Sue

Sue is remembered in John McGahern’s memoir as a mother whose tenderness and faith outlasted her presence in the family home. Her breast cancer, prolonged absences, and death unfolded amid secrecy and family dispersal, but the adult narrator understands the love she gave as a hidden strength that helped her children endure their father’s domination.

Identity and Family Life

Sue was a teacher, and her salary helped make her marriage to Francis (Frank) McGahern possible. The memoir places her within a family of seven children, including Margaret, Monica, and Dympna. She appears not through a continuous account of her life but through remembered scenes, family arrangements, and her own words preserved in letters. That partial portrait is central to the way the memoir represents her: important not only as a figure in childhood memory, but as someone whose experience and convictions the adult narrator continues to interpret. Her life had taken her from three rooms on a mountain through years with nuns, study among wealthy girls at the Marist Convent, and training at Trinity College Dublin. The memoirist sees her as having lost some of the earthy quality shared by her brothers and sisters, while retaining their humour. He describes her deepening trust in God as a defining part of her later life, particularly as illness tested the faith on which she relied.

Illness, Secrecy, and Separation

When Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer, she spent several weeks at the Mater Hospital in Dublin for tests and treatment. Her children were not told where she was. At the barracks, where they lived under their father’s direct authority, questions about their mother were discouraged and they were told instead to pray. The secrecy was not simply a private arrangement: it left the children uncertain about what had happened to her, and Sue herself was unhappy that they had been kept in the dark. A letter she sent from hospital conveyed her hope that her children would soon see her again, and her belief that the prospect of returning was helping her recover. She briefly came home to the barracks after the birth of Dympna, but the narrator remembered that visit only as a vague, almost delirious happiness. One sharper recollection was the journey with his father to a nursing home in Boyle to bring Sue and the baby home. Sue carried Dympna in a white shawl; laughter about the baby and Packie McCabe both having red hair passed around the car, though the young narrator did not understand it. After roughly a week, Sue left again, with Dympna placed in the care of Bridgie McGovern. The children still did not know where their mother had gone. The memoir later reveals a further instance of the children being arranged among relatives while Sue was still alive. Margaret and Monica went to Aughawillan School on the day the others were taken from Corramahon. Their father had insisted that the girls remain together, despite Maggie’s agreement to care for her godchild, Margaret. When Sue died, the girls were still at school; they were intercepted before reaching home and stayed with the Bradys through the funeral. They did not understand what had happened, and did not see the hearse pass. This delayed explanation makes the family’s separation part of the memoir’s larger account of how adult decisions and withheld information shaped the children’s experience of their mother’s illness and death.

Faith, Motherhood, and Marriage

Sue’s writing presents prayer as a recourse when her husband tried to press her beyond what she felt able to bear. She asked God for direction and help in raising the children, while explicitly refusing to blame them for her illness: she had cared for them because she wanted to, and had been happy doing so. Her faith therefore appears both as a source of endurance and as a language in which she could express the limits of what she was willing to accept. The memoir sets this inward reliance against Francis’s conduct during her final illness. He chose to write to her rather than visit, and answered her illness with prayer, fasting, and religious observances while continuing to criticize and reprimand her from a distance. The contrast is not between belief and unbelief: Sue and her husband both invoked religion, but the memoir distinguishes her appeal to God for help from his use of religious devotion alongside authority and emotional withholding. Sue’s own words also insist on the human reality of her suffering, including her conviction that her children were not to blame for it.

Death, Memory, and Lasting Influence

Sue died while Margaret and Monica were at school. In the aftermath, Francis demanded that Maggie take the two youngest children instead of the girls she had originally agreed to care for. When Maggie refused the changed arrangement, he took the older girls back, and all seven children were together again. The episode shows Sue’s death not as the end of the family’s upheaval but as a moment when decisions about the children continued to be made under their father’s control. The adult narrator recalls learning more about his father with time, but describes Sue’s influence differently: she never really left her children. He believes that the other life they had known with her, and the love she gave them, kept them from being broken in the worst years. Her significance is also bound to a promise he made to himself that one day he would say Mass for her. He credits that promise with helping him resist his father’s attempt to take him out of school, even though he ultimately followed a different calling from the one Sue had hoped for. In his adult reflections, she remains present in moments of unexpected security and peace, and in the landscape of summer lanes and lakes that he imagines sharing with her.