This is a copy of an e-mail sent to me on Tuesday 13th November 2012, by my cousin Alan O’Brien of Dublin in relation to the death and interment of his older brother Louis in Long Beach, California. Alan always had a great gift of writing long and informative letters which usually contained some humorous edges and they were always gratefully received by me. On the rather strange way that Alan and his younger brother, 'Paddy' learned that their long lost brother had passed away - by a very odd happenstance - I feel that his story might be of interest to a wider audience. Within the bounds of that context and with nothing to hide I therefore publish this letter to a wider public interest than Louis himself might have possibly expected. It reads:
Hi John,
Thanks for your recent email, and glad to hear you're getting over the surgery and clear, I hope, of trouble.
We're about a fortnight back from Spain, where we spent a very lazy and pleasant six weeks. We don't like the high summer over there, it's just too hot for us, but spring and autumn are beautiful. Unfortunately, summer here was pretty awful too, but not because of the heat!
Now then, Long Beach. As you know, Paddy and I went over there to see to Lou's funeral, and it all went off as well as could be expected. His body had been refrigerated at the undertaker's for some six weeks when we arrived, but we were able to see him and say our goodbyes. We'd thought that we might be able to have some sort of farewell ceremony for his friends, but the undertaker said that once the body'd been taken out of storage it wouldn't be possible to open it again for his mates; and that in the absence of any religious ceremony it would be better to simply go ahead with the cremation. As you probably know, this does not take place where the ceremony does, but off-site in a more or less industrial environment. That being so, we said our goodbye there and then and left him to do his job the following day. We collected the ashes a day after that and brought them home in a simple box in Paddy's suitcase. While we were there in the undertaker's we had a look around at the selection of containers available for this purpose; and while we were tempted for a moment by the two-foot-high egg timer, we resisted. Paddy and I, together with children and grandchildren, interred the ashes, or rather half of them, in our parents' grave in Glasnevin cemetery. We mixed them up with a bit of my garden compost and used them as nourishment for a miniature fuschia which we planted there. The other half Paddy dug in around the apple tree which our father had planted a few years before that profile picture of yours was taken, in the garden where we all grew up.
We'd had very little contact with Lou during the last twenty years or so. I'd made several attempts to keep the link open, but it was all very one-sided. Anyway, I'll tell you a bit about him. For a kick off, while Paddy and I were close in age and in everything else, Lou was five years older than me. This seems nothing now, but to a child it was almost a different generation, with a different set of interests. He was better educated than any of us, and had a much sharper brain. He completed what would have been the equivalent of A levels, but with a few extras thrown in. For example, he studied classical Greek outside of hours with one of his teachers who was passionate about it, and I also remember that he studied Spanish, another subject not on the curriculum at the time. I remember these two guys, Miguel and Antonio, who used call to the house one night a week for mutual English/Spanish conversation. He did the Greek with an elderly Christian Brother who had a love of the language - knowing what we know now, the mind boggles! You know, my years at sea have left me able to speak a bit of modern Greek, and I read and write it, and the year before last I took the ancient version as my optional subject in university. I thought I was onto a soft few credits, but boy was I wrong! I ended up spending as much time on that one module as on my other five, and it literally nearly killed me, so you can see why I've so much admiration for what Lou did.
Following a period in an engineering company here, which he correctly identified as being a dead end, he followed his uncles into the restaurant trade. He worked for a year or more in Switzerland, where he studied the wine trade and the French language - which he spoke until he died. Next thing we knew, he was back in England, it must have been '60 or '61, and had acquired a wife and a pub - in which order we are still unsure. Gwen was from Somerset, quite a few years older than him, and with two boys, Peter and Michael, from a previous marriage. The pub, which no longer exists, was a beautiful old English one with those small thick panes of glass in the bay windows, the Penhale Arms on Fratton Road in Portsmouth. If you're a football fan you'll have heard of Fratton Road. The place was small and they worked hard and long at it. I stayed there myself around '62, and remember how hard Gwen worked, producing, in a tiny kitchen, dinners which sold for half a crown. They gave it a few years and decided to call it a day, emigrating to California around 1963.
When they arrived in Long Beach Lou worked in a restaurant and Gwen in the canteen of McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft manufacturers. Lou studied for his real-estate licence during this time, and as soon as he qualified he found a job in that line. Again, he seems to have been fairly successful, working as district manager for a chain of offices around the southern California area. I stayed with them for a while in, I think, 1967 or '68 by which time Michael was working in a bookstore and Peter, by now a carpenter, worked in McDonnell Douglas making mock-up models of airplane interiors - a skilled and fascinating job. I mention that to give an idea of just how much older Gwen must have been, since Lou at that time would have been still under 30.
Some time after that they opened their own restaurant, Gwen's Pantry I think it was called, and they ran this successfully up to their divorce in the early '90s. I have no idea whether Gwen is still alive, or where the two boys are. Lou and Gwen never had any children of their own, and I don't even know what Gwen's family name was. It is possible that the Los Angeles County people will find them, though I don't know whether he would still have any legal connection to them following the divorce. I don't know whether Lou ever adopted the boys, or if he did, whether or not one divorces one's step-children along with one's wife.
I should say here that I never met Lou again after his visit to Dublin the year our mother died, which was 1988, though I did call him several times over the years. In fact, I was in touch with him a few years ago when one of his cruises - he was an inveterate cruise-goer - took him to New Zealand and I arranged a meeting with Peter. Peter was pretty upset afterwards because, having driven about 300 miles to meet the ship, Lou 'gave' him only a short period of his time before carrying on with arrangements he'd got with fellow-passengers. Something similar happened with a friend of Paddy's who'd dropped in to the restaurant some years before that - Lou could be a bit off-hand like that.
He divorced, as I said, in the '90s, and the restaurant went in the settlement. For several years he'd been doing voluntary work for a local hospice, and for his next career he went on to qualify as a counsellor, a profession he practiced until he died. This led to a rather hilarious incident while we were over there. Paddy and I were in a local hostelry one afternoon, and we got talking to a guy who'd dropped in to wet his whistle - and boy, did he wet it it. He was on his fourth vodka-and-tonic when he asked whether we were there on holiday, and we replied that we were there to bury our brother. Having expressed his sympathy, he asked us who he was, and when we said his name he almost dropped his glass. "Oh, no!" he cried, "He's my alcoholism counsellor!" Paddy and I had to bite our tongues to keep ourselves from saying that he can't have been much good at it, but we kept ourselves in check. Anyway, word got around the bar and we were approached by almost everyone there, all of them friends of Lou's. In fact, it turned out that a sort of farewell ceremony was scheduled for him there in the bar, but for a fortnight after we were due to leave. We did later get emails and pictures of the send-off: it was what they called a 'pot-luck,' where each of the regulars brought a cooked dish for a communal meal, there were a few speeches, and then everyone went out in the street to release coloured balloons and a dove. Paddy and I gave one the guys a few words to read out on our behalf, and left enough to cover a round for the house. We'd love to have been there for it.
A lot of the folks there talked about Lou and his dog, Spot. Spot, it appears, not only accompanied him to the pub but also on his many and varied overseas cruises. But Spot, we were to learn, was not really a dog at all, but the little trolley on which he towed his oxygen tank about. So then, he'd been sicker than any of us had known, and for quite a few years too. We met one guy who'd been on holiday with Lou, and Spot, in Paris, and who was very impressed with Lou's command of French. We met another lovely old lady, whom Lou had christened 'The Widow Enloe,' a sobriquet which she still carries in that company, and who says she 'ran around' with Lou for about twenty years. She too had been on overseas cruises with him, and was quite a feisty old bird. Around eighty now, she was a regular down in the pub, and quite wealthy after several lucrative widowhoods and divorces. She had to leave early the night we met her because, she said, her 50-year-old boyfriend at home was given to jealousy, but we met for dinner another night. All in all, they were quite a crew, and we got a great picture of Lou's life: of his sufferring bravely borne over many years, of his courage, ability and determination. He was not well off by the time he died. He lived in a small rented apartment and had not owned a car for many years, but he was rich in his life and in his many friendships. May he rest in peace.
Lou actually died on May 30th, though it was only six weeks later that we heard about it. Having no local relations, and being intestate, Los Angeles County took charge of his affairs. They found in his apartment the wedding invitation that Dearbhla, our daughter,m had sent some six or seven years before, and wrote to her at an address which she'd left some years ago. Eventually, the lertter reached her, and then us. When we finally accessed the apartment, accompanied by people from the Sheriff's office who's job it was to make sure that we removed nothing - the place being still 'sealed' by the County - we found a lot of stuff they'd overlooked. There was a much more recent wedding invitation from our son Conor in Minneapolis, as well as letters from me with my address on them. There was also, framed on the wall, the old licence from the Penhale Arms. He had the most elegant handwriting, and there was a letter to Gwen, dated some twenty years ago and clearly after the divorce, in which he advises her that that he's just had a renewal notice for his life insurance policy, that he is not in a position to pay it, and that, given the general state of his health and the fact that she is named as beneficiary, it might be in her interest to do so herself. I was curious as to why he would still have a handwritten copy: either he kept copies of his correspondence in this way, or he never sent it. Anyway, as I said, we were unable to take any mementos, the the girl in the County said that, when they'd sold everything off to defray their own administration costs, they'd hold back anything of obvious personal or sentimental value. We thought of getting an attorney to do all this ourselves, and went to see the honorary Irish Consul in the area, and his advice was that if the estate were less than about $150K we'd be as well to leave things as they are. It isn't, and we did.
Well, that's it John, the story of our trip to Long Beach. Paddy flew home with the ashes (I should say here that all this was done in an 'unofficial' way - he simply put the container into his luggage. In a similar way, we asked nobody's permission before our little ceremony in the cemetery here in Dublin) and I went on up to Minneapolis to spend a week with Conor, Adrianna and baby Úna. Boy, do they get swings of weather up there! It rarely dropped under 100ºF while I was there, and it's very humid. But around December the snow starts and the temperature drops to as low as -40ºF - but only for about four months.
Sorry for taking so long to reply, but I've been writing this a bit at a time. Some hot news, though, which you wouldn't have got had I been more efficient: Paddy became a grandad for the first time on Sunday last, [11th November] when Kate gave birth to young Nathan O'Brien, who weighed in at an impressive 9lb 10oz.
All the best,
Alan
... and what a great little story. R.I.P. Lois, not that I ever met you!
Comments
Post a Comment