservative credentials!”

Over the next few years, I was heavily involved with advocacy, serving as chairman of Equality Alabama, then the state’s only statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Friends worried about my safety, but the only abuse I suffered were a few unkind comments below my al.com op-eds.

In 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage the law of the land, a straight acquaintance wrote to me on Facebook: “It’s over. You guys won. You ought to feel really good about that.”

Oh, the halcyon days of being gay and out! There were so many rainbows framing the profile pics of straight friends. Back then, there was so little to fear.

But that was then.

This month, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans, citing the onslaught of right-wing legislative efforts and the violent attacks on businesses, individuals, and drag shows around the nation.

“In the wake of the passage of Florida’s discriminatory “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” bill, extremist politicians and their allies engineered an unprecedented and dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation campaign that saw discriminatory and inflammatory ‘grooming’ content surge by over 400% across social media platforms,” read an HRC press release.

There is no credible evidence that pedophilia is more prevalent among LGBTQ+ persons. But these cynical politicians and influencers are not actually interested in protecting children. They’re employing an old political tactic used throughout human history, where an authoritarian movement selects a vulnerable scapegoat to distract the masses from its own power grab, stoking fear and rage and setting citizens one against another. The disgusting groomer angle is simply the latest version of the Jewish blood libel, the abhorrent lie that Jews used the blood of Christian children in religious rituals. It was a calumny that led to the murder of countless European Jews by violent mobs seeking to… “protect the children.”

Here in Alabama, citizens with an understanding of this state’s history, or anyone who’s read Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Carry Me Home might recognize these tactics as variations on those orchestrated by Alabama’s industrial powers in the last century. Fearing unionization, wealthy industrialists (known locally as “Big Mules”) stoked fear and distrust between black and white workers, pitting them against one another with false rumors of black men targeting white women, all part of a calculated effort to prevent the two races from organizing to demand better wages and conditions. Lynchings, bombings, beatings and the murder of four little black girls in a Sunday school classroom were the inevitable result of this diabolical business plan.

Bring to mind the contorted, hate-filled faces of 1960s racists screaming and spitting on civil rights activists, the images we know from museums and history books. Well, in America today, we can see new versions of these on the nightly news. In the year 2023, as we suffer one mass shooting every single day in this country, we’re seeing red-faced, spit-spewing bigots decimating cases of Bud Light with assault rifles and harassing Target employees over the store’s Pride merchandise. In America today, modern-day brownshirts are violently attacking gay bars and drag shows, while a recent protest over a California school district voting to recognize Pride month turned violent.

This is why I decided not to hang the Pride flag.

One evening last June, my husband Michael and I were strolling down to 32nd Street to meet members of our church lining up to walk in the Central Alabama Pride Parade. “I don’t mean to be a downer,” he said. “But if something bad happens and we get separated, let’s meet back right here.”

I nodded, acknowledging the pragmatism of the plan while shrugging off its necessity. Things were certainly worse than they’d been, but I still wasn’t fearful for my safety. The only torment we experienced that evening was the predictable droning of a street preacher’s bullhorn warning we’d better repent or go to hell, this as we passed him led by a crucifer hoisting a tall brass cross and a Chevy Silverado displaying a sign that read, “St Andrew’s Episcopal Church Birmingham Choose Love.”

But this year, as we approached the month of June and our church announced details about the 2023 Pride parade, I thought it might be too dangerous to walk. I thought it might be too dangerous to put up that flag. I decided I wouldn’t.

On the last night in May, I helped Mom get ready for bed. As I wheeled her into her bedroom, we passed a picture of my father as a young priest, baby-faced and smiling joyfully. Tears welled in Mom’s eyes. It’d been 14 months since he died in the memory care apartment they shared.

I helped her brush her teeth and get into bed.

“You’re a darling Fergus,” she said. “How will I ever repay you?”

“Just pray for me.”

“Oh, I do,” she said. “I pray for you every day, you and Michael. I’m so happy Dad blessed your marriage. He was so open to everything. He was imitating God.”

When I woke up the next morning, I texted Michael, who was out of town, and asked him where we kept the Pride flag. By 8 a.m., I had it hanging from the front porch just across the steps from the U.S. flag.

Later, I had lunch with a psychologist friend and told him about the flag. He told me he was glad I overcame my fear and put it up. He said all day he listens to people worrying about things that never actually happen.

“Anyway,” he said. “This is a good reason to get shot.”

This brought to my mind a line from the end of James Joyce’s short story, The Dead.

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

Back home, I found Mom sitting in her wheelchair reading the newspaper by the front window.

“I love that flag,” she said. “Is it for Pride Month?”

“Yes,” I said. “You know, I almost didn’t put it up. I was worried someone might attack us.”

“No, no,” she whispered. “I’m so happy Dad blessed your marriage.”

“So am I.”

“Ah,” she said with a soft smile. “He was a holy man. He was always so far ahead of his time.”

Happy Pride, y’all. And Happy Father’s Day.

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That’s when you forget everything except for your resentments.

In our family, we always knew if anyone was going to wind up with Alzheimer’s, it would be Dad. The disease is prevalent on the Tuohy side.

Though I was too young to remember, my sister Niamh recalls us visiting Grandma Tuohy in Tipperary, and the sweet old woman not knowing who anybody was, including our father and her youngest son, Joe, who was her primary caregiver.

Later, the disease came for Dad’s older brother, Liam. Years ago, Dad went up to see him in Virginia when Liam was in the thick of it. My father, Jim, told us he’d be sitting there talking with him for a long while, and then Liam would turn to his wife Lois and say, “Have you seen my brother Jim lately?”

We figured the cursed disease might well come for Dad too, but it’s not easy to imagine such a thing happening to someone as gregarious, whip smart, and full of life as our father.

It was when he got lost on his way to his dermatologist’s office that we knew for certain. As a fair-haired Irish priest whose favorite spiritual practice was playing golf, Dad was one of Dr. Monheit’s regulars. We used to joke that Dad’s insurance paid for Monheit’s lake house and probably a beach house too.

One time, Dad brought my aged godmother, Anna O’Donnell, to that clinic for an appointment with my old high school friend Todd, who was doing his Mohs surgery fellowship there. When Todd came into the waiting room to greet Anna, he took one look at my dad, squinted his eyes, and said: “Hey Father Tuohy, it’s great to see you, but I’m afraid I’m going to need you to come back too so I can take that new growth off your head.”

Like I said, Dad knew his way to that dermatology clinic. So when he told us he’d gotten so turned around he missed his appointment, we knew his time had come.

Thankfully, he gave up his car without a fuss. After the disease really began taking its toll, I took him to that clinic for an appointment. On the way, every few minutes, he’d say: “Fergus, where are we going?”

“We’re going to your dermatologist’s office, Dad.”

“Ok,” he’d say. “Thank you.”

Then, just a few minutes later: “Fergus, where are we going?”

Before you continue: If you enjoy this essay, please click the ❤️ and consider restacking it. Those small acts help The Beauty That Will Last reach new readers. Every story I publish is part of a larger memoir about faith, conscience, family, and authentic living. Thank you for helping others discover it.

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Like father like son

I never worried Dad would wind up with that fabled “Irish strain” of Alzheimer’s. He wasn’t one to carry around resentments for too long.

Sure, he had very strong opinions about politics and justice, but he was first and foremost a joyful soul. Playing his accordion, sharing meals with family and friends, meeting new people on the golf course, visiting the sick and dying—these activities defined him as a bon vivant.

I inherited his world view—his belief in taking care of people in need, as well as his passion for peace and justice. Sadly, these days, I find myself angry more often than I’d like. But I don’t wake up that way. The anger usually comes thundering in after I’ve read the news—an article about another outrage, another atrocity, some new assault on human dignity.

I vent. I say my piece. And then I move on.

It’s not natural for me to hold grudges. Maybe this is thanks to the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, which teaches us:

Resentment is the “number one” offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.

Truly, that axiom need not be limited to alcoholics. Think of how many “normal” families and friendships are estranged because one or two people cannot let go of some prior wrongdoing—whether real or imagined.

It is the human ego that keeps us trapped in these prisons of our own making.

Thankfully, there are ways out.

Mom’s way out

I always figured if anyone in our family was going to wind up with that “Irish strain” of Alzheimer’s it would be my mother. She’s the one who had all the resentments.

But I will tell you—she came by them honestly.

Mom had a hard life in many ways. If you’ve read some of my prior essays, you’ll know about:

• The time that joyful, pig-tailed five-year-old tried joining her mother in song, only to be asked: “Do you have a pain?”

• How after being diagnosed with cancer, her mother was denied a hysterectomy on account of being “a Catholic woman still of childbearing age” and later died in agony.

• How, as a child, my mother read every book on Irish history she could get her hands upon, imbuing in her an intense hatred for the English for their 800 years of oppressing her people.

• How she became a Sister of Mercy and left her beloved Ireland expecting to be teaching Black children in Alabama, but found herself in an all-white school and, when she questioned segregation in the diocese, her superior silenced her saying, “Don’t rock the boat!”

• How the elder nuns (except for Anna O’Donnell) in the Alabama convent mistreated her and nearly drove her to suicide. I haven’t written an essay about that yet, but the story will be in the book.

So yes, Mom came by her resentments honestly. Her ego retained and nurtured them. And she suffered for that.

In her final years of life, she experienced some sort of dementia, but it was nothing like Dad’s. Nor was it was the joked-about “Irish strain” of Alzheimer’s, thanks be to God.

One of the greatest gifts for me in caring for her in the last two years of her life was getting to witness her hardened ego dissolve. It was watching my stubborn mother release all those resentments she’d clung to for nearly nine decades of life.

Before she died, she’d forgiven the Church that excommunicated her beloved, she’d forgiven the Archbishop of Dublin, whose patriarchal rules killed her mother, and she’d forgiven the cruel nuns who drove her to the verge of suicide. Most astounding of all—she’d forgiven the English for the eight hundred years of oppressing her people.

My mother died a free woman. Her absolution was an absolute miracle.

States of bliss

A couple weeks ago, Michael and I were in Birmingham for my nephew’s high school graduation. We are all very proud of Dylan, who got a full ride to the University of Alabama’s School of Engineering. Roll Tide!

On the Saturday evening, we saw Niamh play violin with a hip band at a new outdoor venue. On the way in, we ran into one of Michael’s former colleagues from UAB Hospital. The first thing she asked us—very enthusiastically—was whether we’d heard about microdosing GLP-1s for dementia.

Did she know about my parents? Or was she simply assuming that once you’re over forty this is what everyone talks about? I had no idea.

After Michael explained to me what a GLP-1 is, I told him to sign me up for every clinical trial. Stat!

The next morning, we collected our friend Barbara from her new home in a memory care unit and brought her to church.

She was so joyful and filled with gratitude. Every few minutes in the car, her face beaming, she’d exclaim, “I just can’t thank you guys enough for picking me up and taking me to church!”

Even in the thick of his dementia, Dad was often joyful like that too. Sometimes, when you thought he was completely zoned out and oblivious to everything around him, he’d chime in on a conversation in a way that totally surprised you.

I took this video one day during the pandemic after jailbreaking my parents from their memory care apartment and bringing them to my backyard for a little fresh air. You’ll see Mom, as usual, reciting a poem. Enjoy that, but watch my dad at the very end.

“It’ll break your heart, Elma.”

Indeed it will, Dad.

House blessings

A few months after that backyard Yeats recitation, Michael, Niamh, her boys, and I brought Mom and Dad up to our mountain cabin to celebrate their 51st wedding anniversary. It would be their last one together.

Over the years, Dad blessed every house we lived in. I wanted him to do the same for the cabin Michael and I purchased that summer. The old priest needed a little prompting, but he got it done.

I’m so happy Michael captured some of it on video here. I love how, just when it cuts off at the end, Mom is playing the choreographer, telling the aged cleric what he’s supposed to be doing with his hand.

The next day, I took Niamh and the boys whitewater kayaking while Michael stayed home to keep an eye on the ‘oul ones.

Michael later told me he spent the afternoon reading on the couch behind where my parents sat by the windows looking out at God’s grandeur stretched out before them.

Michael said they mostly sat in silence, but every few minutes, Dad would turn to Mom and say, “Elma, where are we?”

Each time, she responded with patience, “We’re at Fergus and Michael’s place in the mountains, Jim. Celebrating our wedding anniversary.”

Time and time again, Dad’s face would light up with joy as if he were hearing this news for the first time.

“Wow!” he’d exclaim. “How wonderful!”

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, please share it, and consider subscribing to follow the series:

I’m writing this week about my family’s experience with dementia.

In the process, I found myself returning to the essay that began this series, The Beauty That Will Last, originally published on March 11, 2026, and decided to record myself reading it. I hope you enjoy listening.

Here’s the full text of the original essay with pictures and videos:

The music never left him.

Even as the Alzheimer’s ravished his brain, erasing memories made mere moments before, my father could still belt out Danny Boy as purely and powerfully as any singer the wide world over. He had sung that lament thousands of times over the years, usually while squeezing away on the glossy silver piano accordion he’d purchased as a Roman Catholic seminarian in Dublin in the late 1950s.

In his heyday, my father commanded a robust repertoire of ballads, jigs, and reels he played and sang for nuns and priests, parishioners, friends, prisoners, pubgoers, and revelers of all kinds, both in Ireland and in Alabama, where he landed in 1963 and met my mother, then known as Sister Marion Margherita Hannon of Dublin.

After the two bonded over a shared love of W.B. Yeats and a terrifying run in with the Ku Klux Klan, it was at Midnight Mass, as my father sang O Holy Night from the chancel steps, that my mother realized—to her horror—that she’d fallen in love with the new priest. Petrified over the prospect of ruining his vocation—an unpardonable sin in her mind—the devout Sister of Mercy eventually fled Alabama for New York to save them both from ruin. But my father, who by then had become apoplectic over his imperious archbishop’s opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic hierarchy’s silence on the Vietnam War, tracked her down and proposed marriage, and the two then took a terrifying plunge into the unknown.

There was no trial

My father’s excommunication was automatic. His forced exile from Ireland—a theocracy in those days—was painful. After the wedding, they tried to make a life there, but no one would hire my blacklisted father, the married priest. Scarcely able to put food on the table playing his accordion on O’Connell Bridge, he and my mother and their infant daughter Niamh returned to Alabama, where former parishioners helped them get on their feet.

The Church that persecuted us for centuries

Things worked out. In his role advocating for the poor as executive director of the Interfaith Mission Service, my father became friendly with the Episcopal bishop of Alabama, Furman Stough.

“God called you to be a priest, Jim,” the purple-clad cleric said one day in a patrician drawl. “Why don’t you come over and join with us?”

“I’ll have to get that past Elma,” Dad replied, a bit sheepishly.

“You mean the Church that persecuted us for centuries!?!” my fiercely nationalist mother howled when he proposed the idea. “Like hell!”

But she knew the bishop was right, and so she went along. My father, the joyful bard, then settled into a new life as an Episcopal priest at the urban parish Saint Andrew’s in Birmingham, where he helped open a soup kitchen to feed the multitudes of men, women, and children newly homeless or hungry on account of Reagan’s drastic budget cuts. He’d bring Niamh and me along to help serve while he played for the guests as many danced jigs and conga lines around the parish hall. Then, every March, as the redbuds burst into bloom, the more enterprising barkeeps in town would fight over who’d get the gregarious Father Jim to headline their Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations.

My mother, who on a whim could recite hundreds of sonnets and soliloquies by heart, found her dream job teaching poetry and literature at a prep school just outside town. Each summer she’d bring groups of students to Ireland, proudly showing off all the holy sites—her favorites being in Yeats Country—while my jubilant father drove the bus, leading the awe-struck American teenagers in song.

Once exiled from their native land, my parents became two of Ireland’s most passionate ambassadors.

Our revels now are ended

After three decades of protesting injustices of all sorts—acts which landed my father on an FBI watch list—and three decades of boisterous, music-filled dinner parties, the redeemed priest received the diagnosis of mild cognitive dementia, and my parents then moved to an independent living apartment in an Episcopal retirement home called Saint Martin’s in the Pines.

When I arrived there for our first Sunday dinner, Dad greeted me at the door with a bear hug and a jocular slap on the back as The Chieftains blared on the stereo behind him.

“Go in and say hello to your mother!” he ordered me, raising his glass of wine towards the galley kitchen, where Mom was tending to the potatoes and lamb chops.

“Fergus,” she said, appearing defeated. “Will you look at the size of this kitchen? I’ll never put on another party again.”

Cupping her hand to her mouth, she then hollered into the living room over the rollicking chorus of Rocky Road to Dublin.

“Jim, dear! Our revels now are ended!”

As it turned out, my mother’s Shakespearean allusion was mostly, but not entirely predictive. For the next few years, the activities director had Dad headlining the independent living wing’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, providing him a kitschy buckled hat that would make any Irish person not suffering from dementia groan out a, “Jaysus, fer fuck sake!”

But Dad didn’t mind. He was so happy to be singing Whisky in the Jar and other favorites and cheering on his audience during the choruses. Mom would follow his act, each time reciting Yeats with passion, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…”

It was a few days before Saint Patrick’s 2020 that Saint Martin’s went into lockdown. Niamh and I went over on the holiday morning with her violin and her two sons, Aidan and Dylan. Standing in the grass below our parents’ third-floor balcony, my sister played as Dad sang with Mom and their chaplain standing beside him.

Jim Tuohy singing “Danny Boy” at Saint Martin’s, accompanied by Niamh Tuohy on violin, with Elma Tuohy (right) and Rev. Jennifer Riddle (left). Video by Fergus Tuohy.

His dementia worsened drastically from there. Some afternoons, Mom would be downstairs talking with neighbors in the common living room, and Dad would awake from a nap in terror, come out onto the atrium balcony in his underwear looking like Lear on the heath, his white hair and white beard wild as he cried, “Where’s Elma!?! Jesus! Where’s Elmaaaaaa!?!!!”

The administrators told us they could no longer care for him in the independent living wing, that he’d have to go to the locked memory care unit next door. Though Mom could have remained, she could not bear to be apart from the love of her life, not even for one night, so she went with him.

At the first Christmas party in memory care, Dad sang O Holy Night for his new neighbors as Mom looked on, still so much in love with this man nearly sixty years after she’d first heard him sing that hymn from the chancel steps. She was with him too on the Friday morning before Palm Sunday when he rolled out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, collapsed on the floor and died.

“I don’t want to live anymore,” she told me every day. “I just want to go be with him.”

That was true. Three days before we were set to travel to Ireland to spread Dad’s ashes, Mom fell and broke her hip. And though her surgery went well, she refused to eat or cooperate with the physical therapists, so her doctor recommended hospice.

“Bring her home with us!” my husband Michael, a palliative care physician, said before I could even ask him.

And so we did just that.

The beauty that will last

Long before the dementia diagnosis, at any of my parents’ frequent dinner parties, stories from the old days, some harrowing, some hilarious, would invariably come up, prompting some party guest to shout, “You two should write a book!”

“Only after all the guilty are dead!” my mother, feigning panic, would retort.

At some point, during our Sunday dinners, I began recording them telling those stories. On occasion, Dad would allude to some set of mysterious files he kept locked away, some papers he hoped to publish one day.

On that first Sunday dinner at Saint Martin’s, after Mom had the potatoes and lamb chops under control, the three of us sat in the living room unpacking boxes together, laughing about old memories, when Dad exited abruptly and emerged moments later from the bedroom carrying a stack of folders and papers. In a suddenly somber tone, he said, “Here are my diaries and love letters to Mom. I thought I’d publish them one day, but it’s too late. Now it’s up to you.”

“Jaysus!” my mother shouted. “Please wait until we’re dead!”

“Well, I’m just saying,” my father countered. “It’s very interesting. Civil Rights. The War in Vietnam. Everything was going on.”

With their permission, I began working on their story. I had to put the project on hold through the worst years of the Alzheimer’s and those months when Mom lived with us on hospice. When she was confined to her wheelchair, I often read to her the love poems Dad gave me on that Sunday night, those secret epistles they wrote one another when their love was so unfathomably taboo.

Christ gave life and love to man.

You tell me you see Christ in me.

So I give to you this Christmas Day,

My life my love for eternity.

“Did Dad really write that to me?” my childlike little mother said, now wide-eyed, as if hearing his words for the first time.

In her final weeks of life, she began to see him in the room.

“He comes to visit me,” she said.

One morning, she called me over to where she sat in her wheelchair by the large glass door overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. Watching God’s grandeur stretched out before us, a cardinal among the birds gathered at the feeder, the morning sun burning away the milky mist rising from the river gorge, she began reciting verses the Irish schoolteacher Patrick Pearce wrote just before the English executed him for his role in the 1916 Easter Uprising, which led to Irish independence:

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,

This beauty that will pass;

“But ya know, Fergus,” she said quietly. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe the beauty ever really passes.”

A few weeks later, in the early hours of Easter Monday, I stroked the white wisps of hair on my mother’s head as the beauty that is Elma Tuohy passed from this world, as I can see it, joining, at long last, her beloved Jim in eternity.

Resurrections

After her funeral, after Michael, Niamh and I spread both their ashes in the family graves and in Bantry Bay, I resumed working on their story. Lately, I’ve been listening to recordings of them telling tales of the old days. I’ve been listening to Dad singing and Mom reciting poetry. I’ve been reading their journals and love poems, and though I cannot see them with my eyes, I get to hang out with them every single day at my desk as I resurrect them both on the page.

And now, when our weary world so often seems too bleak to bear, when the institutions and leaders we thought would protect us instead capitulate to tyranny, I look to my parents’ story of resistance, romance and redemption, and I know in my soul there is profound beauty in this world, beauty that will last.

So, each week, as I write this family memoir, I will publish a new reflection inspired by my parents’ example of living authentically and courageously no matter the personal costs. Because their ultimate redemption—finding great joy and purpose in life—will uplift anyone despairing over the current state of world affairs.

Their story is for all of us.

If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe below.

You can hear my father sing Danny Boy below.

Jim Tuohy singing “Danny Boy” at a Saint Andrew’s house Eucharist in the home of Fergus and Michael. Video by Fergus Tuohy.

We were at an Enneagram studies conference discussing ego fixations. As a Type Three, my ego’s fixation is vanity. I told the group this totally tracks, that when I was a young boy, my mom often said things like, “Jaysus, Fergus, you’re so vain! You’re always checking yourself out in the mirror.”

Shannon told me she enjoys getting to know my mom through these reflections and loved hearing me mimic her voice. This reminded me that I need to start recording myself reading The Beauty That Will Last essays. Some people prefer listening over reading—especially if they’re driving, vacuuming, or otherwise on the go. I do this all the time with Substack pieces. I don’t mind the AI voice option, but the personal touch is much better.

I’m going to get on that soon.

It also occurred to me that I have countless hours of audio recordings of my parents telling stories about the old days when they came to America from Ireland as a Roman Catholic nun and priest, unknown to each other before meeting in Gadsden, Alabama.

Many of these stories are in the family memoir I’m writing. I’ll save those, but there are many more I can share now, and I’m going to play around with them in various ways like blending two or three brief clips into broader essays like this one.

Let’s see how it goes…

Talk about culture shock!

One night about 15 years ago, Mom and Dad came over to my house for dinner with my godmother, Anna O’Donnell. I haven’t introduced Anna to most of you yet. She was one of the seven Sisters of Mercy who came over from Ireland with my mother on the RMS Mauretania in 1960.

Then known as Sister Malachy, this devout, elfish little woman grew up on a sheep farm in a remote stretch of County Donegal. Years later, she left the order in protest over the way the Church treated my parents when they married.

Following her conscience and her love for her friends left Anna penniless. But in the most beautifully serendipitous ways, life worked out for her. Anna never married nor learned to drive a car, but she enjoyed a marvelous teaching career and became a surrogate grandmother to my sister Niamh and me. Anna was as much a part of our family as any of us.

Here’s a picture of her singing at a coffee hour after church while my dad plays his piano accordion:

And here’s a little audio excerpt of Anna and my parents at that dinner telling me what happened just after the Irish sisters came off the boat at Ellis Island. You’ll hear Mom’s voice first, then Dad, then Anna chiming in about a nun dancing an Irish jig. You’ll hear them reference two other nuns—Regina, the Gadsden convent’s mother superior; and Teresita, the principal of Carysfort Training College in Dublin, where Mercy Sisters trained to be teachers or nurses.

Now, here’s some vocabulary you might be wondering about:

• Scapulars (from Merriam Webster): a long wide band of cloth with an opening for the head worn front and back over the shoulders as part of a monastic habit.

  

  • You can see how Teresita thought of these when she saw her first teabag!

• Pioneer (from Wikipedia): A member of “The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart (PTAA) is an international organisation for Catholic teetotalers based in Ireland. Its members are commonly called Pioneers.

• Mineral (from Wiktionary): A soft drink, particularly a single serve bottle or can.

All of this just reminded me of the confusion surrounding the Gadsden convent’s onetime shortage of erasers, which, in Ireland, are known as rubbers.

“Father!” a distraught Sister Divine Heart cried. “Father, we’ve used up all the rubbers! Please go up to the store and get us more rubbers as soon as possible!”

We had absolutely nothing

Mom came by her food aversions honestly. Born just before World War II broke out, due to the Nazi naval blockades, she never saw an orange or a banana until she was nine years old.

And even though her father was a police detective, the family had very little money. When Jim Hannon moved them to Dublin from Cork, the family lived in a public housing tenement. But Jim was a Tipperary man, a country boy, or a culchie, as Dubliners derisively call them. He was able to grow all their food in his little back garden.

This didn’t win him any friends among the other men in the neighborhood, whose wives were always saying to them, “Why can’t ya be more like Jim Hannon and grow your family some bloody food to eat!?”

Here’s Mom and Dad during a Sunday dinner about 12 years ago telling me about their war-era sacrifices as I’m audibly tearing into a feast of roast chicken and potatoes:

I suppose that explains why Mom never wanted us to have turkey, even for Thanksgiving.

Also—I just had to include that final bit where Mom chides Dad for praising the English. If you read my earlier essay, Forgive them, Mother, they know not what they do, you’ll know about Mom’s longtime disdain for the English—which she overcame on her deathbed! You may not know that my father never shared her contempt for the English because, as a young man, he worked many summers in London and was well-treated by the Brits. But that’s a topic for another day!

Anyhow, Mom’s brother John was the same way about food. As an executive with Dunnes, the largest department store chain in Ireland, he travelled the world buying shoes and being wined and dined in the finest restaurants across Europe and the Far East. This sounds perfectly divine to a foodie like me, but all my Uncle John ever wanted to eat was well-done steak and potatoes.

I remember one time I was staying with him in Dublin. His wife—my Aunt Mary, who is a gourmet cook and baker—was away in County Clare, so John was handling our dinner. As he was standing over the stovetop poking at the filet mignons, he asked me how I like my steak.

“Rare or medium-rare would be grand,” I said.

“Jaysus!” he shouted. “It’s far too late for any of that!”

Lost in translation

It wasn’t long after Mom and the nuns arrived in Alabama that they found themselves in a Cullman gas station conversing with an attendant.

Here’s Mom telling me how that went:

She loved telling that one to her high school English students, whose parents were paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.

“You know, I don’t speak no good English!” she would guffaw.

Well, I hope y’all enjoyed this little experiment. Now I’m going to go brush the dust off the audio recorder I bought in J-school and read out some of my older essays. I hope you’ll listen and enjoy them.

In the meantime, I would love if you would share in the comments here some of your own food aversions and lost in translation experiences. I will add some of my own!

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

An old client of mine, a widow herself, lent me her convertible for the weekend saying, “You go show your momma a good time. Go and make her smile.”

It was a beautiful day, and we drove all over Birmingham laughing and cutting up, getting Mom’s mind off the profound sense of loss over her just-departed beloved.

Later, I memorialized our outing with a selfie and a post captioned:

“A couple generations of Columbia Lions out for a Mother’s Day spin…”

Summer of love

My mother didn’t so much go to Columbia University as she fled there.

In the 1960s, when she was still known as Sister Margherita, she fell in love with the associate pastor at Saint James Catholic Church in Gadsden, Alabama, and kept these feelings a secret for four long years. When she finally confessed her love to my father, he admitted the same, and they both panicked.

Nothing could have been more taboo. Nothing could have been more ruinous.

So she fled.

In the summer of 1968, she took a leave of absence from the Sisters of Mercy and fled to New York, where she enrolled at Columbia University and took courses in Joyce and Faulkner, two writers who laid bare the corruption of the religious and political power structures in their native lands—the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and Jim Crow in the American South.

My mother arrived at Columbia just weeks after students took over campus buildings protesting the university’s involvement in racial injustices and its complicity with the war in Vietnam through its associations with The Institute for Defense Analyses and Dow Chemical, which was manufacturing the napalm being used to incinerate whole families of Vietnamese civilians alive.

My mother admired those students. They were doing what the Roman Catholic bishops would not. Those well-fed bishops—she called them—were too comfortable with their positions and their power and did not wish to rock any boats.

My parents were Vatican II people. They were among the new generation of Catholics who believed the Church should be right in the middle of the civil rights and antiwar movements. They watched in despair as the Church remained on the sidelines while racial terror reigned across the South, while young men of the parish came home from Vietnam in body bags.

Indignant over the hierarchy’s refusal to stand up for justice, my father finally had enough. He tracked my mother down and asked her to marry him, and together they took a terrifying plunge into the unknown.

Fergus and the Druid

Mom was ecstatic when I told her—about ten years ago—that I was selling my financial planning practice to study journalism at Columbia. She was so proud, she went around telling everyone at her retirement community all about it:

“My son Fergus is living up to his namesake!” she’d say. “Fergus mac Róich, the Irish king who gave up his crown for knowledge.”

Her blue-haired neighbors just nodded politely, having no idea what she was going on about.

While there are many versions of the myth she referenced, Mom, a Yeats scholar, was likely referring to the poem, Fergus and the Druid. In Yeats’ telling, King Fergus grows weary of the heavy burdens of his station and seeks out the wisdom of an elusive, shape-shifting druid. When Fergus finally catches him, the druid asks him what he wants, to which Fergus replies:

Be no more a king

But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.

My mother’s jubilation over my decision went further than her poetic allusions or the promise of a shared alma mater. Like every Irish mother, mine most wanted for me to be a priest. When I told her back in 2004 that I was going into finance, you’d have thought I’d announced I was joining the British Army or the Bush administration.

“Jesus, bless us and save us!” she cried, crossing herself with dramatic flair. “Don’t you know the love of money is the root of all evil!”

Over the next twelve years, though, she came to see that my work as a financial planner was a ministry in itself. She saw me helping people put their children through school, retire with dignity, and pay for nursing home care.

I enjoyed this work and built a thriving practice with a business partner who became a best friend. We had a terrific staff and excellent relationships with our clients, many of whom became like family.

Still, somehow, I grew restless. I felt like something was missing, something the royal trappings—the tailored suits and BMWs—could not provide. I felt a yearning to create, to express myself. I wanted to write. I just needed to learn how, and I believed Columbia could help me with that.

I should tell you some of my motivations were not so noble. There were also egoic reasons behind my decision. Despite all my success in business, I carried a feeling of inferiority. I felt a powerful urge to prove to myself and to others that I could get into an Ivy League school and do well there. I believed such an achievement would elevate my self-esteem.

It would, but only for a while. The universe, I would learn, has quite a sense of humor.

A little bag of dreams

In all the times my ecstatic mother likened my career transition to my namesake’s relinquishing his crown for knowledge, it never occurred to me that Yeats’ poem does not have a happy ending. Not in any conventional sense.

The druid tries warning Fergus there are terrible drawbacks to possessing wisdom, saying:

Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks

And on these hands that may not lift the sword,

This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.

No woman’s loved me, no man sought my help.

Still, Fergus insists on giving up his crown for knowledge, saying:

A king is but a foolish labourer

Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream.

And so, the Druid relents, giving Fergus a little bag of dreams, which shows him his whole life—all of his lives, in fact. He sees the many costumes he’s worn across time—a drop in a river, a gleam of light, a tree on a hill, a slave toiling away, a king on a chair of gold. He now sees the temporary, ever-changing nature of all things.

This knowledge leaves Fergus feeling untethered.

My own untethering

My Columbia experience felt magical. Every day on campus was like being in wonderland. Looking at the course offerings—and the famous professors teaching them—it was like an amazing dream. I was so happy. I couldn’t believe I was actually there.

But during all of this, I experienced an existential shock.

It was difficult enough no longer having an office, staff, and clients to make me feel important. It was difficult enough being so far away from my family, my fiancé, and our dogs, who remained in Birmingham. But then, one day, early on in my first semester, a dear friend back home took his own life. This friend had been like a father figure to me when I came out as gay years earlier. It was totally unexpected. I didn’t even know he was depressed. The whole thing shattered my understanding of the world. Nothing felt solid. It felt like there was nowhere safe to stand.

Making my sudden sense of insecurity even more unsettling was that I no longer had the tailored suits and BMW to tell me that I was ok, to tell the world that I was worthy of love. Even the usual spiritual remedies—AA meetings, prayer, meditation, and running—were not helping much either.

I needed relief, and the relief came in the form of an audiobook.

Years earlier, a friend in recovery told me I should read The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. I purchased the audiobook, but it sat in my phone for years, unplayed.

One night as I was coming home from class feeling like I was underwater, my head swimming, my thoughts swirling, something told me to open that audiobook and listen. For the next several hours, I walked around Hell’s Kitchen listening in raptures, astonished at what I was hearing—about the ego, the false self, and how I was never really who I thought I was.

From that night, I read everything Eckhart Tolle ever wrote, which then led me to Ram Dass and then to the spirituality of Enneagram. Accumulating this wisdom, I began to understand the nature of the ego, the unreliability of my thoughts, the fleeting nature of all things. Every decision I’d ever made in life began to make sense.

The universe has a sense of humor

In an ironic and poetic sort of way, my less-than-noble reasons for going to Columbia were rendered useless.

Today, I live on the side of a mountain in a rather remote stretch of Appalachia. The friends I see most often are whitewater kayakers who couldn’t care less if I went to graduate school, never mind where.

And as if that wasn’t enough to reduce the symbolic value of the diploma hanging on my wall, last year, Columbia’s president and board of trustees sacrificed the institution’s academic integrity and freedom by capitulating—without a fight—to the Trump administration’s outrageous authoritarian demands. In the trustees’ view, protecting the school’s money was more important than protecting its students, its faculty, or its integrity.

I’m glad my mother wasn’t around to see this development. That sort of craven greed is precisely what she meant when she told me, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

On the other hand, she and my father would be very proud of this new pope—a Catholic of their sort—who speaks truth to power, voicing his moral opposition to war and voicing a moral defense of protecting the marginalized, especially immigrants.

As for Columbia, my romantic vision of the prestigious “Activist Ivy” has been hollowed out. The majesty of its buildings and mythology has crumbled. But these notions were always superficial, anyhow. What matters is that my education there was far greater than I ever imagined possible. I learned from great writers and great thinkers and formed enduring friendships with classmates and professors alike. I became a better writer and a better thinker myself, and my education has continued every single day since I threw my graduation cap into the air.

Making the decision to go there later enabled me to care for my parents as their health failed, to get to know them in new ways that mightn’t have otherwise been possible. I am now writing their story of resistance, romance, and redemption in an age of American upheaval much like the one we find ourselves in today. I’m writing their story of finding the courage to speak truth to power, to endure excommunication and exile, and ultimately to find great joy and purpose in life.

Having opened the little bag of dreams, I can now visit my mother when she was a pious pigtailed little girl in Dublin, a nun in a white habit teaching in Alabama, a diligent student soaking up Faulkner at Columbia. Now, any day of the week, I can pick her up in a convertible, put her hot pink walker in the backseat, and take her out for a spin around town.

And though I may never be the priest she originally hoped for, I’ve achieved something mystical: through writing, I have the power to resurrect the dead.

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The fighting went back about as far as I can remember. When it came to my sister Niamh, the scene usually played out something like this:

MOM:
You’re going to practice your violin, you insolent brat, or I’ll ground ya for a week!

NIAMH (tear-streaked, red-faced):
Ahaaaaaa!

MOM:
Two and a half hours every day, or yer not goin’ anywhere!

Niamh storms down the hall toward her room.

stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp

NIAMH:
I haaaaaaaaaate you!

SLAM.

A violin tunes.

Scales.

Then Brahms. Mozart. Vivaldi.

The music continues for the next two hours.

It was a bit different for me because I came into the world six and a half years after my sister, who’d already begun to wear our mother down.

Our parents started me on the violin when I was four with the same teacher Niamh had when she began. Colonel Wade was a retired army officer who I remember looking like Daddy Warbucks from Annie, though this may be a fabrication of memory.

Colonel Wade taught the Suzuki method, which incorporates Japanese practices of honor and respect. On Saturday mornings, Mom would bring me to his studio at Samford University. Having practiced “Mississippi Hot Dog” all week, I’d toddle in with my little violin, bow to the colonel, who stood there waiting for me to say:

“Please teach me, I want to learn.”

Only I never spoke those words. What I actually said was:

“Please don’t teach me, I don’t want to learn.”

Rather than sending me to the brig, the colonel kindly urged my mother to consider another instrument or hobby for her second child.

Mom then got me into a piano program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where I spent every Saturday with scores of children of all ages learning theory, technique, and simplified arrangements of Für Elise and Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

Watching the older kids playing Saint-Saëns and Mozart, I wanted to be doing that too, and with the same grace. I wanted to be a child prodigy. I just didn’t want to practice.

When Mom told me I had to practice every exercise, every major piece of music, five times before I could go outside and play, I wrote a piece of music I titled Everything Five Times.

So, when Mom got home from work and asked me, “Did you play everything five times?”

I could honestly respond, “Yes, I played Everything Five Times.”

It was clear my heart wasn’t in it. I begged her all the time to let me give up the piano. After seven years, she gave in. Throwing her hands into the air, she said:

“I don’t have the energy to do this a second time!”

Do you have a pain?

Mom simply wanted for us what she had been denied.

Her mother had a gorgeous singing voice. Though the family had little money, my grandmother never missed a performance of The Messiah, always bringing her firstborn, my mother, along.

One day, my grandmother was going around the house cleaning and singing, and my joyful little mother joined in:

“For, unto us a child is bo-orn.”

Her mother spun around and faced her with a glare.

“Do you have a pain, child?” she said.

From that moment, my mother never tried to sing another note for the rest of her life.

Still, she loved music. She used to tell me that any time she doubted God’s existence, she would put on Beethoven or Mozart, which immediately transformed any agnosticism into awe at God’s majesty.

“If I make it to heaven,” she told me a million times, “the first thing I’m going to ask God to do is give me a voice.”

A rather public humiliation

Mom didn’t want me to have to wait until the afterlife for a voice. When I was about eight, she started me singing with the Birmingham Boys Choir.

Then, when I entered eighth grade at the school where she taught literature and poetry, she insisted I join the concert choir. Half the student body sang in that choir. The school considered the institution so important that fifth and sixth periods each day were blocked off for rehearsals—girls first, then boys, and on Fridays, everyone rehearsed together.

After my audition, we began learning Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem. I thought the music was gorgeous, but there was a problem—during fifth and sixth periods, my friends who were not in the choir got to hang out at the campus lake, goofing off, flirting, and pushing each other over the water on a rope swing. Such activities were infinitely more appealing to the thirteen-year-old me, and so I stopped attending rehearsals. After all—wasn’t choir optional?

For me, it was not.

One Friday, after I’d skipped a couple rehearsals, my mother came marching across campus, down to the lake, where a dozen of us were gathered, laughing and carrying on.

“Fergus Alexander James Tuohy!” my mother shouted. “Come here at once!”

She took me by the ear, marched me the hundred yards up to the rehearsal room, pushed me inside, and said, in front of half the school:

“You’re not to miss another rehearsal, ya little pup. And don’t be late either!”

The perfect gift

The Fauré Requiem kept a slot in my parents’ six-disc changer the whole time I was in high school. Mom loved it so much.

“Fergus, I want the Sanctus movement played at my funeral,” she told me many times as the heavenly arpeggios and soprano voice transported her somewhere beyond doubt.

During my five years in that choir, I got to sing some of the Western canon’s greatest works, including Bach’s Mass in B Minor, as well as dozens of African American spirituals, Jewish hymns, jazz standards, and masterpieces of musical theatre.

I got to sing at the United Nations and the National Cathedral, in churches, parks, schools, and nursing homes. All of this culminated in a Mother’s Day performance of Mozart’s Requiem my senior year at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church.

This was 1996, and Niamh had recently graduated from the University of Alabama’s music program, which she attended on a full music scholarship. She was now among the musicians from the Alabama Symphony Orchestra playing with our choir.

As we sang the mournful Lacrymosa movement, I could see my parents in their pew, tears streaming from my mother’s eyes.

When the concert ended and the colorful sea of spring outfits surrounded the choristers, Niamh and I waved each other down and went to find our parents.

Mom was beaming. She hugged each of us tightly and looked us in the eyes.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “You’ve given me the perfect Mother’s Day gift.”

Legacies

Years later, after I returned to Birmingham and began my career as a financial planner, I attended an Alabama Symphony Orchestra performance of Mozart’s Requiem with my parents. We sat on the front row of the balcony level behind the stage. The chorus stood on risers just below us, giving me a clear view of the conductor. I still knew every word, every note, and it took every ounce of restraint I possessed to keep myself from hopping over the rail and joining in.

The next season, I did join them, and in the years that followed, we performed the Fauré, Mozart, and Brahms requiems; Carmina Burana; and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And every December, we sang Handel’s Messiah.

One sunless winter’s day, I was kayaking a Class IV creek in North Alabama. The water was high, and as we approached the entrance to a rapid called Bone Crusher, I got out of my boat to scout. After mapping my route, noting the eddies I’d catch on the way down and the must-make moves around boulders that could pin my kayak and drown me, I walked back to my boat shaking a little.

As I fit myself into my kayak, music began playing in my mind. It was the Handel I’d been rehearsing all month:

Tha-anks, thanks be to God. Thanks be to God, thanks be to God…

I began to feel calm and centered. Now smiling and singing softly, I peeled out into the current, entered the rapid fully present, and made the required moves without thinking.

Niamh now spends her days working as a pharmaceutical sales representative. At night, though, she can usually be found listening to live music somewhere, if not playing it herself.

She’s performed numerous shows with The Black Jacket Symphony and plays in her own band called String Theory, a string quartet plus a bassist and drummer that plays everything from Brubeck to Springsteen, Radiohead to The Fugees and has a devoted following that comes out for the good vibes and unique musical experience.

Over the years, she’s accompanied Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder, and The Eagles. In 2015, when the movie Selma debuted, she got to play Glory with John Legend and Common on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“Music is my soul job,” she says.

Promises kept

Two years ago, at our mother’s funeral, Niamh played her violin while I sang Mom’s favorite prayer in Irish. Members of the Alabama Symphony Chorus were there, singing the Sanctus and several more movements from Fauré’s Requiem. Once again, it took every ounce of restraint I had to keep from joining them from my pew in the front.

These days, anytime I’m on the river going into a particularly gnarly rapid, I talk to Mom and Dad. I ask them to pray to keep me safe. Sometimes, the music begins, and in my head and in my heart, I can hear the singing:

Tha-anks, thanks be to God. Thanks be to God, thanks be to God…

I then move through the rapid fully present and, on the other end, I emerge very much alive.

What a gift. A perfect gift.

Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

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According to my journal, Mom and I managed living together for several weeks before a real fight broke out.

When she first moved in with my husband and me on hospice, our time was marked by tender moments and expressions of gratitude. We had a few small tussles over bedtimes—“You don’t have to go to sleep, Mom. We just have to get you into bed so I can!”

But that was minor stuff compared to what happened one mid-September Sunday evening.

I’d just returned from a kayaking trip, and after saying goodbye to the caregiver, I got Mom situated in her wheelchair by the big window. I kissed her on the forehead and said I was going upstairs to shower and would be back down in 15 minutes to cook us some salmon.

Just as I stepped into the shower, I heard her yelling up the stairs.

Worried she might have fallen, I threw back on my clothes and ran down to find her red-faced and shouting, “I need to go to the bathroom, and no one will help me!”

“Mom, you just told me you’d be fine for 15 minutes.”

Everything kicked up a notch.

“You’re a selfish little bastard!” she screamed.

“What?” I shouted, flummoxed and rapidly becoming indignant. “Explain how I’m selfish!”

She replied with only a searing glare.

It was a familiar glare—one that, in an instant, brought back the pain of fights like this from childhood.

It’s amazing how family members know just which buttons to press.

“Explain. How…am…I… selfish?”

Her rage was boiling over.

“You’re always going off and leaving me here with strangers!”

These “strangers” were the caregivers we hired so Michael and I could go to work. I was astounded—when I visited Mom in assisted living, she was always worried I was taking too much time away from work on her behalf. Now, I was selfish for going to work at all.

I told her this, and she went straight to King Lear.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” she seethed. “Away, away!”

It was she who looked like the child now, her face scrunched up, her lips pursed into a cheeky pout.

Out the window, I noticed our nice young neighbor watering his garden and worried he’d heard the whole commotion. I suppose my ego had been enjoying the story of me as the dutiful son caring for his mother.

“Ah well,” I told myself. “Are there any families that don’t fight?”

Taking a deep breath, I crouched down beside my mother.

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “Do you still need to go to the bathroom?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Okay, I’ll help you.”

When she was finished, I kissed her head, brought her back to the window, and we made up.

After my shower, we ate salmon and watched her new favorite show, Ireland with Michael. This episode was set in Waterford and we both loved it. We then watched another show about three gregarious Irishwomen touring the country. It was nearly nine when it was all over, and I said, “Whoa—it’s past bedtime!”

“I’m not ready for bed!” she said, scrunching her face up again. “No one goes to bed at this hour—it’s too bloody early!”

Another argument ensued. After I finally finished helping her get ready and into bed, she began complaining about her meds. I could do nothing right.

“If you’re so unhappy here, I can take you back to that nursing unit!” I said, before flipping the light switch and storming upstairs.

I didn’t mean it. My parents had good experiences with assisted living and memory care, but the nursing unit Mom went to after breaking her hip was a different story entirely. One Sunday afternoon I came by and found her shivering in a blanketless bed, the room dark, the blinds drawn, shutting out the lovely view of the trees outside.

“I think I’m going crazy in this place,” she said of the nursing wing.

I found the attendant on duty stretched out on a sofa in the common living room playing on her phone. When I asked her for a blanket for my shivering mother, she shrugged and said all the blankets were in the wash.

That’s when we decided Mom was moving home with us.

Back upstairs after the fight, I lay in bed catching up on nearly a week’s worth of meditations on the spirituality of the Enneagram written by my friend Joe Howell. Feeling more centered, I returned downstairs and asked Mom if she’d like for us to say our prayers together. When we finished, she squeezed my hand and said:

“We’ll learn how to live together, Fergus.”

Reunions

Last weekend, I was back in Birmingham for my 30-year high school class reunion. When Mom attended the 20 and 25-year reunions, many of my classmates enjoyed reciting to her the poems she’d taught them so long ago.

Some had taken her Shakespeare elective with me in the 11th grade. That’s when I convinced my parents to let me spend a weekend with friends so we could practice our lines for the King Lear scene Mom had assigned us.

Little practicing was done. Instead, we just goofed off, and our cover was blown the following week when we all stumbled over our lines.

Mom was positively irate. Summoning Lear himself, she blasted me in front of the whole class:

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!

At the reunion last weekend, I spoke with classmates who are now caring for their own aging parents. One friend told me she enjoys my reflections on caregiving but wishes I’d say more about the fussing, because there’s a good bit of that in her own home.

That stayed with me. During the nearly 20 months Mom lived with us at the end of her life, I regularly posted pictures and funny things she said. It brought joy to people who knew her—and to many who came to know her in this way. But often, in the back of my mind, there was a voice saying, You’re making this look too easy. You’re not giving the full picture.

Our usual conflicts were like the fussing between a parent and a child—only now the roles were reversed.

And I didn’t want any authority over my mother. All I wanted was for her to be safe and happy.

This is what our life together often sounded like:

• “I don’t need to go to the bathroom!” she’d say to the caregiver at the end of the shift.

• “I need to go to the bathroom!” she’d say to me five minutes after the caregiver left.

• “Please go home, I had my bath yesterday!” she’d say to the CNA who may or may not have succeeded in giving her a bath in the last several days.

• “I love them but can’t eat them any longer—they make me break out,” she’d say of her sudden (and imaginary) shrimp allergy.

• “Jaysus, Fergus, the feeder is empty! The poor birds’ll be dropping dead from starvation!” she’d say, pointing to a feeder three-quarters full of sunflower seeds.

• “The doctor told me I have dementia, which means I’m depressed,” she’d say, ignoring me when I told her those words are not synonyms, and then thanking Michael when he confirmed what I’d been saying all along, because he is a doctor and not her “cheeky brat of a son.”

Never go to bed angry—and don’t die that way either

We are Irish. We have hot tempers. We fight, but we make up before bed.

That was the rule. “Because if one of us doesn’t wake tomorrow, it would be too much for the other to bear,” my mother told me in my childhood.

When I began writing this piece, Michael reminded me that Mom and I always apologized to each other during our prayers or during tuck in. His words comforted me in a moment I didn’t realize I needed comforting. Perhaps this is true for most of us: no matter what we’ve done for those we love, we’ll always feel we should have done more.

For her part, Mom sometimes fretted over the times she was impatient with my father when his Alzheimer’s was so bad.

“I was always saying, ‘Jim, I just told you that two minutes ago!’” she said to me, cradling her little head in shame.

It really bothered her ruminating on that, so I reminded her how much she did for my father, how she rallied herself and took great care of him in his final years.

“You could’ve stayed with your friends and your freedom in the independent living wing, but you chose to go with him to that locked memory care unit because you couldn’t bear the thought of being without him even for one night. You know that meant the world to him. You were his everything.”

The worst for me is the memory of the time I flung Mom’s lunch plate onto the tray in front of her because I was overwhelmed and annoyed that she’d changed her mind about whether she wanted to eat. Whenever I think back on this, I shudder.

Instead of wallowing in the memory of such unskillful moments, I try to remember something Henri Nouwen wrote about this kind of guilt. He said there is an awareness of sin that does not lead to God but to self-preoccupation—that we can become so impressed by our failings that we get stuck there, convinced we are too sinful to deserve mercy.

That kind of guilt doesn’t help. It turns us inward when what we need is to turn back toward those we love.

In the last few months of Mom’s life, Michael, a palliative care doctor, taught me the five things he often suggests families say to their dying loved ones:

“Thank you…I love you…Please forgive me…I forgive you…Goodbye.”

Mom was still lucid when I said these words to her, and we both teared up.

Over the nearly 20 months we lived together, more than anything else my mother, the former nun, said to me each night when I helped her to the toilet, gave her meds, brushed her teeth, and got her into bed, was this: “Fergus, you are performing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Thank you. I love you so much. Now, go spend some time with Michael. He misses you.”

These days, I still hear her fussing at me, but it’s never over anything big.

It’s usually about the birdfeeder.

Probably once a week, I look out the window and catch a glimpse of the half-full container hanging off the edge of the deck and smile and say to Michael:

“Uh oh—I’d better go fill the birdfeeder right now before Mom crucifies me.”

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Each week, I share a new reflection from the family memoir I’m writing—stories inspired by my parents’ faith, love, exile, reinvention, and joy.

If this piece moved you, consider subscribing to follow the series:

The Beauty That Will Last is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.