Sweet Adeline—Awaiting Arrival of My First Grandchild
By Greg O’Brien
Papa O’Brien and granddaughter Adeline Mae Everett on Cape Cod Bay last summer
Sweet Adeline
Sweet Adeline,
My Adeline,
At night, dear heart,
For you I pine.
In all my dreams,
Your fair face beams.
You’re the flower of my heart, Sweet Adeline. —RICHARD H. GERARD
Abiding “Sweet Adeline,” a ballad written in the late 1800s under the title, “You’re the Flower of My Heart,” became a hit when per- formed in 1904 by The Quaker City Four. The song became so popu- lar that John F. Fitzgerald, “Honey Fitz,” the father of Rose Kennedy and maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy, made it his political theme song during his tenure in Congress and two terms as mayor of Boston. Honey Fitz sang the ballad at scores of political and social happenings as well as on the radio, venerating the name Adeline in barbershop quartet fashion.
Teutonic in origin, the Latin translation of Adeline is “noble, or of nobility.” It was a common name in the Middle Ages, then faded from usage until the Gothic Revival of the mid-1700s. The song’s popularity amplified over the years, becoming a favorite of the Irish at last call. Mickey Mouse even serenaded Minnie Mouse with “Sweet Adeline” in a 1929 Disney cartoon.
Hold that thought.
My daughter, Colleen, noble in all ways, had the principled heart years ago to leave the refuge of her Washington, D.C. job as a security analyst for a consultant to Homeland Security to teach needy children in the inner-city of Baltimore. She took a sizeable pay cut, taught her students to walk in love and hope, married a fine Baltimore guy, Matt Everett, whose family has lived in the city for generations, and then got pregnant, our first grandchild on the way. All in due time.
I always thought I was too young to be a grandfather; now I’m wondering why I waited so long. In this journey, I’ve worried privately that I’d never get to hold a grandchild, a common fear in Early Onset Alzheimer’s. I was losing ground in my desire to remain here. After word of her pregnancy in the spring of 2016, I reflected quietly on the day I gave my precious daughter away. She was an extraordinary bride in all ways. The wedding reception at the Ocean Edge Resort and Golf Club Resort overlooking a panorama of Cape Cod Bay was spectacular in its venue and guests that numbered more than 200. Lots of confusion, disconnects for me, too many voices, so surreptitiously I took breaks outside the ballroom and stared blankly at the bay, looking out at Pluto and pondering how other fathers diagnosed with this disease fought off symptoms on their daughter’s big day. Friends and relatives came looking for me. On cue for my invocation, I tried to capture the mood of all fathers in the room, in a speech I wrote days earlier on a ferry ride across Vineyard Sound to Nantucket, with tears streaming down my face:
Words have sounds.
We hear words. Not just read them. Run.
Breathe.
Reach.
Live.
Celebrate.
Faith.
Forgive.
They all have meaning in sounds. In the composition of the mind. Scholars call it onomatopoeia—formation of a word from a sound associated with it.
The word today swirling around my head is: Change. As a verb, Webster’s defines change as “to make or become different.” As a noun, change is defined as “the act or instance of becoming different.”
We are here today on the precipice of change, the making and the instance of it. Becoming different.
While my mind agrees with Webster’s definition, my heart says otherwise.
I’ve never done change well.
The sounds I hear when I think of change: the first cry of a beautiful little girl entering the world in the delivery room of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Colleen’s laughter at walking Brewster flats as hermit crabs tickled her toes; her anticipation as she climbed for the first time those steep steps of the yellow school bus on her way to kindergarten; the cheers on the softball field as she turned a double play; the stench of the old Boston Garden as we watched Disney on Ice together; the swing of “Sweet Caroline” at Fenway; sitting in Tom Brady’s personal suite for a Pats game at Gillette Stadium; the rip of my heart as she left for Elon University, and I felt in change there was something terrible wrong. Then, the first time she brought Matt Everett home with her, and I felt something was terribly right.
Winds of change are swirling today. My mind is an old school carousel of Kodachrome slides of Colleen’s life, all arranged in chronological order. I can hear the click as one slide advances the other.
I can’t stop these flashes and sounds of color. Nor do I want to.
Marriage, to me, is reaffirmation of God’s plan. We, as parents, are caregivers, caretakers in the nest for our children. They belong to God, our father. Our job is to nurture, to love, to direct, to refine, to support—all in imperfect ways—then to let go, and let God. When love comes from the heart, not the head, it is perfect.
The letting go part, however, is difficult for all of us. But the spreading of wings results in beautiful, soaring flight.
So Colleen and her husband Matt Everett soar today, as you leave the nest, soar as high as you can. Fly side by side. Help, encourage, and love each other endlessly in flight. A picture worthy of a gold frame.
You begin your family album today. The first click was the “I do.”
Now it’s “we do,” the first person plural. You have become one. That is a change. A good change: becoming different, but in remarkable ways. The winds of change have cleared the canvas. You paint your own picture now, a stunning picture in words, in romance, in children, in challenges, in flight, and in words from the heart.
Words have sounds. We hear them.
Flash forward to Colleen’s delivery, November 11, 2016. She sent a text at midnight saying her water broke. Mary Catherine was in bed, heading to Baltimore at first light; I let her sleep. I had been told earlier by several family members, close and extended, not to come to Baltimore for the delivery, that I would be a persona non grata, yet another distraction. “Remain home and don’t forget to go to the bathroom,” I was instructed. So I stayed on the Cape with Conor, under house arrest.
“Keep the faith, breathe easy,” I texted back to Colleen, not clearly remembering what “water broke” meant. Like a slip and slide, I thought the baby was heading down the shoot. Not by a longshot.
With Mary Catherine in Baltimore later that morning and Colleen and husband Matt at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, I got another text at noon. “No new word yet,” my wife wrote.
No word? Really? The baby was in the chute.
At 2 p.m., there was another terse text. “Colleen pushing at 2 p.m.” Great, I thought. “Matt, oil up the catcher’s mitt!”
No word. Radio silence.
Finally, I texted my wife at 4 p.m. “What’s up?”
“No new word, that’s all I know,” she replied.
“That’s bullshit,” I texted back in a fit of loss of filter. “I need a new word.”
I was justifying my house arrest.
Alzheimer’s, in so many ways, is an altered state where paranoia reigns. The Alzheimer’s Association, alz.org, will tell you: “Individuals with dementia may become paranoid as a result of false beliefs, or delusions, symptoms of the disease.... Although not grounded in reality, the situation is very real to the person with dementia. Keep in mind that a person with dementia is trying to make sense of his or her world with declining cognitive function. Examples of paranoia are accusations that someone is poisoning their food or stealing their money, or statements such as, ‘My spouse is an imposter.’”
I was thinking Mary Catherine was an imposter.
I texted her again at 5 p.m.
“Any new word?” I was desperate, channeling myself.
There was no response. Dead silence.
In my paranoia, I began thinking something was critically wrong. Colleen’s water broke at midnight; this was 18 hours later. Holy shit! Really? “They are hiding something from me,” I feared. “They just don’t want to deal with me in an emergency.” I was pissed, moving toward yet another rage. Little did I remember that Mary Catherine was in labor with our first son, Brendan, for about 22 hours at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital.
At 6 p.m., I called my wife. “What’s up, I need to know now!”
“I have nothing to tell you,” she said curtly, clearly annoyed at my persistence.
“I need to know if something has gone wrong with Colleen or the baby,” I insisted.
“There is nothing more I can tell you,” she said.
“Fine,” I replied. “Then I’m heading down now to talk to the doctors!”
“Oh, no you’re not!” she said.
“Yes, I am!”
Click! The phone went dead.
Within minutes, Mary Catherine, unbeknownst me, convened an emergency session of the College of Cardinals, available siblings, to talk me off the third rail. Seconds later, I received a call from my older sister Maureen, a tough Irish lady and a baby nurse at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mt. Kisco, New York.
“You stay home,” she ordered sternly, like a field marshal. “You just stay home! Look, we all know that you know a lot about writing, politics, and Alzheimer’s, but you know squat about delivering babies. You stay home. Got that?!”
Reassured by my sister, I responded, “Do you still love me?” “Yes, but you stay the fuck home!”
I needed to reload, so I asked Conor to take me to the gym to
work off the rage. We ran on treadmills, side-by-side. About a half hour into the run, Conor reached over to hand me his iPhone. I thought it was a sports score. I didn’t have my glasses.
“Congratulations, you’re a grandfather,” he said, showing me a text just sent with a photo of my granddaughter.
I started crying. A beautiful baby, eight pounds, eight ounces, Adeline Mae Everett, entered the world in noble fashion. The name Adeline, I wanted to believe, because she came from nobility, half a member of the Brian Boru clan, an Irish king who concluded the high kingship of Ireland. Mae, as family history would have it, is the proper name of my maternal grandmother’s sister, Mae Clancy, a first-generation Irish American, who married, then was whisked off to a Carmelite convent in Peekskill, New York, after something horribly went wrong with the marriage. At the 1876 Abby of St. Mary, now abandoned, the nuns took a vow of silence. Enough said. We were never told about Mae’s past, though on visits as young kids, Mae and her Carmelite sisters, who all made Eucharistic hosts at the abbey, would be allowed to speak for the day. To my knowledge, no one ever spilled the family beans.
And to my knowledge, Adeline Mae Everett, with a healthy set of lungs, has never taken, nor will ever take, a vow of silence.
The trip to Baltimore the following month on Christmas Eve 2016 to see my Adeline for the first time was both electrifying and unnerving. As you now know about me, airports can be my undoing. Too much noise, confusion, and people in uniforms yelling stuff. Loading laptops, backpacks, belts, winter coats, shoes, paper clips, cell phone, and small change onto a conveyor belt can be disconcerting with petulant travelers queued up and sighing behind you. I usually yell out something stupid, like “this sucks...” Not the kind of exchange TSA likes to hear. “Excuse me?” I often hear.
“Oh, my husband is just having a bad day; he has medical issue,” my patient wife usually explains, then turns to me and stares a penetrating stream of lasers into my corneas.
On this particular morning, the conveyor belt was herky-jerky, stopping and going because the dumbasses ahead of me (there I go again) had bottles of water, mouthwash, shampoo, and other verboten liquids in their carry-on. Given my head shaking and muttering through the metal detector, I was patted down. I don’t like strangers touching me. I was out of sorts. Once released, I waited on the other side of the conveyor belt for the bolus of what I had shipped. Without notice, a single shoe shot out. It was my wife’s, a tan Sperry topsider. Out of body, lights in the brain dimming, I was thinking body parts now were on the way. I turned to my right to look for a cop, then saw my wife limping with one shoe. Remember when you were scared about losing a child, a family member, thinking they were lost, abducted, whatever, then shouting at them in relief when they’re found? So I threw the shoe toward my wife...
Conor immediately sent Colleen a text: “Can’t wait to see you and the baby! Bells are ringing! The wonderful Christmas spirit is upon us! Oh, Dad threw a shoe at mom going through security. Merry Christmas! When does Santa stuff his fat ass down the chimney tonight?”
My bad. Caregivers offer grace.
Finally, we arrived safely in Baltimore, staying downtown on the harbor, not far from Colleen and Matt’s home in the handsome Roland Park section of the city and near ancient cobblestones of historic Fells Point—ballast for schooners and “Baltimore Clippers” that plied the blustery oceans of the world. Established in the mid 1700s, Fells Point was a classic shipyard that built and supported dozens of privateers in the War of 1812 which preyed on British shipping vessels. The British retaliated, calling Fells Point a “nest of pirates,” an enflaming moniker that eventually led the British to attack Baltimore Harbor and mercilessly bomb Fort McHenry, an assault that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem, “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” later to become known as The Star Spangled Banner. During the battering, a “storm flag” was flown over Fort McHenry. It was replaced early on the morning of September 14, 1814 with a large garrison American flag,
Flags waving in a spirit of victory, I embraced my granddaughter Adeline Mae on Christmas Eve. I held her tightly. New life. New hope. Something new to live for. God is good!
The winds of change.