by Sr. Sheila Devane MMM                         Ireland                              16.07.2025

Summertime in Ireland with its long, long days brings us many opportunities: for holidays, special ceremonies, pilgrimages, outdoor activities, and riveting sports’ events either here or elsewhere and most of them available on TV.

The annual remembrance of the dead in their graveyards is held in Drogheda in July and we MMMs decorate each sister’s grave with beautiful flowers and attend the mass and memorial service that Sunday.  People come up to talk about different sisters whom they knew well and still mourn.  It is also the season of the wonderful international tennis tournament at Wimbledon UK where the top world players compete for the top prizes – the Challenge Cup (men’s singles) and the Rosewater Dish (women’s singles).

I love to watch Wimbledon and look forward to the first two weeks of July each year.  Little else gets done by me each afternoon!  I am glued to the screen and to the matches.  While watching I always feel in the presence of two now deceased, wonderful Medical Missionaries of Mary: Sisters Sheila Hogan and Eileen Carmel Keogan.  Let me tell you about them!

Sister Sheila died in May 1990 and would have missed watching Wimbledon on TV that year – possibly though she was watching from Heaven?  In the time I knew her she arranged her holidays for the first two weeks of July every year, went to Bettystown where she appreciated the other sister guests talk of swimming, walking on the beach and meeting up with friends – but she was virtually in Wimbledon for every match.  She was a wonderful woman, a trained nurse and our first radiographer and if I am not mistaken one of the first people to train in radiography in Ireland?  In the large community in Drogheda at that time she arranged monthly talks called “Our Lady’s Circle” where she brought in guest speakers on a whole variety of topics.  She then called on one of us to propose a vote of thanks and another to second it –in this way we were getting experience in public speaking as well as a wealth of information on subjects that we mightn’t otherwise know anything about!

I recall talking to her about tennis; she played as a schoolgirl and later as a young woman and knew all about the best racquets, strongest non-slip shoes, most suitable clothing and as a radiographer knew too of the strains, sprains and fractures that tennis players are most vulnerable to suffering.  And Sheila knew the players long before Wimbledon began as she avidly followed their careers all year.  I feel her beside me and would love to hear her commentary!

Sister Eileen Carmel died in June 2011.  She watched Wimbledon daily every year on one of the TVs in the big rooms in Beechgrove before its renovation.  She particularly enjoyed having a companion or two watching with her and invited and encouraged us to join in.  Eileen played tennis and many other sports at secondary school, and she proudly spoke of her sports’ prowess showing off a large cup which she won one year in the Dominican Convent, Cabra, where she was a boarder.  She kept the cup in her small bedroom in St. Patrick’s corridor where it served as a useful receptacle for whatever small items needed housing at any time!

Eileen was a wonderful character and a force of nature.  She established hospital pastoral care in Ireland and given her warm, vibrant personality and great love of life it is amazing that anyone died in her care – but they did, and they could not have had a kinder, more caring person than herself seeing them off to their gentle God.  As I write this short article and watch a very uneven game of tennis where a magnificent, seeded female player is just not getting into the game at all, I can hear Eileen beside me talking of days when she too did not play her A game…. and lost.

I am truly blessed to have met these two great women, to have had the opportunity to share a hobby with them and to learn so much more from the giftedness and richness of their generous lives. May they rest in peace, and may we all continue to find creative and special ways to remember our deceased, loved ones who we still miss and to whom we owe so much.