Susan and Margaret (Maggie) McGahern’s sisterhood

Susan McGahern and Maggie’s sisterhood is a relationship of practical care as much as affection: they shared a home and livelihood, helped one another establish security, and remained connected through bereavement and the care of Susan’s children. After Susan’s death, Maggie’s grief and her acts of support make visible a bond that had long been lived through work, family loyalty, and mutual dependence.

A shared home and reciprocal support

When Susan received a scholarship to attend the Marist Convent in Carrick-on-Shannon as a boarder, her family struggled to meet the extra costs it did not cover. They managed without drawing attention to their sacrifice, and were proud of her. The scholarship also marked a divergence in the siblings’ opportunities: Jimmy, as the older boy with an ailing father, was unlikely to be able to take it up. Susan’s later success did not sever her ties with her family. Once she began teaching, she helped Pat and Maggie establish themselves in Ballinamore. For years, the three lived together above their shop on High Street, by the railway station, until Susan married.

That history complicates Francis (Frank) McGahern’s suspicion that Susan was still sending money to her siblings when the family lived at Aughawillan. The memoir makes clear that the help had, by then, flowed the other way: Maggie and Pat were helping Susan. Their closeness was not simply a record of Susan’s generosity to relatives who needed a start. It was a reciprocal arrangement that changed with circumstance, allowing the sisters and their brother to sustain one another over time.

Work, memory, and grief

Maggie’s care also appears in the ordinary work of family life. In a letter to Frank after Susan’s death, she identified a coat and school things for Monica and Margaret, and remembered how Susan had spent her spare time knitting and sewing for the children. The school bags and stockings were practical items, but the letter turns them into reminders of the labour Susan had quietly performed. Maggie’s attention to what the children needed sits beside her awareness that life was continuing without Susan’s help.

The loss affected Maggie beyond such practical recollections. When she visited the children of her brother Jimmy, she could take pleasure in seeing them well and happy, yet remained heartbroken while trying to keep her composure. The memoir also records that she struggled to sleep after Susan’s death and could not pray at the grave: painful memories and questions overwhelmed her there, and she had to go into the church to pray. Her grief therefore unsettles the outward steadiness she tried to maintain. The sister who had shared a household and helped build a life with Susan now had to carry memories that made even the graveside difficult to approach.

The proposal and Maggie’s judgment

Frank’s proposal to Maggie brought the sisters’ bond into a difficult posthumous context. In her reply, Maggie asked him to wait at least twelve months before raising the matter again. She questioned how he could be so eager to marry after having loved Susan, and made clear that her chief concern was that Susan’s children should not be forgotten. Her response ties any possible marriage not to romantic possibility but to obligations created by her sister’s death and the children’s vulnerability.

The narrator considers why Maggie entertained the proposal at all. His sisters thought that custom, the scarcity of positions for women, Maggie’s shop and possible money, and the prospect of safeguarding the children might have drawn her to it. He also notes that a deceased wife’s sister sometimes married the widower to protect the children and prevent a potentially hostile stepmother from entering the household. Maggie later said she might have been hard up, but not so hard up as to accept for that reason. The narrator believes she used custom to deflect the proposal and deliver a rebuke without open confrontation; if Frank renewed it after the year had passed, she rejected it. These competing readings leave Maggie’s intentions open to interpretation, but her stated concern for Susan’s children is unmistakable. Frank was also courting Mollie Waters while waiting for Maggie’s answer, and the children’s tentative thought that a beautiful stepmother might be welcome gave way to the heartbreak of imagining anyone in Susan’s place.

Reunion after Susan’s death

The narrator’s later journey to see Maggie shows how the relationship endured in the next generation. In the heat of summer, he cycled from Cootehall to Drumshanbo, took the train to Ballinamore, and wheeled his bicycle from the station to Maggie’s shop. As soon as they greeted one another, both began to cry. Maggie lifted the counter leaf, brought him inside, sent the new shop girl out to serve, and dried his face. Their conversation soon opened out; she made tea and cooked a large fry with halves of tomato, then a considerable luxury.

That welcome joins emotional recognition to tangible care. Maggie did not ask the bereaved boy to contain his grief or keep it outside the shop; she made room for it, then fed him. Later, Pat accompanied him to the grave, where he prayed beside fresh clay and wilted flowers. The scene places Maggie’s shop and Susan’s grave within the same journey: one offers immediate shelter and sustenance, the other makes the loss physically present. Their sisterhood thus persists in the care Maggie gives Susan’s son, without pretending that such care can replace his mother.

Care carried forward

After Susan’s death, Katie McManus partly took on Susan’s former role of protecting the children from their father’s rages, using quiet interventions to move them out of danger and comfort them. When the father refused to allow Katie to return, Maggie eventually made the face-saving arrangements that enabled her to do so. The memoir emphasizes that Katie’s return improved the household’s order and regularity but did not restore the children’s earlier protection: she was not permitted to challenge the father’s authority over them. Maggie’s intervention nevertheless helped preserve a connection to the care Susan had once provided. In this limited but consequential way, the sisters’ shared concern for the family continued after Susan’s death, carried forward through Maggie’s support for the person who had helped look after Susan’s children.