Irish American author Maura Casey said ‘humor' kept her family from ‘bursting into tears' dealing with illness and addiction

Irish Daily Star

25-04-2025

When penning her memoir, Maura Casey got to relive her entire childhood through journals that she kept for most of her life.
While attending a charity tournament, later in life, Maura shared childhood memories with
Irish writer, Frank McCourt,
of growing up in a busy, loud and often turbulent household. Despite being on opposite sides of the Atlantic - McCourt's
Angela's Ashes
being set in Limerick - the pair found themselves laughing at how similar their stories were.
'If you live in the madness of an alcoholic home, there's a funny combination of humor and madness that's hard to explain,' Maura said.
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Maura is the youngest of six children, who all came in quick succession over the course of seven years. The next child up from Maura was her sister Ellen; her Irish twin who was just 11 months older and 'the most charismatic of the bunch.'
Ellen was diagnosed with kidney disease when she was ten, and at that time, it was considered terminal. Ellen's doctor, Mary Hawking - a sister of
Stephen Hawking
- said that at each medical meeting they would ask the question, 'How do we give Ellen one more summer?'
Maura and her sister Ellen were just 11 months apart
(Image: Maura Casey)
Maura's mother, desperate to save Ellen at any cost, donated her kidney. In Buffalo New York in the 1960s, renal transplants were still considered incredibly risky and Maura believed for many years, her mother kept a lot of the details from the rest of the family, so they wouldn't worry.
'Now people act as if getting a kidney transplant is like getting your wisdom teeth out. But then, it was kind of the medical equivalent of walking on the moon."
'The kidney lasted twenty years,' Maura explained. 'But in making the choices she did, I began to expect it shortened my mother's life considerably. And that's what I wrote the book to find out.'
In many ways, Ellen's diagnosis seemed like the catalyst for the turmoil her family went through after that point.
'My father dissolved into alcoholism and a spectacular affair with a neighborhood woman, who had nine kids,' Maura explained.
As she wrote, she realized that 'booze was a character in the book just as much as any member of the family.'
For a long time, drinking and Irish culture were inextricable for Maura - something she laughed about when she later visited Ireland after getting sober at 28, and realized how wrong she had been.
But despite some of the memories being difficult to revisit - like violent altercations within the family home - Maura retells them with an impeccable sense of humor, a trait she also credits to her Irishness.
'Humor is food and drink to an Irishman,' she said. 'It is so much a part of who we are at our very core. My mother could be hysterically funny. Her humor was witty. My father had a story-telling humor. So we were all very, very funny, in different ways, but it also seems to me that our humor kept us from bursting into tears.'
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