NON-FICTION: Michael, Who Resembles God

Published in Palimpest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, volume 5, 2007

Michael, Who Resembles God

The fatal accident held up 10 trains on the main line from nine minutes to an hour and a half. The death train was delayed 68 minutes at the crash and lost 23 minutes at Patchogue where the damaged locomotive had to be taken off and a freight engine substituted for the rest of the run to Montauk. – New York Newsday, February 6, 1945, page 2

On the morning of February 5, 1945, my grandfather Michael kissed my grandmother May goodbye, dropped her off at Grumman’s garage where she was working for the “war effort,” and continued on to his job at the main plant in Bethpage. The night before he had a dream that my aunt Eileen, then eight, had lost a tooth—a premonition dream, according to family lore, which meant she would lose a friend. Michael was superstitious, and told May he was worried about Eileen.

While Michael was dreaming of Eileen losing her tooth, his sister Katherine lay dreaming of the banshee in her railroad apartment in Queens.

Due to the war being on, school was closed that Monday in February to conserve heat, and my then sixteen year-old mother Peg was at the movies with her fifteen year-old brother Michael and the eight year-old Eileen when their father’s body was tossed “400 feet from the crossing as the train carried the twisted truck chassis nearly a third of a mile scattering debris along the right of way.” Gregory Peck was in the film, but no one can remember the title.

I grew up knowing that my grandfather was killed by a train. It was part of my litany of family statistics: one of ten children, one died so I’m really one out of nine, number seven of ten, six of nine, three grandparents from Ireland, one from Poland, always had cats, Irish-Catholic yes hahaha that’s why there are so many of us, grandfather killed by train.

Every Sunday, with my grandmother in my aunt’s 1967 emerald green Mustang convertible (with white leather interior and roof that Eileen cleaned with a toothbrush) idling by the unmarked grave of my sister and the sizable granite stone engraved MANLEY/Michael, 1900-1945, we would recite ten times fast:

Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee
Huminah huminah huminah women
And huminah huminah huminah Jesus

Holy Mary, mother of God
Huminah huminah sinners
Huminah huminah deaths,
amen.

Followed by an Our Father. I would get very lost. But not my grandmother, as she was the one fingering the rosary beads. One, two, three, four she thumbed. She got to kiss the cross at the end, too. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory... Smooch.

I don’t really remember what I was thinking in the backseat of Eileen’s super clean Mustang. I do know that when I went to church with my grandmother and aunt, the cemetery was part of the deal. But so was a quarter for the candy store. Then there was breakfast with the family no matter who I went to church with, including jelly donuts, fresh hard rolls, bacon and eggs. What did it mean to me that a man I never met garnered the undying love and devotion of his wife and daughters who mourned his passing with unrivaled freshness their whole lives? I was six, seven, eight years old. I had a sweet tooth and liked to run with the boys and climb trees. What did I know about loss?

For Christmas 1944 Michael asked May if she wanted the diamond engagement ring he could never before afford. He was already giving her the clear deed to their house that year. He had come from Ireland with nothing, following my grandmother who, ticket to America in hand, refused to marry him in Ireland. I think she knew that if they married in Ireland, children would come and they might never make it abroad. She was determined to join her brothers in New York—perhaps for adventure, perhaps to make a better life for herself and her family. Twenty plus years later, after saving and working, the tide was finally turning for May and Michael Manley.

May, being the practical woman she was, told Michael she would prefer to hold off on the ring and get a washing machine. And so the brand spanking new Bendex arrived on Christmas morning. She was thrilled. Seven weeks later, her feelings changed, and she would always regret this choice.


Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. – Psalm 23

When I was growing up, May had a photo of my grandfather mounted on a piece of wood and jigsaw-cut in silhouette—a gift from my mother. She kept it in the built-in bookshelf behind her TV chair. The photo was mounted on a base, with Michael preserved in perpetuity like a thick paper doll, slightly contraposto, one arm close to his side and weighed down with a stack of horseshoes like ballast, the other arm poised in the fore, caught in that moment where the eye and hand silently measure distance between shoe and post, considering weight, velocity, the arc of the swing. Or perhaps he was just posturing for my mother the adoring photographer who loved to watch him fling horseshoes into the mortgage-free side yard. He is tall, dark, handsome, captured in a crisp suit. It was most likely a Sunday. My mother recently gave me this little statue, and so now my grandfather stands in my curio cabinet, nestled amongst my children’s clunky clay creations and school awards, considering his next move.

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

When May left her mother’s home in Ireland at the age of 19, she promised to return in five years. Five years came and went as May tried to save the fare for a trip home. Peggy and Michael came too, ten months apart. Then six years came, ten, eleven? And then the letter from Ireland months after my great-grandmother Mary was dead and buried. There would be no trip home to see Mom.

I wouldn’t fully comprehend the significance of this loss until I made my own pilgrimage to Ireland. May never talked about it, though along with my grandfather’s death, it shadowed me my whole life. I didn’t understand why May was so emotional when I went off to college, crying like she would never see me again. Her crying scared me—I think it scared all of us, Mom and Eileen included. But of course now I see a woman who said goodbye to her own mother, fully expecting to return. Who kissed her husband goodbye one morning, never to see him again. On her eventual trips back to Ireland with my mother and aunt, driving down the narrow roads of Dunmore in County Galway, May would call out, “Mom, I’m home.” And then there would be tears. It seems perfectly obvious to me now why goodbyes were so hard for May—why there was nothing light about them.

When May was bed-ridden in my mother’s house after the stroke that eventually killed her, she asked my mother, “Did my mother like the coat I bought her?” to which my mother replied, “Oh yes, she loved it.” May also called out constantly for Michael, and, given that she had a father, husband, brother, son, grandson and great-grandson named Michael, we couldn’t quite figure out who she meant. My brother Michael was the only one actually around, and so he would come to her with tea or to fluff her pillow, to be whichever Michael she wanted him to be. Michael the leader of heaven’s armies, Michael the archangel, Michael who is like God.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. -- Matthew 5:4


I am 45 years old now, avoiding a trip to the endodontist for a look at a failing molar that may have to be pulled. “Keep your teeth as long as you can,” May always told my mother, who, like me, has spent thousands and thousands of dollars preserving the masticators. I don’t think May’s advice has to do with the superstitious dream of losing teeth/losing a friend, I think it had more to do with the real discomfort May experienced when eventually, she traded the last few in for a full set of dentures. Still, I am trying to put all these pieces together in a meaningful way, through stories and bits of information gleaned, imagined and possibly invented over the years. The anecdotes are disjointed, though the feelings, the shadow, the extended mourning create a strong and steady arc.

I used to be puzzled and even annoyed by this never-ending sorrow. It felt like an imposition on me somehow—the dramatic and easy flowing tears, the idolizing of my grandfather, a seeming inability to move on. 10 years ago my father died. It was devastating, and as a family we came together, laughed, cried, eulogized, got angry, and for the most part, eventually moved on. Fathers die, life goes on. What was wrong with my grandmother, mother and aunt?

About two years ago Eileen sent me a copy of the newspaper accounts of my grandfather’s death. The front page headline of the New York Newsday South Suffolk Edition, February 6, 1945, in 1 inch bold letters reads:

SUFFOLK MAN DIES IN CROSSING CRASH (Story on page 2)

A photo of the mangled truck my grandfather was driving accompanies the article, along with what I imagine was the most important piece of information for my grandmother, that he was “killed instantly,” and the information quoted earlier that he had been tossed 400 feet from the point of impact. As I discussed the article with my mother, I realized that she didn’t even know this last detail. She knew his body was beyond recognition. The wake was closed casket, and when she and her cousin tried to peek inside when no one was looking, they discovered a metal seal beneath the lid.

May had neatly folded the article and kept it in her dresser drawer with valuables, showing it to no one. Like her grief, she tucked this piece of the story away, though we could all feel it. It wasn’t until May’s death that Eileen found it, and then she kept it to herself for another 12 years.

Beyond the gory details, the dramatic report of the “death train,” I, through the impersonal distance of reader to newspage was struck for the first time by just how sad and tragic this event was to this fledgling family. It hit me hard, like it happened to some other family yesterday and I was hearing of it for the first time. My father died at the more reasonable age of 69, after raising nine children to adulthood alongside my mother, and to a long illness where we had the privilege of preparing ourselves over time and gracefully escorting him to the cusp of the next world. But at 45, my grandmother was left with two teenagers and an eight year old to support, her heart broken in the most shocking way. Overnight she became a single mother and widow, and spent the next 25 years standing on her feet 40 hours a week, selling notions at
W. T. Grant and altering clothes in her home on the side.

Mom, we’re home!

I grew up with stories and photos of my mother, aunt and grandmother’s trips “home,” May’s house in Dunmore had been converted into a mechanic’s shop, and they always visited it, along with the cemetery, church and the neighbors and friends May knew. I ached to see this place, and finally took the trip with my mother, aunt and two sisters in 1998, the five of us packed in a mini-van, my mother and aunt shouting conflicting directions from the back seat through the streets of Dunmore. “I think we passed it.” “No, it’s just ahead on the left, set back from the road next to the bakery.” I drove past the bakery and pulled over. Before us stood a large parking lot. Since my mother and aunt’s last visit, the house had been razed.

We were shocked. The five of us got out of the van and walked around in disbelief. We took turns crying, asking Eileen and Mom to tell us every detail about the place they could remember, exploring the ruins of the (Episcopal!) church still standing next door, and eventually took pictures of each other standing where the house used to be.

Towards the end of our visit to Dunmore, we went to the old church cemetery where the bones of Mary and Michael Ryan lay—in one of the crumbling, unmarked graves where there is no one left to point and say “They’re right over here!” The rest of my crew was too tired for this last leg, and so I hiked up the hill and through the rusty iron gate, walked around a bit and then stood very still amongst the graves and weeds. I took long breaths, waiting for my heart rate to slow before returning to the van, and in the stillness felt something snap deep inside me. It wasn’t a breaking snap, it was something snapping together. It was something much larger than me, something that had long been apart.

After Dunmore, we drove on to my grandfather’s homestead in Crossmolina, County Mayo, covering the fifty miles by van that he used to cover on his bicycle when he returned home on breaks from his job as a gard in Dunmore, the job that took him to the chance meeting of my grandmother. We were greeted by celebratory shots of whiskey followed by a meal of meat, dark bread and root vegetables prepared by my grandfather’s niece and nephews, who have inherited the homestead which they still farm and on which they raise dairy cows. They have built a new house on the property, and the calves now live in the original structure where my grandfather and his seven siblings were raised.