Susan and Francis McGahern’s letters

Susan and Francis McGahern’s letters are both a practical exchange about illness and a record of how unevenly its danger was understood. Questions about Susan McGahern’s teaching and prospects of recovery sit beside farm reports, remedies, and efforts to reassure her; as her condition worsens, the correspondence exposes the distance between medical knowledge, family explanations, and the life she was trying to preserve.

Medical questions and the limits of reassurance

The correspondence includes an early letter from Frank McGahern to a doctor in Dublin, written to ask for a medical view of his wife’s case. He wanted to know whether she should give up teaching and what her chances of recovery were. He had already written at the beginning of her illness and received a detailed report. The memoir describes the tone of this later inquiry as defensive and slightly bullying, while also suggesting that it was characteristic of him. The questions are starkly practical, but they also show Frank seeking authority outside the household at a time when the family’s future depended on Susan’s health and work.

As the illness continued, Susan’s own letters began to register despair without dwelling on it. After spending several days in bed, she wrote that she was improved but still suffering, and wondered whether sunshine might help. She suspected that the cancer had returned, but people around her treated her stomach pain and recurring constipation and diarrhoea as an unrelated illness from which she could recover through effort. She asked Frank to write to Dr Corcoran. He was reluctant, although he had already contacted the doctor secretly. The letters therefore preserve a gap between Susan’s suspicion, the explanations offered to her, and the medical information Frank possessed.

Susan’s letters: illness within ordinary work

Susan’s correspondence does not consist only of reports about symptoms. Even while unwell, she asked after Frank’s health and the work he was doing at the barracks, in the garden, and on the bog. She reported that the oatfield had been rolled and that Uncle Pat had moulded the potatoes; she also described how ammonia obtained from James McGovern had been mixed with compound and spread on them. Because she had been in bed, she could not see the work being done and could only say that she supposed it had been done properly. The agricultural details show the household continuing to run around her illness, while the small qualification in her report marks how sickness had already removed her from tasks she once followed closely.

Her letters remain brief about her own suffering. In one, she called herself still unwell, mentioned staying in bed to see Dr Dolan, and hoped that something could be done before the trouble lasted too long. She also passed on that the children were well and closed as a loving wife. The tenderness and restraint of that sign-off contrasts with the seriousness the memoir later gives to her symptoms: the letters do not turn into full accounts of what she feared or what the disease meant. Their domestic attention continues even as her ability to participate in domestic life contracts.

Frank’s proposals and competing accounts of care

Frank also wrote to Maggie about the possibility of Susan moving to the barracks to rest. The proposal reached Maggie rather than Susan directly. The narrator considers that it may have been intended for public consumption rather than as a practical plan Frank truly expected to carry out. Maggie answered that she had asked Susan, who wished to stay at Corramahon while she was getting better and building up her strength. In this exchange, a possible change of home is filtered through a third person; Susan’s preference is reported, but the decision remains entangled with the family’s competing judgments about what her illness required.

Frank’s letter of 23 May 1944, addressed to his mother, gathers care, religious observance, medical advice, and authority into one document. He told her that he had enrolled her in perpetual adoration at the Poor Clares’ convent in Drumshanbo and had resumed fasting for her. He also sent Margaret a purported remedy for neuritis: hazelnuts carried on the person. For Susan, he prescribed dietary restrictions, warned her to move outside only gradually when she was better, and urged her not to worry. He said the nuns thought she should give up teaching and claimed that, if she acted reasonably, she had nothing to fear. His practical instructions are evidence of attention, but his reassuring certainty sits uneasily beside the medical report he had already received.

The letter also reveals friction beneath that reassurance. Frank accused Susan of losing confidence in God, worried that she might quietly oppose him over the children, and said the responsibility was too much for him as well. He invoked stubbornness in Susan and Maggie, then described himself as wicked and contrary but easily led if approached the right way. The mixture of admonition, self-description, religious language, and household concern makes the letter more than a simple account of support: it records Frank presenting himself as both burdened caregiver and authority over Susan’s choices. He admitted that he had written to Dr Corcoran, even while insisting there had been no need.

Letters after the last visit

The correspondence took on a different weight after Frank’s final visit to Corramahon. He spent the visit in grave conversation with Susan, who walked with him to the little iron gate at the road; the children were not allowed to accompany them. They never saw one another again. From then on, Frank’s contact with Susan was by letter, and he also began writing to Maggie. He regularly telephoned the guards in Ballinamore to have Uncle Pat call him, although the memoir suggests that Frank enjoyed the drama and attention as much as any practical urgency in these calls.

Maggie’s response to Frank’s advice shows that his letters did not necessarily reassure their recipients. After receiving two letters, she said that much of their contents had simply been passed over, adding that she did not mind while Susan was getting better. The response is bluntly ordinary, set against Frank’s elaborate counsel and the growing gravity of Susan’s condition. It also exposes how little control a writer has over how a letter is read: prescriptions and religious encouragement could be dismissed, or accepted only so long as improvement still seemed possible.

Epistolary record and the approaching loss

The memoir places these documents within a wider account of dying as a state that separates a person from the ordinary continuity of the world. Its reflection that “The world of the dying is different” gives a frame to letters in which routine remains visible—school, crops, diet, and family news—even as Susan’s future narrows. The correspondence makes denial legible not through a single admission but through the conflict between her suspicion of returning cancer, Frank’s assurances, and the practical plans made around teaching and rest.

The letters also preserve a relationship in which concern and control are difficult to separate. Susan attends to Frank and the family while reporting little about her own fear; Frank seeks medical advice, offers devotional and dietary measures, and presses his judgments about work, faith, and the children. Neither the household details nor the affectionate forms of address can resolve the medical uncertainty. Read together, the letters become an intimate but incomplete record: communication continues, yet the central truth of Susan’s condition remains unevenly spoken and increasingly impossible to contain.