Remembering my Dad, Kenneth Ireland, Sr.

Kenneth Lawrence Ireland, Sr.

Aug. 8, 1913 - May 20, 2014

My Father was a remarkable man, and he lived a long and truly blessed life. When he died on May 20th, he was almost a hundred and one years old, and I might have entirely missed knowing and appreciating him.

I have no idea where to begin, so many stories about my Dad’s intelligence, his impeccable memory, his endless curiosity and quick wit. His golfing buddies will testify how much he loved the sport and bridge partners will swear that he remembered every card played even when he was more than 100 years old. People will tell stories about his work ethic, his writing and stamp collecting. He was devoted to his family, our mother Lee, her sister Judy, his Dad, his brothers, our Uncle Donny and Rich, Uncle Chunk, his wife Freddy, and Bill, Don’s partner, his seven grandchildren and six great grandchildren as well as his many, deep friendships.

I want to share one memory that changed our relationship. It’s also about memories. On one of my first visits to Huntington Commons, in part to hide my trepidation about not having visited for a long time (I almost called it off and probably would not have made the trip without Ashish’s encouragement and support) plus my personal fears about not measuring up, I tried to start a fun conversation--reminiscing about growing up. 

We went back to the time when he was a young dad soon to have 4 kids, a new business, and the responsibility for an extended family that included our maternal grandmother, Nana, and mother’s sister, Judy, who was suffering from TB at a time when cure was far from certain. But our family life, thanks to both Mother and Dad, extended beyond those concerns.

Our parents had a close circle of friends, other young couples in Nichols. Bif and I went up and down Huntington Turnpike, and talked about the people we grew up with and their kids. Their shared experiences included learning life’s lessons during the Great Depression and fighting a great war, raising families and building schools, bike trips on Nantucket and family summers on Cape Cod. Bob and Louise Dunning, Dick and Barbara Sargent, Les and Shirley Nothanagle, Mae West, Dave Peck, the Flemmings with their eight kids, Bif remembered everyone.

Then there was the Milford Yacht Club, our memories of the countless summer weekends when we campaigned our Lightning up and down Long Island Sound and our sailing friends, the life guards and sailing instructors who Dad had a hand in hiring. He spearheaded the first World Championship for the Lightning class in Milford, and that opened up the opportunity for him and mother to travel to Italy and Peru. When we talked about Ned and Emily Daly, their sons Ned and Jerry, he had me pick up the phone and call Ned Junior.

From the days of Ireland Heat Treating on the Post Road, we talked of his many loyal workers, his long-term secretary, Hilda Graff, who was almost part of our family, and the men who’d encouraged Dad to go out on his own. 

We drifted in and out of this conversation over the three days we spent together. For more than 60 years I believed a story I made up: that my Dad was distant, that just because we’d had a difficult time communicating (and of course that was entirely his fault, not mine), that Dad was somehow self-absorbed and not really in touch. 

Nothing could have been farther from the truth. 

He remembered details that I’d entirely forgotten or never heard before. But what really astonished me was the level of feeling, the kindness and compassion in his recollections. He talked of the happy events and the sad moments, the setbacks as well as the accomplishments in a way that made them present. It was so clear that he cherished these men and women. As we talked I could see his face change. I felt his admiration for their successes, sadness for their losses, and gratitude for their friendship. I can also tell you that if there was any funny story about any of the people we talked about, he told it with his gentle laugh and bright smile. That weekend he gave me a real gift—himself.

When I talk to my friends about my father, they are amazed that he lived such a long life, and that it was such a happy and rich life right to the end. They ask, “What was his secret?” Those of us who were close to him know that he was not perfect by any means, that he had his share of disappointments and sorrows, but when I look at his life for an antidote to life’s sufferings I marvel at the wonderful way he connected with so many people, accepting and treating everyone with an even hand, balanced with good humor and love. 

I can’t close without thanking all the people here in Kennebunk who became part of Dad’s family during his last years, the friends and admirers who welcomed me when I came to visit. I will mention Ruth, Annette and Nancy, the Chandlers, by name, and I have to include Dick and Peg, who are no longer with us. 

Julie, thank you for everything you did to make Dad’s last years so rich and fulfilling. You are a totally extraordinary woman.

It’s best to end with a funny story, and one that inspires me, as I grow older. 

When we were celebrating Dad’s 90th birthday at Elen and Charlie’s ranch up in the high Arizona desert, I told Dad that my friends who were golfers (I am not one) were really impressed that he’d cut 7 strokes off his handicap since he was 85. He looked at me with a deadly serious face and said, “Well, Ken, I’m sorry that it isn’t true. … It’s 11. “

*The photo was taken at Bif's 100th birthday party which we celebrated on Goose Rocks Beach, at the Tides Inn where he worked in the kitchen during the depression. Ruth, Dad, Annette, Julie and me.

A tribute to Julia Wilson Carroll

Julia Wilson Carroll

June 3, 1923-May 16, 2006. 

11/19/07

On November 11, 2007, Aunt Judy's ashes were placed in the earth next to her sister's, Leona Carroll Ireland, my mother, in Nichols Connecticut. I prepared this to be part of the eulogy that my sister Julie (named after our aunt) delivered at the mass in the parish church with her own additions and edits.

“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate,” the Apostle Paul.

Paul’s “Hymn to Love” crossed my desk sometime between when the medical students in Tucson had learned all they could from her physical remains and arranging this service to honor her memory and her life.  And I thought to myself: yes, this is Aunt Judy, Judy as she ought to be remembered. 

Here is a very modern translation (by Eugene Peterson) of those verses from one of Paul’s letters to the Christians in Corinth:

Love never gives up.

Love cares more for others than for self.

Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.

Love doesn’t strut,

Doesn’t have a swelled head,

Doesn’t force itself on others,

Isn’t always “me first,”

Doesn’t fly off the handle,

Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,

Doesn’t revel when others grovel,

Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,

Puts up with anything,

Trusts God always, 

Always looks for the best,

Never looks back, 

[And] keeps going to the end.

Judy Carroll would certainly be embarrassed to be remembered by quoting this famous praise of the highest love-she was a private woman who would never dream of using fancy words to describe her interior life. But even if you just spent a day with her, it was clear that her interior life, nurturing and relying on her connection with God, was part of her ordinary life, like getting out of bed. 

Almost everyday of her last years in Green Valley, she carved out time to sit quietly in the back of Our Lady of the Valley church. It was part of her routine, like having lunch with Ken and Lee, playing bridge or watching her beloved Yankees on the TV. When we visited her, she might mention, almost in passing, that we were near the church, and that, yes, this is where she parked, a spot that was shaded, protection from the desert sun, and not too far to walk to rear pews, to sit in silence in the presence of the Sacred. 

There were times in Judy’s life when she could not get out of bed, during her bouts with serious illness, tuberculosis, cancer, and crippling osteoporosis. It was then she showed us in terms of real life what Paul praises: she put up with an enormous amount of pain and suffering but she trusted God always, always looked for the best, and never looked back.

She was our mother, Leona’s only sister, her only sibling, and was always part of our family. When we were growing up, we lived together. It almost seemed at times that we had two mothers. Elen said that was her experience, and she took care of Judy with the love and care of a daughter in her last days. 

So it is from this bank of shared memories that I have chosen some stories and anecdotes that we can remember today as we pray for her, remember her with love and finally lay her to rest.

I remember, as a child, when our mother, next to whom she is now buried, would also stop into church for a quick visit. It was during the time Judy was confined to Laurel Heights sanatorium in Shelton for treatment and only a slim hope of complete recovery from tuberculosis. At some point during her confinement, her sister, our mother, was making a novena and a stop at Saint Theresa’s on Main Street in Trumbull was part of her daily routine. One day she came back to the car with tears and a smile. She said, “I am almost sure that Judy is going to be alright. I may be hallucinating, but I saw the statue of the Infant of Prague move his arm in a blessing.” Whether it was a hallucination or not, whether it was a miracle or the miracle drug streptomycin which saved her, it was clearly the work of God in the eyes and hearts of both sisters.

The story in the family was that this forced interruption in the life of a young woman, in those days, reduced the possibility of finding an eligible young man. And it was probably the case. And we as kids knew her rather dashing suitor, Joe Gurbach, who would take her out every Friday night in his sports car for close to 12 years, and we also knew that there was not the marriage proposal that she expected. Judy must have been disappointed, but whatever regret or anger might have existed was entirely gone in her later years. She simply said that some opportunities had been taken from her, but that she still loved her life as it was. Such a bright and down to earth example of what Paul lists among love’s highest qualities: that it doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.

We as kids used to call the seat next to Aunt Judy’s at the dining room table, the “death seat,” because it was there that you got a thorough training in table etiquette. As I think back to the her firm directions, “keep one hand in your lap and not on the table,” “buttocks to the back of the chair,” “look up and answer when you are spoken to you,” I remember that Paul too, before he gets to the word “love” in 1st Corinthians, talks about a lot of Do’s and Don’ts. Certainly there was a well-regulated Christian way of life instilled in Judy Carroll. 

There is a picture of her dressing as a nun when she was a St Augustine’s school in the 30’s; there was also a quiet suspicion among us that she might have wanted to enter a convent at one time, but caring for her mother took priority.

She did care for their mother, Catherine, during her last days. It was simply understood by both sisters that their mother would live out her days at home and that Judy would care for her. Judy and Nanna shared a room in our house on Huntington Turnpike and Prosper Place, and it was in that room that Nanna died, at home. We were all home when Fr. Halloran came to give Nanna the last rites, though the doors were shut to children for those events a half century ago. And in some ways this was just another expression of what she undertook as her life’s work, caring for others as a nurse, or in Paul’s words, “Love cares for others more than self.”

She did private duty as registered nurse for a wealthy man in Greenfield Hills. When we showed hesitancy in folding our napkins properly, she would tell us that Mr. H. Smith Richardson would insist that everyone at lunch fold their paper napkins properly so that they could be reused, and that he had more money than God so we had better listen up and learn. After Mr. Richardson recovered, she had a number of very wealthy clients. But at another point in her long working life, when she was an industrial nurse for the United Illuminating Company, she showed the same love and care for the more ordinary folks then in her care, whether it was a question of placing someone in treatment for substance abuse or having to tell a lineman’s wife that her husband had been killed on the job. (She told me that this was one of the most difficult tasks she ever had to perform). There is a lot in Paul’s other letters about there being no distinction among the followers of Jesus between rich and poor. Yes, Judy Carroll lived out that ideal too.

Today's mass, lovingly officiated by Monsignor Shea and St. Catherine's parish in Nichols, a town she called home and loved very much, is to pray for Judy and to honor her life. It is taking place almost 16 months after she died in hospice care on May 19 of last year. The reason is that Judy was firm in her wish that her body be given to a medical school so that she could, even after her physical life was complete, make a real contribution to educating the next generation doctors and perhaps relieve the suffering of disease and illness. Judy did know suffering in her life and had a deeply kind regard for others she only knew as fellow humans who shared her lot. The generosity of the final gift of her body cannot be overlooked and is a bright example to all of us. Thank you Judy from the bottom of our hearts. Looking at the whole of Judy's life, I would offer an additional line to close Paul's hymn: Love goes beyond life as we know it. You will always be with us Aunt Judy.

And so AJ, although your ashes have already been set alongside those of your sister very near here in the Nichols cemetery, I will close with the hymn that is usually sung when the casket is taken from the church to grave:

May choirs of angels welcome you and lead you to the bosom of Abraham; and where Lazarus is poor no longer, may you find eternal rest.