by Sr. Margaret Anne Meyer MMM                                            USA                                   13.10.2024

(continued from previous blog)

About three months into my surgical rotation, I received the news that I had to leave it and prepare to go to Uganda. I was shocked as well as pleased to be going on the missions to Uganda. Mr. Sheehan told me I would regret it. I was trying to follow what I had been told.

My parents wanted to see me before I left for Uganda but unfortunately my mother’ s brother died, and my father came with my brother, David, whom I had not seen for seven years.  He was a boy of fourteen at a level with my shoulders when I left USA, and now he was a very handsome man of twenty-one, his six feet towering over me. I hardly recognized him.  I was so extremely glad to see him.  He showed me pictures of the beautiful woman, Judy, whom he intended to marry. Daddy liked her too. David stayed with the valet of Mother Mary’s brother and my Father stayed in the Guest Department.  When it was time for David to leave, the kind valet packed his dirty clothes so well that the customs man in Kennedy airport thought he had bought new clothes in Ireland and wanted him to pay a fee.  He had a tough time convincing him that these were his dirty clothes.

Mr. Sheehan, Dr. Connolly and their wives had been to a conference in Brooklyn, New York, a few months previously and my father had met them at Kennedy Airport and invited them home for dinner.  They knew my father and invited him to their homes too.  Dr. Marie Sheehan even gave my father the use of her car while he was visiting me.

I still had a few days of my rotation to finish but had time to show my father and David around the hospital. David and I had our picture taken on the roof where the Statue of the Visitation was placed. I could not get over how handsome he was and have treasured that picture.

We all had an enjoyable time together. We visited some od Dad’s friends at work who had retired in various places in Ireland. M We also visited Dublin, and I took him to see Miss Dowling, whom we visited in the Royal Home for the Incurables. She was a longtime friend of Sr. Magdalen O’Rourke. She was delighted to see us both. My father kissed her on the cheek, and this impressed her very much.  She told me so when she sent me a Mass card six months later when she found out my father had died of a heart attack.

At that time, I was unaware that this may be the last time I would see Daddy alive, but he knew; as he told Sr. Mary O’Neill, who served him his meals in the Guest Department, that he would never see me again.  She told me this in 1970 when I visited Drogheda on my first home leave from Uganda.  But that is another story.