A Labor of Love

Two weeks ago, on Easter Sunday, my sister Mary passed away.

Easter is not a good holiday for my family.

Four Easters ago, my sister Jane, informed us that she had stage four Melanoma.

Despite putting up a heroic struggle, she was gone by that Christmas.

Mary’s death from a severe stroke was both sudden and unexpected.

It left all of us family members in a state of shock.

As we met that week to plan her services, I recalled that after Jane’s funeral she had asked if I would say a few words about her too.

This memory was no sooner out of my mouth, when my daughters, Meghan and Kate said, “Dad, we’d like to do it.”

I agreed and during the next few days and her calling hours, they obtained stories and thoughts about her that they wove into a beautiful eulogy.

I’d like to share it with you, so here it is.

Meghan: If my Aunt Mary were to describe her upbringing, she would probably have said that she was a “Prisoner of War.”

Katie: And she would have been right.

Meghan: Unfortunately for her, she was the first girl born into an Irish-Catholic family and had three older brothers who would tease her mercilessly.

Katie: She told me on one occasion, that the three boys locked Mary and her sister Jane in their bedroom, and then couldn’t get the door unlocked to let them out.

Meghan: They finally gave up and took the door off the hinges.

Katie: Aunt Mary was a gifted person, who could read music more easily than most people can read the newspaper. Everything seemed to come to her easily.

Meghan: She had an extensive vocabulary, and there were some words she used more than others, one in particular that she favored…which, ah, began with the same first letter as her last name.

Katie: She was a gifted pianist, a talented actress, and a straight A student. Her parents never knew about the straight A’s though, because her brothers would pay her to not show her report cards to her father.

Meghan: They knew that he’d want to see theirs next.

Katie: Her piano recitals were always on a Sunday afternoon.

Meghan: Her father, to his credit, would give up watching his New York Giants game to attend.

Katie: He was the guy you saw sneaking out in the dark as soon as she was done playing.

Meghan: As a Drama student at Buffalo State, she performed in some interesting plays.

Katie: In one, titled “Bird Bath,” she and the other performers flapped around the stage for an hour without any dialogue.

Meghan: Her brothers went to see it, but not because they were interested in the play.

Katie: Because they wanted to watch their father sit through it.

Meghan: His reaction was much more entertaining.

Katie: After graduation, she took a staff position with the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Meghan: She loved to recall how the actor, Clint Eastwood, who was a board member, was so very short when you saw him in person.

Katie: She then enrolled at the University at Buffalo Law School, where she was a talented and brilliant writer on the Law Review.

Meghan: She was enormously proud of an article she wrote about the Constitution’s double jeopardy clause, which was ultimately cited as authority by United States Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens.

Katie: After graduation, she served as a law clerk in the Appellate Division Fourth Department, where she made friendships with other law clerks and judges that she cherished for the rest of her life.

Meghan: She had the experience of working for a large law firm on Wall Street in New York City for a number of years before the tug of her family and home town brought her back to Syracuse. I was still a young kid when she moved back, and I remember that every year for my birthday, she would make a special date with me to take me out to lunch and the movies to celebrate.

Katie: Every year for Christmas, Aunt Mary would tell her nephews, Conor and Ryan Suddaby, to name three famous athletes from whom they would want autographs. Every year, she would manage to get a personalized and certified autograph from one of the three for each of them. They still say they had the best autograph collections of anyone they knew growing up.

Meghan: One year, my Aunt Jane and Uncle Glenn wanted to go away overnight for their anniversary. I often babysat for Conor and Ryan, but I wasn’t old enough to stay overnight without an adult present. So Aunt Mary happily agreed to be the responsible adult for the evening. Everything was going great, and Conor and Ryan were each asleep in bed for the evening, when Aunt Mary decided she wanted to go out in the garage to have cigarette. I walked out there with her, and the next thing I knew the door had slammed shut behind us and we were locked out of the house. We looked all over for a spare key and couldn’t find one, so Aunt Jane and Uncle Glenn had to drive back from Cazenovia to let us into the house. After that, every babysitter was provided with a spare key.

Katie: While I was in college, Aunt Mary took me to New York to see some shows and to introduce me to her college boyfriend Tom Fontana. We had a blast! Tom is a very successful Hollywood writer with a laundry list of accomplishments – but what Aunt Mary always wanted everyone to know about him MOST was that this was the guy whose glasses flew out of a dorm room window because she slapped him so hard for kissing another girl. You don’t mess with Aunt Mary.

Meghan: Aunt Mary had many, many talents, however, she was the first to tell anyone that domestic tasks were not one of them. My friend Justin Coyne managed her household for many years and was wonderful to her. At one point she told Justin that her future headstone should read: “She knew how to delegate.”

Katie: But there was no area of the law that she couldn’t master, from election law, to discrimination law, to criminal law. Over the course of her legal career, she served as an assistant district attorney for Bob Wildridge, and as a law clerk for Judge Stewart Hancock.

Meghan: She eventually worked in the Onondaga County Attorney’s Office, where she shared an office with Al Julian. This pairing may have been a strategic move by their bosses, as they both liked to yell, and we think what they meant to say was FAHEY, out loud, but in their excitement they confused it with another F-word. PAUSE. She was very happy as she finished out her career there. And I’ve heard that at one point, her colleagues even got her cake to commemorate her ability to use that other F-word so many times in the same sentence.

Katie: After Aunt Mary retired, a very kind and thoughtful neighbor started helping her with yard work and occasional maintenance items around her house, refusing to accept any payment for his help. She noticed that he often referred to her as SISTER Fahey, and assumed he had simply forgotten her last name. Imagine her surprise when she learned he had mistaken her for a nun! Never one to miss a chance for a little humor, including at her own expense, she chalked up the mistake to her own lack of fashion sense, and insisted that while she might not be a “frequent flier” at church, she DID have a relationship with God, which consisted of her frequently taking His name in vain.

Meghan: She was a fearless advocate for her clients. No one, and I mean no one, could intimidate Aunt Mary. She was also a loving and protective aunt for her nieces and nephews. Woe to the person who attacked or hurt a family member, because she had an elephant’s memory and never forgot them.

Katie: I guess you could say she had Irish Alzheimer’s before anyone knew it existed.

Meghan: At the same time, she was incredibly generous, and always willing to help others who were less fortunate than her. She would help out with legal issues for free, and would even purchase and give away laptops, furniture, and other gifts to people she knew could not afford them. She sent many care packages to soldiers over in Afghanistan, and seemed to really enjoy being there to support people during hard times and trying help them in whatever way she could. When people close to her needed a place to recover from surgery, she would open her home, give up her bed, and sleep on the couch until they were whole again.

Katie: She was intelligent, tough, incredibly loyal, funny, talented, supportive, generous, irreverent, and compassionate. As many of you have said over the last few days: “She was a gem.” Thank you.

At the end of it, I can honestly say that I learned about her generosity to others that she knew and didn’t know and which she never talked about.

I’m certain that she would have loved the memories and anecdotes that her nieces recounted and shared.

I love their eulogy and, more importantly, I love them for doing it.