Séamas O’Reilly (2021) Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

I used to read Séamas O’Reilly’s whimsical weekly column in The Observer. I didn’t know much about him, other than he was Irish. His 2021 memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? won biography of the year in the Irish book awards.

He makes light work of his mum dying when he was five. It’s in the title. His incomprehension about why so many people were pouring into his house to see his mum and dad. Mum died from breast cancer when she was forty-three and was lying in a coffin dead. Séamas was fine with that. He just wondered when she’d come back from being dead to care for him and his ten other brothers and sisters.

It gradually dawned on him that she never would. In later life he had only five memories of Sheila, but with writing them down turned out to be eight.

His girlfriend, later to be his wife was Swedish. When he told his wife’s mum that his mum had died and she’d had eleven children, his mother-in-law’s response that she wasn’t surprised, sum it up.

The hero in every sense is his dad, Joe. Séamas recalls his dad literally picking up a Volvo when his brother was underneath it. His dad picking up over a ton of metal was according to Joe just one of those things anybody would have done.

The Troubles was Trouble enough in rural Derry but Joe was great friends with both sides of the sectarian divide. He lost a leg not to a bomb, but to chocolate bars and diabetes. It didn’t impede him. He carried on working and taking care of his own, living in the ramshackle bungalow he’d designed and built himself. He could fix things but he couldn’t fix his wife dying, or his hatred of mice—one of which he dispatched with a plastic bottle shaped like the Holy Virgin, with the Holy Water inside giving it a bit of heft.

Grief takes many forms. Joe’s idea to visit his wife’s sister in Southern Spain involved the family minibus towing a 26‑foot caravan with the toe-bar ripping a hole in the floor. God may work in mysterious ways that include a French farmer having a welding rig and all the equipment to fix it.

Séamas’ medical emergency of an almost burst appendix when he was ten, meant he couldn’t sleep for days and brought his fears to the fore. He spluttered to the family doctor, he didn’t want his daddy to die.

Joe, of course, was there to hold him and let him cry his eyes out. And reassure him. What a man. What a guy. Hero in every sense. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6