Mary Kate O'Flanagan - Carry Him Shoulder High

 

So, my parents found themselves with the responsibility of raising six daughters. They took that really seriously and they really wanted to empower us. They told us there was no ground we couldn't break and we could be any number of things as long as we worked for them. But what they hadn't factored in was that they had already given us everything that we needed to walk through this world fearlessly, which was five sisters each. And if anything, we had a superabundance of self-assurance. My sister Olivia always says, “Our family motto should be underprepared but overconfident.” [audience laughter] 

 

But all that changed one morning 10 years ago when my sister Catherine rang me to tell me that our father had dropped dead. He was 74, but he'd been as fit as a flea up until the night before. So, we were all poleaxed with shock. But thank God, if there's one thing the Irish do right, it's death. Because in English you say, “I'm sorry for your trouble,” but in Irish we say, “Tá mé i mo sheasamh leat.” I'm standing with you. And we mean that literally. First, the neighbors come with enough food for an army and then an army comes. 

 

So, we had a traditional Irish wake where literally hundreds of people loved my father and loved us, came to sit with us and pray with us and sing songs. I'm not going to lie, a drink was taken and [audience laughter] mostly to tell stories. While he lay there in his open coffin, those stories kept him alive for a few more hours, how he read Tolstoy to us at bedtime when were little girls, before we could read ourselves. 

 

When we could read ourselves, he made a big ceremony of taking us to the bed library and getting us our first library card and telling us, “The whole world is yours now.” How he didn't allow us to watch television unless there was a good movie on anything with Fred Astaire or John Wayne. He saw nothing contradictory and completely identifying with both those images of masculinity. [audience laughter] 

 

And in the solidity of those Irish traditions handed down generation from generation, I felt such comfort, and I realized why they never change. But there was one tradition that just wouldn't work for us, and that was when the undertaker came to me and my sisters and said, “So, we need to know who are the six men who are going to carry the coffin?” And I said, “Well, there are six of us.” And he said, “Okay, so, you're husbands then?” I looked at my sisters, and I saw without us ever having discussed it, we were all in complete agreement. And my sister Sarah said, “No, she means we're going to carry the coffin.” 

 

And he said, “Oh, isn't that lovely that you would want to do that. But a coffin's much heavier than you think, and it's unwieldy. It would be better if you let the men do this for you.” And my sister Catherine looked at him very calmly and said, “It would be better if you let us do this for our father.” He came back to us with a counter offer and he said, “How about if we wheel the coffin along and you girls walk beside it like a guard of honor?” And my sister Rebecca said, “Shoulder high. My father will be carried from this house, shoulder high, and by us.” 

 

So, with misgivings, they allowed us to break with tradition and to stand up and carry our father's coffin as long as the men were standing in reserve. But when they lifted him and put him on our shoulders, he wasn't heavy at all. My father wasn't a big man, and there was nothing the six of us couldn't do together. It was unwieldy. We also had an additional problem, which is there's a big height disparity in my family. [audience laughter] 

 

So, Rachel and Rebecca, do you remember that badass shoulder height for her is about four foot off the ground. They're like 5-foot altogether. Then come me and Olivia, who are 5’6”, and Sarah and Katherine bringing up the rear, 5”10. So, there's quite a considerable tilt [audience laughter] on the coffin. But we managed it. We carried him from the house to the church, from the church to the graveyard, where we put him in the broken ground and we said goodbye to him forever. My lovely aunt said afterwards, “You know, for all the great stories that were told, the most eloquent testimony to the best part of that good man's life was watching the six strong women he raised carrying him to his rest.” 

 

And that should have been a comfort, but it was no comfort at all. Because in the weeks and months that followed, what I discovered was we weren't strong women. We were women who'd had a source of strength that was taken from us. And each one of us was bowed down in our own private grief. I found that the bonds that tied us together were loosening, because before, whenever we came together, we'd laugh and tell stories. And now, whenever one of us saw another one, we'd just start crying and we started avoiding each other. 

 

It went on like that until six months after his death. My sister Rebecca had finished a huge job, and she just got on a plane and went to the other side of the world. She rang me from there the next day and she said, “Mary, you're in Mom and Dad's house, right? Could you just go and check and see if someone's been monkeying with Dad's phone?” And I said, “Yes. What's going on?” She said, “Just check.” So, I went to his desk and I said, “Have it here, Rebecca. It's dusty and the battery's dead, like nobody's been near it. What's going on?” And she said, “Okay.”

 

I sat on the balcony of the hotel last night, and I looked up at the sky and I just said, “Dad, I can't go on If you don't exist anymore. I'm going to need a sign.” And I said, “Oh, Rebecca, but what's that got to do with the phone?” And she said, “So my phone beeped this morning and it said, you have one new message from Dad.” I said, “Dad sent you a message from beyond the grave?” And she said, “Well, it's the last message that he ever sent me, but it came through again. “And I said, “What did it say?” And she said, “It said, I'm home now, Bex. You can call whenever you want.” And I went, “Oh, Rebecca.” And she said, “Do you think that's a sign?”

 

Maybe it was just a glitch in the system, and I said, “Yeah, that happens sometimes. What's that called, Rebecca?” And she said, it's called a ghost in the machine. And we started laughing. And she said, “Do we have the audacity to believe?” And I said, “Rebecca, you sent up a prayer and your father's unstoppable love penetrated the veil between the living and the dead to send you a sign. I dare you not to believe. Plague. Locusts, you'll get next.” And she said, “So, what do we do now?” And I said, “We tell the others.” And that's how my father gave me back the only thing I need to walk through this world unafraid, my five sisters.