Silence and Service: Searching for My Grandfather

Creagh Cemetery, Ballinasloe, County Galway, 2012

We are the last to arrive, scrabbling our way through the new graves at the back of the cemetery in order to get a good vantage point. There must be two hundred people here, gathering round the open plot and spilling backward down the paths where cars have been parked by those who couldn’t get a spot in the small carpark to the front of the graveyard. My sister left her car on the Roscommon road; we pray that her English registration plates won’t attract unwanted attention. The rain holds off, though the low cloud has threatened all day, making its own contribution to the somber mood: the “pathetic fallacy,” my mother will pronounce later.

The prayers are getting underway; my uncle’s coffin is still being shouldered by the escort of six middle-aged, balding men who had gathered around the entrance of the funeral home earlier in the day and who’d carried the casket, shrouded under an Irish flag, to the church with military precision. Each wears an Easter lily made out of cloth and pinned to their lapels. They approach the open grave and begin to lower the coffin, guided by two attendants who have been waiting quietly beside the mound of earth. The flag has been removed and folded in a precise square before being handed to my aunt, who clutches it to her. The priest begins to lead the prayers. I glance over at my mother. My oldest brother is beside her should support be needed, but she stands there erect and wet-cheeked. She knows the ritual. This is the sixth brother she has laid to rest; three are buried in other parts of this cemetery, as are her parents, a nephew, and an infant niece.

The graveside oration is conducted by an elderly man who speaks mostly in Irish interspersed with a few English words. My school Irish can’t quite follow the thrust, although I pick up individual words and phrases. I understand his final sentence; how when he was a boy, he’d always wanted to be a member of the clann Mac Cana. The crowd seems to murmur agreement. I understand that feeling. For the past thirty-six hours I’ve been surrounded by that clann; I’ve seen men and women, little boys and girls who bear the hallmark wiry blond hair, the high cheekbones and foreheads, the pale blue eyes. I’ve felt strangely proud to be identified as one of them.

All my life I’ve heard stories about this clann. About the ten little girls and boys ranging over Ballinasloe during the 1930s and ’40s, watching drowned dogs float down the River Suck, stealing coffin lids to use as improvised rafts, swinging out of trees, and raiding the ammunition store to construct makeshift explosions.

The stories that have gripped me the most have been those surrounding the man who fathered those children, my grandfather Michael McCann, the quiet man from North Mayo who was involved in all the major conflicts of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Like many of his generation, he never spoke about his exploits. Stories filtered down through my grandmother and mother about the horrors he must have seen, the comrades lost, the quiet bravery he took for granted.

I’d been planning to write at length about him for some time. The most I had mustered had been passing references in some of my poems. In one, I refer to his walking stick, which currently rests in my mother’s stick stand and which mirrors an earlier stick he is photographed with when posing in his British Army uniform during World War I. In another, I picture him discussing with his older brother the prospect of going off to war. I had even made a start on a memoir a few years back, before life, and my own father’s death in 2010, had interrupted. I’d interviewed my aunts and last remaining uncle, Liam, the one being buried today. Time doesn’t wait for us, I...