Death of Margaret

Margaret’s death at seven weeks old turns an already precarious household into a scene of shock, grief, and accusation. Her mother, Angela McCourt, clings to her after the doctor declares that she is gone; her father, Malachy McCourt, stands shaking and later drinks. The loss is not confined to the morning of her death: it returns in the family’s memories of the infant in her pram, in the account of her father’s grief, and in later deaths that deepen the children’s exposure to illness and bereavement.

The morning of her death

Angela wakes the household and asks what is wrong with the child. Malachy is at the window rocking Margaret and sighing; she is quiet and a little cold. When he returns with the doctor, the physician examines the baby—prodding her, lifting her eyelids, and feeling her neck, arms, and legs—then straightens up and shakes his head. The declaration that she is gone abruptly changes the family’s anxious waiting into bereavement.

The doctor asks whether an accident occurred, whether anyone dropped Margaret, or whether the boys played too roughly with her. Malachy denies that anything of the kind happened. He signs the paper that allows the doctor to take her for examination, while Angela begs for a few more minutes with her baby. When Malachy reaches for Margaret, Angela pulls away and repeatedly moans, refusing to let the moment end. The doctor wraps the child in a blanket; Angela cries out that he will smother her and invokes Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Her desperate protest registers the gap between the living mother’s need to hold her child and the practical authority of the doctor, who says he cannot stay all day.

After the doctor leaves with Margaret, Angela turns to the wall and becomes silent. The twins cry from hunger, but Malachy stands in the middle of the room staring at the ceiling, his face white. He beats his thighs with his fists, then comes to Francis’s bed, puts a shaking hand on the boy’s head, and says he is going out for cigarettes. The child’s death thus leaves the surviving family’s ordinary needs—feeding the twins and comforting the children—unanswered in the room, even as both parents are overwhelmed by the loss.

Grief, blame, and the empty pram

Mrs. Leibowitz comes to help Angela sit up against the wall. Angela seems smaller; she presses Francis’s hand against her cheek and holds on to it. Her address to him does not mean that she is thinking of him rather than Margaret: she is holding the hand available to her while grieving the daughter who has died. Mrs. Leibowitz tells Francis plainly that his little sister is dead, then asks where his father is. Angela answers that Malachy is drinking. She repeats that he cannot get a job but can find money for drink, and her accusation joins bereavement to the family’s material insecurity and to the strain of his drinking.

Angela’s grief breaks again into questions about where Margaret is. She recalls the circumstances of the death: Margaret had been alone in her pram in the middle of the night, and Angela believes she should have been watching her. She repeats that her daughter lived only seven weeks and died alone. Mrs. Leibowitz holds her and tries to console her by saying that babies sometimes die and that God takes them. Angela cannot accept that comfort: she returns to the pram near her bed and wonders whether she could have picked Margaret up, then questions what God would want with little babies. The scene does not resolve her self-blame or religious anguish; it lets them recur in the same questions and images.

The family’s response

In the days surrounding the loss, care comes in concrete acts from the women nearby. Minnie MacAdorey and Mrs. Leibowitz help with the children and household; Minnie supplies diapers, washes the twins, and brings mashed potatoes. At the table, Mrs. Leibowitz insists that something must be done for children who are running wild and asks where their father is. Minnie reports that Malachy is out drinking and describes how, after Margaret died, he went wild along Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue, was thrown out of bars near the Long Island Railroad Station, and might have been jailed had the police not understood that he was grieving. She also says that he had not drunk after Margaret was born, calling that restraint a miracle, and that the little girl had brought something out in him.

That account gives Malachy’s drinking a painful double meaning without removing its cost to the family. He is absent from the household when Angela most needs help, and his drinking is a source of anger amid unemployment and poverty; yet Minnie’s recollection presents his public, uncontrollable grief as a consequence of Margaret’s death. The neighbors’ intervention—washing, feeding, and worrying over the surviving children—contrasts with his flight to drink and with the family’s lack of money. Margaret’s death is therefore both intimate bereavement and a crisis that makes the household’s dependence on others visible.

Deaths that follow

The loss becomes part of a wider pattern of childhood illness and death. Six months after Oliver dies, Eugene is found cold in the bed on a November morning. Dr. Troy says that Eugene died of pneumonia and asks why he had not been taken to hospital sooner. Malachy and Angela both say they did not know; the doctor answers that children die because people do not know. He warns that even a slight cough or rattle in the throat in the boys must prompt an immediate visit, and that they must be kept dry because the family seems to have weakness in the chest. His warning gives the earlier bereavement a grim context: the children face recurrent illness, while recognizing its signs and securing timely care are difficult.

At Eugene’s death, Malachy again beats his fists against his thighs. He blames the dampness from the River Shannon for taking Oliver and Eugene, while the adults prepare Eugene’s body in a white gown and rosary beads. He and Francis pray for Margaret, Oliver, and Eugene as being happy in heaven. The repeated gestures and explanations do not erase the differences among the deaths; they show grief returning in the father’s body, in his attempt to name a cause, and in the family’s religious language.

Still later, when Francis contracts typhoid fever, Angela cries out that she may lose the whole family. Dr. Troy takes the boy to the Fever Hospital at the City Home, where a nurse tells Angela that an exception has been made to the usual rule barring visitors because he is at a crisis. The episode makes the earlier fear newly present: a surviving child’s severe illness revives the possibility of another death, but this time a doctor names the disease and hospital treatment is provided. Margaret’s death remains one of the losses through which the memoir measures the family’s grief, the limits of their care, and the precariousness of childhood survival.