“I had but the one beloved”
The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War“I had but the one beloved” names the narrator’s sense that Susan McGahern is irreplaceable. The phrase first emerges in a conversation about death and returns at her funeral; between those moments, a child’s fearful protest becomes the language of actual loss.
First Utterance
When Susan speaks of being in God’s hands, the narrator understands that she is contemplating the possibility of dying before old age. He answers, “People do not die until they are old,” then sets the abundance of heaven’s angels and saints against his own singular attachment: “I had but the one beloved.” The words register both anger at what seems unfair and fear that the person on whom his world depends might be taken from him.
His promise that he will become a priest, live with her near the church, and say Masses for her after her death is an attempt to imagine a future in which separation can be controlled. The phrase belongs to that effort: it makes the depth of his attachment plain even as his imagined assurances cannot protect her from mortality.
Return at the Funeral
At Susan’s funeral, the phrase returns inside a more formal religious image. The narrator recalls that she “has waited for the Lord as sentinels wait for the dawn, and now she goes to the Lord”; the promise of divine welcome is immediately set against the same private truth: “the Lord has many servants, and I had but the one beloved.” The wording now stands beside the physical work of mourning: the coffin is carried from the church, lowered into a grave lined with moss, and covered with earth.
The repeated phrase links the conversation about possible death to the completed burial without making the two occasions equivalent. Earlier, it voices alarm at a feared future; at the grave, it measures the loss that has occurred. The religious language remains present, but it cannot lessen the narrator’s sense of Susan’s singular place in his life.
Meaning and Narrative Function
The expression’s force comes from its contrast of scale. Heaven has many servants; the narrator has one beloved. That contrast allows the same words to carry private attachment through the public forms of funeral prayer and communal mourning. The funeral passage ends not with an account of consolation but with the narrator leaving the laurels and running to meet two men with fishing rods, hoping to go out on the river in the borrowed boat. Against the ceremony of death, the phrase preserves the immediacy of personal grief.
