Esther McCarthy: I hope to pass down the legacy of my mam’s love to my children

Esther McCarthy: 'It was her anniversary yesterday. It always falls around Mother’s Day.' Picture: Emily Quinn

This isn’t really my story to tell, but she’s not here to share it so I hope she wouldn’t mind. It was her anniversary yesterday. It always falls around Mother’s Day.

I’m piecing together a lot of it from little stories from family and friends, a precious letter she left her husband, who gave it to me, and possibly my imagination.

I didn’t get to know her myself. I have fragments, flutters, feelings.

Fleeting images at the peripheries of my memories, but maybe these are made up.

I think I remember hiding behind her on the couch when the Incredible Hulk was on the telly.

Sitting on a curb on Red Abbey St, playing with her skirts. I can see her smile, a little crooked, very kind, a bit rascally, when I close my eyes, but it’s probably from a photograph I saw rather than a real memory. She met her first and only boyfriend when she was young — 12 or 13 — out around the green in Ballyphehane.

Her grandmother was bedridden, and then her mother became very sick, so she left school to look after them and run the house around the same age.

Her grandmother died when she was 15, her mother passed away 10 months later. She probably didn’t know this, but her eggs, the ones that created my sister and me were formed inside of her as a foetus while she was inside of our grandmother’s womb. We are connected at a cellular level, I like thinking about that.

But now she was the mammy of the house. She reared her younger sister and brother while her father, a gentle, stoic man, worked as a carpenter. She also made the dinners for her bachelor uncles on both sides. She made sure people were minded.

I don’t think it was all that unusual at the time, 1969, for girls to leave school early. She was embarrassed by her spelling, she said so in that letter, but she had lovely handwriting.

I bet she would have been creative if she’d had the time — and the chance. Her dad and his twin both won scholarships to Crawford School of Art. She was kind to kids and crazy about animals. She was fiercely loyal and a bit wild.

She could talk to anyone, no matter how rough or how tough, she made friends easily.

She was a bit of a tomboy, a clever card player, and she was funny. She didn’t take a good photograph, I was told, she was much prettier in real life. She married the boyfriend when she was 23, in 1976, and had some party!

They were a perfect match, everyone said, mad about each other. She gave birth to her first daughter in 1977. She named her Esther Norma after her mother and her sister.

Then, the bad news came. In a different form to that which took the women before her — but it was cancer all the same. The kind that gets described with dark words; malignant, aggressive, rare. It was in her brain. She started treatment, travelling to Dublin. It was expensive to get there and, with a little baby at home, it must have seemed very far away from their house near the Lough.

She was a person of faith; she prayed, she believed in God. She went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to beg for a miracle. I heard she asked her priest for permission to use contraception, but he advised her it was against God’s will.

But ... if she got pregnant, she’d have to stop radiation therapy.

Her second daughter was born in 1978, named after her husband’s mam, Ann. Baby Ann had to be taken out early — an emergency — so many weeks premature, that when she finally made it out of the incubator, it ended up there was only 11 months between her girls.

One year, 11 months, and one day later, on March 21, 1980, Linda Marie McCarthy (née McEnery) died at home. It was not peaceful or pain-free. She was 26 years old. Having spent a lot of her life making sure people were looked after, she made sure her daughters were minded. She didn’t ask her husband, she asked his mother. The one who had eight children, just seven years between her youngest and Linda’s eldest. The one who took the two-year-old and the one-year-old in without hesitation.

Because they were small, they heard everyone else call her mam — so they did too. Although they grew up without Linda, they did not grow up without a mam. She made sure of that. Linda’s family too, enveloped her daughters with love, consistent and unconditional, and were always there for them. This is my mother Linda’s story, but it’s part of mine too. Now I’m a mammy, I imagine what worry she had, what aching regret to know she wouldn’t be there. She was in unconscionable physical pain at the end, I was told, but the knowing she would not see us grow up must have hurt so much more.

“Ah,” she wrote in that last letter to her husband, “our beautiful girls. I love them so much.” That love is her legacy, one I hope I can pass on to my children. Not everyone gets that chance, and I don’t take it for granted. So Happy Mother’s Day, Mammy Linda, to her mam Esther, her grandmother Hannah, and to our mam, Ann McCarthy. Thanks for making sure we were minded.