“And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind.”
My mother died in the small house she and my father bought in 1959, the house in which she had raised nine children, and from which she had watched her husband drive away. It was a mild afternoon with light cloud cover, but the small room full of adult bodies was warm, and the sun was directly overhead, so the light was dim. Ruth Lillian Jackson Overby lay in a hospital bed provided by the hospice service, sedated and relieved by a combination of her daily drops of CBD oil and just the amount of morphine she could manage while remaining lucid. The nine of us gathered around her that day have nine very different personalities, and thus had nine very different responses to the moment, from the boisterous and pointed to the somber and silent. We were there for more than an hour before she drifted off to sleep, the divisions in our large family set aside, surrendering to shared laughter and reminiscence.
Later, when I had my private moment with her, I leaned in close, knowing this was a final goodbye. She spoke fondly of my wife and my siblings, and, no surprise to me, she recounted distant memories of her father. “Daddy wanted me to become an actress,” she said, placing a finger to her lips as if to silence any dissent. “And I would have been a good one, too.” I had known this—it was something she had told us before—but in that moment, our last moment together, the thought of it raised questions in my mind. The image of Frank Jackson admonishing his third child, my mother, had always been a vague one that I’d spent far too little time imagining or interrogating: my mother, a young, beautiful woman—I’d seen many photographs—and her father, an incurable, though gentle, alcoholic, expressing his ambition for her. How would he have expressed it? What ambition might he have had for his other seven children? And most of all, how did a man like Frank Jackson, a man of Irish descent who had died from the drink at the young age of 57, how did this man muster ambition for his daughter in the midst of what must have been a shameful existence of his own?
* * *
My mother, the third of Frank Jackson’s eight children, was 20 when he died. He was, by all accounts, an affable, unremarkable man whose wife Lillian, my grandmother, never remarried after his death. At Lillian’s funeral, a family friend described Frank Jackson to me as “just a really, really good person who unfortunately had that one demon,” by which he meant alcohol.
As an Irish Catholic, Frank was predisposed to father a bevy of children and drink heavily. Nevertheless, Ruthie worshipped him and followed in her parents’ footsteps to become a devout Catholic herself. Marrying young, she swore off the birth control pills that had just come on the market and delivered one child after another, seven in eight years, followed four years later by another, then eleven years after that, one last one. Forty-four years old, one more child, a grizzled veteran, a true expert of the genre, that’s how I remember my mother during that last pregnancy. I was 18 at the time.
My father didn’t live with us then, but he’d been around the house lately. He had left four years before, and my parents’ divorce had been finalized two years after that. But then, a horrific tragedy had reunited my parents in grief. My mother’s only brother, John, the only boy in Frank and Lillian’s bevy of eight kids, was killed by a drunk driver, leaving six of his own children behind. A man in his early forties, the prime of his life, John had been my father’s close friend since they were in high school, a friendship born in small-town Minnesota that had traversed United States Navy service, relocation to California, marriage, and family. And in the wake of John’s death, Ruthie and my father, Duane Overby, had been drawn back together by grief and shared memory, and had conceived their ninth child, one more brother, the gender tie broken with the boys winning, five to four.
I can only imagine what my mother must have been feeling during the family meetings we had, the first to announce that our father, her husband, was leaving, the second, four years later, to announce that she was pregnant with a new baby. I don’t know what she was feeling, but as a Catholic child of modest means, just as she was, I know that one of the things she was feeling was shame. At the first meeting, there was the shame of losing a husband despite two decades of faithfully observing the dictum of her Irish Catholic upbringing. At the second, there was the shame of losing some little part of herself when that same husband was leaving again.
And deeper than that, perhaps, was the shame of having abandoned the ambition Frank Jackson had expressed for her all those years ago. And I would have been a good one, too.
* * *
For some time, I’ve had the idea of crafting a work of fiction based on the Irish heritage I owe to Frank Jackson and his bloodline. I turned my reading in this direction for a time, and was first drawn to the life of St. Patrick, then, in turn, to the Great Shame, the formation of the Irish diaspora, and the ancient Gaelic legends. One influential book I encountered on that journey was The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World by Thomas Keneally of Schindler’s List fame. In the book, Kenneally interweaves the story of his own Irish ancestor Hugh Larkin, a convict transported to Australia in the 1840s, with the stories of the well-traveled Irishmen who shaped the culture of the United States, Canada, and Australia. The book also popularizes the term Great Shame to refer to the famine of the 1840s that was less a catastrophe of nature than it was a supreme act of oppression against the Irish by their British overlords.
More recently, my exploration of Irishness led me to Leon Uris’s 1976 novel, Trinity, which I had claimed from my mother’s extensive library after her death. Trinity is an expansive generational saga of another Larkin family, that of the fictional characters Tomas and Finola, and their struggle against that same British oppression. It is a book that so fiercely addresses the innate trials of Irishness—cultural oppression, Catholic guilt, and, of course, the shame of alcoholism and neglect—that I found myself returning again and again to thoughts of my mother as I read.
I wondered if any of my siblings might have read the book, on her recommendation or otherwise, and whether any of them might have discussed it with her. No one had, and I wondered why. Did she find the book’s 815 pages tedious, and therefore assume no one would be determined enough to get through it? Did its contents simply get lost in among the hundreds of books she devoured constantly? Or was she ashamed of the book’s salacious depiction of love among the 19th-century Irish poor? Could the book have cut too close, perhaps stirring painful memories of her failed marriage, or disrupting the angelic image of Frank Jackson that she had so assiduously labored to construct?
* * *
At the start of Uris’s novel, the protagonist Tomas Larkin rises from the tragedy of his father’s death to become both his family’s patriarch and a leading nationalist in his village of Ballyutogue. In time, however, Tomas is both physically and emotionally crushed by a Catholic dogma that infiltrates and destroys his happy home. In the novel’s early pages, Tomas and his wife Finola enjoy a happy and active sex life that would have been common in the 1970s, when the book came out. But readers soon learn that such exploits were anathema to 19th century Irish Catholicism, as Finola, overcome with guilt, appeals to the village priest, who weaponizes her guilt, admonishes her sinful behavior, and turns her against her endearing husband.
Ruth Overby could have been proud, on reading that account, that she would have had none of that. After her divorce, she jettisoned the Catholic faith, secured her first driver’s license at the age of 41, and transformed herself from a lifelong housewife into an independent working woman in the nascent Silicon Valley tech industry. I was a self-absorbed teenager at the time, but I distinctly remember my mother setting out each morning in her used Ford Pinto to drive 45 minutes up San Tomas Expressway to the Memorex disk factory in Santa Clara. Only a few years earlier, she was unable to drive me two miles to swimming practice, and now she could name from memory every cross street on her 10-mile commute. That Pinto was the car I borrowed when I went on high school dates, and the words she spoke after my first one—“Just call her and tell her you had a lovely time”—came in the first calm, measured tones I can remember her speaking to me. In earlier years, with eight often bickering children surrounding her in our small house, her voice was always raised, often to a yell.
The strength she showed in those years after the divorce was an inspiration on the surface, but we soon learned that there was a hole there that only her departed husband could fill. Because we had had that second family meeting, and the new baby was coming, and with him a second abandonment that proved to be more than she could endure. She held it together, and with regular financial support from our father, continued providing for that new baby and the other five of us who remained in the house. But in time, guilt or shame or exhaustion or all three led her to the same alcoholic fate that had claimed so many Irish Catholics before her.
In fact, Catholicism ran so strong in her veins that, even years later, when she finally joined Alcoholics Anonymous and made it into recovery, she wrote repeatedly in her journals of seeking solace from God. “God, please help me stay clean and sober tomorrow,” she wrote in one entry. And in the following day’s entry, she wrote, “I have a lot to thank God for.” Reading this after her death, I saw these entreaties to a God she had long since set aside as searches for forgiveness. In an entry dated a week after these, she wrote:
“I feel like I have a life that is a whirlwind of activity. There doesn’t seem to be much time to reflect, but then I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself either…I’m sitting here on 10/4/86 writing this. It’s 5:00 p.m. and I’m out on the patio enjoying the fresh air.”
She was a week behind in her entries, and coming clean in the pages of her journal. She was also admitting to simply taking time for herself amid “a life that is a whirlwind of activity.” She didn’t have time to feel sorry for herself, she said, but she always had time, it seems, to feel sorry.
* * *
Duane and Ruth were a United States Navy couple early in their marriage. Their first two children, Duane, Jr., (Joseph) and Ramona, were born on naval bases, in Virginia and Southern California, respectively. Their third child, Blair, was born in a civilian hospital in Ventura, near Duane’s post at Port Hueneme. Early photos show Ruth tending to three tiny children, two in high chairs and one a babe in arms, in the confines of a cramped Quonset hut on the base. The photos don’t show it, but she was very likely pregnant with me at the time.
Duane served as a missile technician on the USS Norton Sound, one of the United States Navy’s early seaborn missile-launching platforms, a ship affectionately known as “The Galloping Ghost of Hueneme Bay.” These were the most nerve-wracking days of the Cold War, and the Norton Sound had been equipped to launch nuclear missiles, so Duane’s service often required that he spend months at sea. On one notable mission, Operation Argus, the Norton Sound sailed south of the Falkland Islands and launched three rockets carrying low-yield atomic warheads, testing both the launch capability and the destructive capacity of the missiles. Years later, Duane contracted cancer and lost his spleen, and at his 86th birthday celebration, he recalled that this had qualified him for a $75,000 payout from the Navy. He went on to heap impassioned praise on the Navy for the education and life experience his service had afforded him. “The Navy gave me everything,” he said.
I was the first child born into our family after Duane left the Navy, and the first born in San Jose, where our parents settled and raised the nine of us, and where Duane lived until his death at 88. When that first family meeting happened in 1974, our parents announcing to us that he was leaving, I was a middle child at the formative age of 14, ill-equipped to understand what was happening. They chose to make the announcement to the four oldest, and while my older siblings seemed to have known that something was coming, I fell into tears immediately. Seeing this, my father made a special effort: He returned two days later and took me for a drive in his convertible, parking the car after a time to try to explain himself.
In my stitched together memory, I can see him saying, “I’m sorry,” his tears triggering mine. “It’s been hard, though,” he said. “When I’d go off on Westpac for months, I’d come home and of course she was pregnant, and she wouldn’t let me touch her. And then we had you kids, and everything became about taking care of all of you.” The sun shone on both of us in the cab of his convertible, and my father looked old to me for the very first time. But he had placed an image in my mind, the mind of a hormone-charged teenager, that lingered in the difficult weeks and months that followed. It was the image of a young sailor and his gorgeous young wife, an image I added to fresher memories of all the evenings he had been absent, working two and three extra teaching jobs to keep our family afloat.
My parents were two young people raised as devout Catholics, and Ruth had held that devotion close in those early years. And the daughter of Frank Jackson, the product of a staid Irish-Catholic legacy, had chosen to spurn the affections of her amorous young husband.
* * *
In Part Three of Trinity, one particular scene drew that tearful conversation with my father back into the forefront of my mind. It is the scene where Father Lynch, the village priest, exerts control.
Leading up to this scene, Finola Larkin has just nearly died giving birth to her third son. Under the Catholic dogma of the time, the Larkins, with just three children, were a relatively small family in their village. Worse yet, Finola’s condition meant that another pregnancy might well kill her. And even worse than that, the spirited, adventurous, and joyous sex life Finola and Tomas had enjoyed through the entirety of their 20-year marriage was now under threat. While Tomas responds to the doctor’s warning by descending into drink, Finola takes it as a sign of her own infidelity to God, and resolves to confess to Father Lynch:
“Father,” she whispered, lowering her eyes and voice weakening with shame, “I have been the wife of Tomas Larkin almost twenty years and I have sinned all during the marriage.” She squirmed, then blurted out, “I have always enjoyed pleasures of the flesh.”
The priest shot to his feet, clasped his hands behind him and thrust his face heavenward. “I see,” he sighed. “Would you kindly amplify that remark?”
“I’ve almost always enjoyed the sexual act,” she whispered.
“That’s quite unnatural, you know.”
“I know.”
“Exactly what is it you enjoy?”
“Everything,” she whimpered.
Father Lynch pulled his chair up close and poked his face next to hers. “What you have told me is extremely serious. If I am to counsel you properly you must purge yourself here and now. Are you ready?”
“Aye…I am ready.”
“Look at me, Finola.” She did so out of the corners of her eyes and blushed with guilt. “We must go over this, item by item,” he commanded.
It was degrading but if the gates of heaven were ever to open for her it had to be done. She confessed to one hedonistic pleasure after another, building a mountain of debauchery and mortal sins the likes of which he had never heard in his 35 years as an agent of God. Why, the woman reveled in everything! Nudity, pinchings, slappings, biting, licking, kissing, rubbing, even down to the reprehensible organs themselves. It appeared there was nothing the two didn’t do, even taste each other! When Finola had drained herself, she sobbed. Father Lynch was ashen.
By the time my mother would have read this passage, she would have been in her late 40s, a former devotee of this very same doctrine. But she was also a peace marcher during the 1960s, a devoted feminist, a keen political observer, and a divorcée. She herself had been Duane’s wife “almost twenty years” when he decided to leave, and they, too, had had a difficult birth, the arrival of our special-needs brother Eric in 1967. What’s more, at the time she read Trinity, she may have descended into the depths of her own alcoholism, or she may have been emerging from it—or she may have been pregnant with her ninth child.
I knew her to be incredibly strong—increasingly, in fact, as the years went by—and I knew her to be joyous as well. So, I’ve chosen to see her reading the scene this way: While she may have entertained some uncertainty about the choices she had made early in her married life, she would have been resolute in her spiritual and emotional evolution. She would have seen Father Lynch as the true lecher, and the Larkins, both Finola and Tomas, as the victims of their time and place in history. She may also have reflected on what must have been the joys of her own sexual experience, but also the awkwardness and inhibition, and perhaps even shame, that her upbringing had imposed on everything in her life. In the end, she would have retreated into the wonders of giving birth to her own children, and the gift of the grandchildren that, by then, had started to arrive.
Whatever her thoughts were at the time, a book like Trinity certainly would have prompted a great deal of reflection for a woman of Ruth’s life experience.
In the stoic years after Finola’s confession to Father Lynch, Tomas recedes and Finola grooms their third and final son, Dary, for the priesthood:
“A devouring sense of possession by Finola for Dary stretched normalcy and reason. Finola had joined the majority of Ballyutogue mothers who had long lost any physical and esoteric sensations of love-making. Her home became like all the others in that her husband was a boarder and the sons treated as gentry….
A woman living beyond the memory of carnal pleasure fails to understand why anyone else would crave or miss it. These women were more than willing to push a son into a life of celibacy, which was in the purest Irish tradition. Dary was his mother’s precious child, smothered and fitted with blinders that would allow him to see only in the direction of the seminary.”
Again, the contrasts in this portrayal must have been haunting for Ruth. While she never pushed any of her sons toward the priesthood, she and Duane did send the first seven of us to St. Frances Cabrini School for our primary education. This, along with her own attitudes early in her marriage toward sex and lovemaking, would have united her emotionally with the character of Finola Larkin. More than that, the sheer strength Finola shows in seizing primacy in her 19th century Irish household would have resonated deeply with Ruth, perhaps reminding her of her own mother, Lillian. Ruth and Lillian both lost their husbands, though in very different ways, and both responded with a resolve that, in the end, held their families together and exemplified feminine power and motherhood.
By the time my sister Carol was the last of us to graduate from St. Frances Cabrini in 1977, her continued attendance seemed more a matter of convenience and continuity than any devotion to the church. No need to pull an adolescent away from long-time friends, Ruth must have thought at the time, especially at a time when her family was breaking apart. Carol, who may have been more damaged by our parents’ divorce than any of us, later dropped out of high school at the age of 15. But remarkably, she reclaimed her life years later by finishing both her high-school equivalency and a bachelor’s degree, and then went on to co-found a home health care company that operates in two states. This is just one example of the heights all four of Ruth’s daughters went on to attain, not least because of the example she had set for them.
* * *
Still, the damage was done and our family still struggles, particularly with alcoholism. Despite the example Ruth set for us by swearing off drink and remaining clean and sober for the last 33 years of her life, all three of our eldest succumbed to alcoholism, and are now, thankfully, in recovery. Joseph was wrenched from the disease by an intervention orchestrated by his wife and our parents, and a stint at one of the world’s top substance abuse recovery centers. Blair, a year-and-a-half older than I, only recently entered recovery, but not until he had nearly killed himself with drink, enduring months in the hospital and multiple surgeries on damaged organs.
One of my darkest memories is of my wedding day, when these two older brothers, in the midst of a days-long binge, arrived late, wasted, and unkempt. The photographer had corralled our entire brood for pre-ceremony photos in a beautiful garden outside the Portola Valley School, a historic mission revival building nestled in the heart of the wooded San Francisco Peninsula. The photographer was just wrapping things up to stay on schedule, and I had been sadly distracted through much of the session, knowing my brothers were missing. But I also knew they had disappeared together four days earlier and hadn’t been seen since, so when I turned to see them rolling in just as the rest of the family was filtering back toward the ceremony ground, my heart sank. They were both disheveled and clearly bombed. I would have said something lightly sarcastic like, “Glad you guys could join us,” laboring to avoid looking them up and down, and they would have responded inanely: “Wouldn’t miss it, little bruddah!” “Hey man, this place wasn’t easy to find!” What I remember clearly was the photographer seizing control of the situation (“Two more? Great, let’s get a few shots!”), and the dread and embarrassment I felt as I turned to my wife Caroline, absolutely perfect that day in her vintage wedding dress and headpiece, and beckoned her to join these two wasted fools in a series of photos. It was all mercifully quick, and the blotto brothers became subdued when they realized they were just two of over a hundred other guests, so there were thankfully no major disruptions in the end. But whenever I look back at the post-ceremony pictures, with the two out-of-place drunks lined up alongside my otherwise stylish and smiling wife, siblings, and parents, my heart sinks again.
My shame that day was immediate, and haunting, and I have no idea whether my brothers ever felt any, or feel any to this day. Such is the nature of inebriation: it can melt unwanted emotions away in real time.
* * *
Shame is in short supply in today’s world, perhaps catastrophically so. The Great Shame and its Catholic accomplices led to the household ruin depicted in Trinity, a destruction that, outside of that fiction, inflicted true shame on millions of Irish households before, during, and after. My grandfather’s shame undoubtedly contributed to his early demise, and led my mother to construct a false narrative of both his life and her own Irishness. Her shame on my father’s parting then contributed to her own addiction, and perhaps that of her children, and in the end, I was left mortified by the shameful behavior of my inebriated brothers.
All this is true, but it is also true that, absent the lubricant of alcohol, feelings of shame might have prevented my brothers’ behavior. This didn’t happen, but my own sense of shame did restrain a belligerent reaction from me that would certainly have ruined my wedding day.
Years ago in my father’s convertible, I looked into the tears in his eyes, and as I shed my own tears, I experienced shame unlike any I had ever known in my young life. His shame brought the two of us to that place, and that difficult conversation was an important first step in the healing we both needed.
Shame can have its value.
But we are now in a world where a man has become President of the United States despite feeling no sense of shame for much of anything, despite his incessant narcissism, penchant for criminality, and overt disdain for human kindness and compassion. His vanquished rivals, having spent months berating this man as a chaos agent, now shamelessly and pathetically swear fealty to him. A wanton, cynical media ecosystem spreads lies and disinformation for the dual purposes of currying this man’s favor and amassing profit, and functionaries up and down the political hierarchy concoct and execute fraudulent schemes to disenfranchise the opposition. Shame is, indeed, in short supply.
I will forever regret that my mother, who was politically active from her earliest years, died in 2019 knowing that this man was in the White House. The fact that she did not die an angry and bitter woman, but instead looked on her nine children with gratitude, stands for me as a final expression of her feminine power.
We are, to some degree, the identities we choose or choose to embrace. For my mother, the Irishness of her short-lived father took precedence over the Bohemian heritage of her long-living mother. I expect the broad influence of the Irish diaspora in America was the primary reason for this, but there was also a mysterious and, to my biased eyes, lovely connection to Frank Jackson that carried Ruth throughout her life, for better or worse.
And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind. We laughed that day, and we cried the next day when she finally succumbed, and we’ve laughed and cried mightily in the days since. And I’ve often thought of Frank Jackson imploring his one Black Irish daughter to become an actress, a feat that would have required her to free herself from layer upon layer of deeply rooted Irish Catholic inhibition. She was simply not imbued with that level of privilege, and though she acted in high school plays, giving it her best shot, the Irish Catholic imperatives of church and family deterred her, as the first of her nine children was born when she was just 21.
And in the long life that followed, barriers surely arose, and inhibitions were conquered and dragons were slain. Years after my parents’ divorce, my mother swore off alcohol and befriended my father’s second wife. I’ve always felt this was a reflection of the quiet strength of her own mother and namesake, something she did for the good of her children. But I now see that she also did it for herself, bringing a sense of calm to the final decades of her life. The shame she would have felt had she done otherwise, the shame that had guided and corrupted her life and legacy, the shame depicted in the yellowing pages of Trinity, was perhaps the key ingredient in that choice.
Bruce Overby, a San Francisco Bay Area author who holds an MFA in Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, released his debut novel, The Cyclone Release, in November 2022.
