A EULOGY FOR MICHAEL DONNELLAN

When Margaret called my wife and me and told us that Michael had died during the night, we expressed our deepest sympathy to her, to their son Brian and his wife Susan. We reminisced about the great times we had when we lived in Adrian, Michigan, especially my marriage to Anita Dixon on July 24, 1978. Jesuit priest psychiatrist Father James Gill and Siena’s Chaplain Father John Kiefer concelebrated our nuptial Mass in our home which overlooked Lake Adrian. Anita chose her sister Joan Nealon to be her maid of honor and I chose my good friend Michael Donnellan to be the best man.

How could those of us who were there ever forget the toast my best man Michael gave before we sat down for dinner. He made his toast not to Anita and me, the bride and groom, but to the house where we would live and where the small reception was held. Lifting his glass, Michael said, “Here’s a toast to this house. May the roof never fall in, and may George and Anita never fall out.”

It was a perfect toast. Anita and I have never fallen out and as far as we know the roof of that house on Spielman Road is still as strong and sturdy as it was thirty years ago.

But this celebration is not about Anita and me. It’s about Michael Donnellan, so let me segue to a paragraph I read in a book titled Aubade: A Teacher’s Notebook, written by Wallace Fowlie, a professor at Duke University. He writes these words that apply to the life of Michael Donnellan:

“The story of a life is the story of an education, the story of how one is reared and prepared, led forth to one’s universe. It is the finding of one leader or leaders who will point the way to the new universe that is our own. Old universes are constantly being discarded for new ones. We have to be led away from old universes that have served their purpose, and be guided toward a new goal, a new universe. This occurs each time we change teachers or habitations or cities. It occurs imperceptibly with each new dawn when the past of a single night or a single day appears useless and worthy of being cast aside.” (Wallace Fowlie, Aubade, A teacher’s Notebook, p. 123)

Michael’s life and education began in a beautiful part of our world called County Galway, Ireland. And it brought him to other counties too like County Cavan where he met and later married the lovely Margaret McCabe. How fortunate for me that they left the land of saints and scholars and lived in Adrian, Michigan with their precocious son Brian. When the graduate program at Saint John College of Cleveland closed, Michael urged me to apply for a similar position at Siena Heights College in Adrian, Michigan, where he was in administration. I did and during my tenure there often visited the Donnellans. Michael and I would talk politics until Margaret called us into the dining room where she set before us a gourmet dinner.

Today children read Harry Potter stories, which introduce them to the world of magic, witchcraft and fantasy. They identify with the main characters such as the Dursleys, Ron Weasley, Hermione, Draco Malfoy, and Professor Dumbledore.

Thirty years ago there were no Harry Potter books, but in the living room of the Donnellan home there was always the Sunday New York Times. With little two –year-old Brian at my side, I would ask him to identify the people whose pictures were on the front page of the New York Times. Without hesitation he would call out their names: “President Nixon,” “Sam Ervin,” “Spiro Agnew,” “Gerald Ford,” “Sam Dash,” “Charles Colson,” “Howard Hunt” and many others. It was obvious that Michael Donnellan was teaching his son about real characters in Washington, some of whom were involved in mischief and witchcraft of a kind different from that experienced by the fictional characters in the Harry Potter books.

Although I left Siena Heights and returned to Cleveland to teach at the community college and Mike moved to an administrative position at Trinity College in Burlington, Vermont and then to San Francisco, we kept in touch. Sometimes we would visit the Donnellans in San Francisco, sometimes we would meet in another city, and on numerous occasions the Donnellans would visit us in Cleveland.

Knowing he had little chance of a full recovery from the cancer he had been struggling against for two years, Mike wanted to make some final visits. He and Margaret traveled to their beloved Ireland, to Burlington, and to Cleveland to say goodbye.

We wanted the Donnellans to meet our good friend, 92-year-old Dr. Joseph Foley, a widower who was born in Boston of poor Irish immigrant parents. The Jesuits wanted Joe to attend Boston College high school but his mother insisted that Joe attend the Boston Latin School which he did. Every month for six years Joe had to stand before the student assembly and recite from memory 30 lines of prose or poetry. He can still recite every poem he ever learned.

After the Boston Latin School it was on to Holy Cross College, where he graduated magna cum laude, and to Harvard Medical School, where he graduated cum laude.

Anita and I took Michael and Margaret to meet Joe for lunch at Night Town, a well known Irish restaurant in Cleveland Heights with an outdoor patio that was open on that pleasant October day.

At one point in the conversation, I asked Joe to recite the famous W. B. Yeats poem “The Fiddler of Dooney.” Joe began –

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;

Much to our delight, Michael and Margaret Donnellan joined him for the rest of the poem:

My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin;
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance;
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

Sitting in state, Peter has called you first through the gate, Michael Donnellan; and we rejoice that when he calls us we will spy you and come up to you and say, “Here is our Fiddler of Dooney!” And we shall ask you to lead us to the new universes you have discovered so that we can dance forever like a wave of the sea.

Comments on this hero? Email us

Copyright© 2008