Every year for 10 years, my Irish mother Isabel and I attended the annual Irish Books Arts and Music (IBAM) weekend at the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago.
This year, in 2019, was especially significant. It fell on her 86th October birthday. Her favorite Irish novelist, journalist and broadcaster Frank Delaney, was speaking and that Sunday evening was to culminate with a concert by her beloved favorite singer, Philip Coulter, an Irish musician, songwriter and record producer from Derry, Northern Ireland.
That afternoon we also were going to sneak away for a couple hours and head to North Avenue Beach, where lifeguards had planned a tribute to “The Bird Lade,” Eleanor Arens, my mom’s lifelong friend who was known as the caregiver of all at the beach. Eleanor had passed just weeks before.
“I don’t feel good Mary,” my mother phoned that morning. “I can’t go today.”
The words hit like a thunderbolt. My mother, who we all called “Issy,” was a trailblazer in what today is dubbed FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), or I’d rather like to say, a busy woman on the go who would thrive on getting together with friends, hosting gatherings in our home and NEVER would miss a wake, funeral or tribute to her friend.
I knew. That night, I gave her ticket away to an elderly lady who was visiting from Ireland. She was so excited and grateful. I sat in the cold auditorium and cried as Phil delivered my mom’s favorite song, The Town I Loved So Well.
Fast forward a month, my mother is being transferred from a West Suburban hospital to Loyola Medical Center. That day she was diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer of the duodenum and given only four months to live. I followed the ambulance in my Jeep, the car that transported my mom and myself on so many adventures in the two years since my father, Paul, died. Again, the tears flowed.
Arriving at the medical center, I walked up to the transport, and spotted a paramedic bringing another patient in on a stretcher. It was my son, Thomas, who at the time was training at Loyola. He arrived at the very same time; my mother and I walked through the doors of the ER. I just remember him saying, “Issy, I am here.: Her face lit with delight.
My mother was moved to her room. The nurse on call was my cousin, another Mary, Mary Therese, who walked through the door astonished to see her aunt.
“Issy, I’m here.”
That afternoon, my friend, Michelle, who worked in the hospital’s financial department, headed up to visit Issy. “I’m so sorry. I am here if you need anything,” she said.
That evening, my son, now off duty, drove home and returned with his one-year-old daughter Rylee, my mom’s first great grandchildren. “Issy, Rylee is here.”
The parade of people who loved her had begun.
