As was only fitting on St. Patrick’s Day, my brother Tommy and I congratulated each other on our hardy Irish peasant genes. Centuries of living on dirt floors with pigs, we smugly agreed, have rendered us Micks immune from contagion.
Um, except for our grandfather Michael Sheedy, who died in the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic—the last time a highly contagious virus with no immunity and no vaccine spread worldwide. He’s buried in Elizabethport, NJ, within walking distance of the salt water that carried his family here from County Cork on so-called “coffin ships” (because so many passengers died at sea) during the Great Irish Famine. He was 32.
That’s basically all we know. Our mother was two when her father died; her mother remarried. We must have Sheedy cousins somewhere, but we’ve never met them. Continue reading.