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From Janet McDonagh
The last few days have made me so thankful of email and the internet as it has linked us all up, held us close – Litherland, McDonaghs, Whites en masse - and connected us so beautifully at this sad and potentially difficult time for a family separated by miles and oceans.
The stories and memories told in words and emails have made me smile and cry…. and stop and think - all at the same time –such was the presence of my auntie Audrey.
From an early age I remember folk telling me – oh you are so like Audrey! When I left home for medical school such comments became more frequent. Something about the girl who left home, who left Ireland yet retained her irishness….
I have many memories from early childhood of the summers at Portballintrae on the rock pools and my cousins as well as the Christmas presents of lovely red apples and interesting novelties like packets of dried fruit juice to which you just add water – like the “amazing sea monkeys!” to which you also just added water…..!!
But relationships deepened when I spent a summer as a 3rd year medical student at the Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, funded so generously by Audrey and Henry – This also included 2 precious weeks with Henry in vascular surgery – which included times when Audrey advocated for me to not have to get up quite so early for surgical rounds as Henry!!!....followed by a few weeks with a GP in Vernon, in the foothills of the Rockies….during that summer I was spoilt rotten as the “adopted girl” in the Litherland household –shopping trips to Granville Island with Audrey, coming home after theatre trips with some of Paul’s friends to find Audrey sitting at the top of the stairs worried that I hadn’t arrived home…..During that time she taught me how to drink G&Ts and told me wonderful, stories of my dad, her older brother who had died so prematurely 3 years before but stories that only a sister could tell ..... From then on I felt so close to her even with the miles that separated us…..
It has been lovely to have visits from Audrey and various Litherlands in the intervening years to Ireland and England.
I ventured back to Vancouver in 2005, to celebrate the 21 years which had passed since I had worked in the paediatric rheumatology department in the Children’s hospital in Vancouver as a nervous medical student yet now held a UK academic appointment in that very specialty – only one of 3 such appointments! You never really know where life will take you. It was lovely to again spend time with Audrey and Henry and talk of old times and remember times past….I particularly treasured the support and advice she extended to me as I shared with her the feelings of being on the outside, of always being the one who “left”, of also being the foreigner….I still carry an Irish passport despite living in England longer than I ever lived in Ireland!!!
I am now the auntie of 3 teenage lads and a godmother to a 16 year old girl. I really hope I am the auntie figure that Audrey was to me….so full of life and energy and vitality and a touch of eccentricity which only made her even more loveable.
If I can be half the auntie she was for me, I will have not wasted my life here on earth.
Audrey I miss you dearly and will love you and your memory for all the years I will live.
I am so glad and so thankful you were in my life…
With all my love and life
Janetx