Eulogy for Ma

(4 August 2009)

I want to begin by expressing my family’s gratitude to Fr. Dumphy and Msgn. Pedone for this beautiful Mass. How
utterly appropriate that we are gathered at Blessed Sacrament this morning. It was in this church that my mother
received her first communion. It was here that she was confirmed. And it was here that she was married. And so,
I want to thank the entire parish of Blessed Sacrament for helping to make my mother’s life infinitely richer and
more meaningful.

Up until this moment, I have imagined that I had known the nature of a difficult writing assignment. I was
mistaken. Obviously, I cannot begin to reflect, in the next few minutes, the essence and the value of my mother’s
life. So, instead, I’d like merely to begin a conversation with all of you about a remarkable person. I’d like to start
one of those great Hackett-esque dialogues that we can all continue in the days and weeks and years that will
follow.

I use that adjective—“Hackett-esque”—pointedly, as my mother was part of that incredible, almost mythical
family, that exploded out of Mason Street in the 1930s, flooded through Columbus Park, and pretty much came to
overtake the entire city of Worcester and environs. As the decades have passed, that original tribe of 7 has
become legend—a nation with its own history, traditions, customs, rituals and taboos. But most of all, with its own
language and stories.

The Hacketts could talk. The Hacketts could tell a story. In the Hackett household, to use the old Irish phrasing,
“the crack was always good.”

So what, then, is the story of Eileen Hackett O’Connell?

Sitting around various kitchen tables the last four days with my family, looking at countless photos and eating
countless plates of Owen’s macaroni, I’ve been thinking about that question. Clearly it’s a difficult one. Because, as
we know, every life is inherently and uniquely complex and mysterious.

But in true Hackett tradition, I’ll try now to give you one version of the story of my mother.

Mom was a healer and a nurturer and the most empathetic person I’ve ever known. To her core, she felt your joys
and your pains. And this morning I think her primary and most deeply felt emotion over the arc of her entire life
was an abiding, living compassion.

As most of you know, she was a nurse. For a lot of us, our work, our careers, are simply that thing we do to
facilitate our real lives. But my mother was one of the fortunate ones whose life’s work was a function of her
being, of her tender heart and her kind soul, of her limitless capacity to love.

Technically, Mom worked as a nurse for only about five years—from the time she graduated from the City Hospital
School of Nursing until the time she married. But there is no doubt: she was a nurse to her marrow until the day
she died. And one of the all-time great ones. It was part of her identity, part of the way she perceived the world.
Nursing was a vocation to my mother, in the oldest and best sense of that word. It was a mission and a calling.
And that calling perpetually informed her existence. It determined the way she related to everyone around her—
with a sense of complete presence and concern, with an ability to understand what it was you needed in your
most trying hours. As my sister Lynn has often reminded me, no matter how badly you felt at any time, you could
find an instantaneous comfort in the moment my mother saw you come through her door and asked, “Are you
feeling a little punk, hon?”

Last Thursday night, as we gathered around her bed, whispering to her, thanking her, stroking her arm and
holding her hand and telling her how much we loved her, I thought of how our actions were a reflection of all
those occasions when my mother had done the same thing in the final, earthly moments of so many that she had
loved.

And so, I’ve chosen to start my mother’s story at the place where she learned her vocation, where she answered
her calling. The story takes place on a night in 1949, not too far from here, up on Queen Street, in the old
Worcester City Hospital. I love this story. To me, it has everything—drama and romance, the unfailing hand of fate
and maybe even a Greek chorus.

It begins as an ambulance delivers a local boxer named Al Mattei to the hospital. Mattei’d had a tough night at a
Mechanics Hall bout—he’d hit the canvas hard and required some tending at the emergency room. Some of Al’s
Holy Cross classmates—including Eddie Reardon and Buddy O’Malley and a scrappy kid from Oread Street named
Okie O’Connell—rushed to the hospital to check on the pugilist. My mother was working on “open ward G” that
night. And as she passed the Holy Cross students, one of them yelled, “Hey, it’s Susie Heywood!”

Mom turned and said, “I’m not Susie Heywood.”

One of the pals asked, “What’s your name?”

“Eileen Hackett,” Ma answered.

“Are you Johnny’s sister?” one asked. “Did your brother play football for St. Peter’s?” another wanted to know.

Mom confirmed that she was Johnny Hackett’s little sister. And that was almost the end of the exchange. She
began to move down the hall when Reardon or O’Malley happened to notice that the normally unfazable Okie was
thunderstruck. His eyes were bulging and his chin was slack and his heart was racing. In short, he was in worse
shape than the battered boxer in the hospital bed. Moved with pity, Buddy or Eddie—I’ve heard it told both ways—
yelled to the pretty nurse and announced grandly that his friend had just fallen hopelessly in love with her.

And so, Al Mattei’s glass jaw is responsible for the first five pews of people in this church today.

In June 1953, Okie O’Connell and Eileen Hackett stood before this altar and exchanged wedding vows.

Now, many of you here today knew my father well. He was a story unto himself. I think you might agree when I
call him a force of nature. If my mother’s primary mode of being throughout her life was compassion, my father’s
was, simply, passion. He was the largest small man I have ever known. In the minds of my siblings and myself, he
was fearless. But from the night he first saw Eileen Hackett on Ward G, to the Good Friday morning of his death,
Okie remained entirely thunderstruck. Smitten. Devoted. Captivated and defined by his love for my mother.

Years ago, in the throes of stormy adolescence, I was driving with my father one day and impulsively asked when
he had been most happy in his life. He looked at me sideways for a second and then said, casually, “I was pretty
happy on Saturday night.” Then he turned his attention back to the road. I stared at him, trying to recall what he
had done the previous Saturday night. And, frustrated, I finally asked, “Didn’t you and Mom spend Saturday night
at the Stop ’n’ Shop getting the groceries?” He turned back to look at me again, this time with a huge smile on his
face. And he said, “Yes, we did.”

The message was not lost on his dim teenage son: In Eileen’s presence, he was happy, fulfilled, blessed. More
than this, in the presence of my mother, he felt purpose and meaning.

I hope all of you know how much I loved and admired my father. And I hope that knowledge will allow you to
understand that it is nothing but the happy truth when I say that he married over his head. And that he never
forgot it. That he never ceased to marvel at his life-saving good fortune.

Okie brought Eileen adventure and laughter. Eileen brought Okie grace and a kind of miraculous antidote to
cynicism. I readily admit my prejudice, but as regards the union of my mother and father, did two people ever
complete one another more perfectly? They understood each other. They shared values and a vision. To me, they
remain the definition of what marriage, at its best, can do.

And what it can do—what Eileen and Okie did—was to build a world. Physically, that world was located down on
June St. But, in fact, my parents somehow carried it with them wherever they went. Like all the great worlds, it
was always bustling—and even, at times, chaotic. You could ask our ever-understanding neighbors over the
years—the Reynolds and the LeFleurs and the Palmers—but I think a lot of the time, that two-and-a-half-family
shook on its foundation with the voices always erupting within. With my grandparents and my Aunt, Ree, on the
first floor, and the kids and that terrifying, demented Irish setter on the top floors, the atmosphere ranged from
the vibrant and dynamic to the confused and frenzied. And we all thrived in the midst of that energizing whirlwind
that was the O’Connell family. Because overseeing it all was my mother, always peering through the craziness and
the busyness and my father’s next venture and into both the needs of the family and each of its individual
members. There was Eileen, the serene center of the whirlwind, tending you, nursing you, understanding you and
healing you.

Though it was located on the back-end of the house, the center of our June St. home was the kitchen, Mom’s
operation center—her hospital, cafeteria, domestic chapel and, most of all, counseling office. If the center of our
home was the kitchen, the center of the kitchen was the rocking chair. Please trust me when I assure you that Dr.
Freud’s analytic couch had nothing on my mother’s kitchen rocking chair. The patient would enter via the back
door, bursting with that day’s particular fear, anger, slight, worry, or general broken-heart and collapse into the
old rocker. Mom’s standard psycho-analytic posture was to be positioned behind the ironing board. And then the
patient would talk, would babble, would cry and rant and vent. And Mom would iron her way through a basket of
clothing, and listen and nod at the appropriate places. The session often ended with meatloaf, which, I sometimes
think, was the real key to the healing process. My mother tended two generations of rocking-chair patients—as
soon as her own children became mostly-functional adults, the grandchildren started rolling through that backdoor
and plunking themselves down into the sympathy rocker.

My own imagination is not large enough for me to understand the devastating sense of loss that Mom experienced
when my father died. That world, that reality, which they had created together, was torn in half. But she kept her
family whole, maintaining that center, that place of peace and comfort and belonging that she and my father had
so tirelessly constructed over time.

I suppose I have always felt that selflessness came easily to my mother. But what I’ve discovered in the last few
days is just how hard it was for her in the wake of dad’s death. She kept herself going by writing to him, almost
daily. In her desk just across the street, there are drawers full of fat notebooks containing what must be
thousands of pages of “letters to Okie.” Glancing through them yesterday, I learned that so many of them ask for
the same direction, support, strength, and love that she dispensed continually to her children and grandchildren.
What I marvel at now is that she never let her own sense of loss and confusion and heartbreak and fear
undermine her abiding empathy and compassion. She never allowed her sadness or her anxiety to harden her
heart or to cause her to disregard her calling.

Her very last notebook contains only a single completed page, one final letter, written this past November. It is
addressed not to Okie but to her grandchildren. And in it, she tells them what she always told all of us—and, I
suspect, what she told a lot of you with us today: that she loves you, always and unconditionally; that you are the
great joy of her life; that you are unique and that you are needed; and that she has faith in you—faith that,
whatever happens in this chaotic life, you will always find your way back to the meaning of her rocking chair.

And that meaning can be found, I think, in a different kind of notebook that belonged to my mother. I’ll close this
chapter of my mother’s story by sharing with you a quote we found in her homemade address book. I don’t know
the quote’s source. I don’t know when Mom discovered it. The morning after her death, her family gathered to
begin discussing the arrangements for her wake and funeral. As we started pondering the difficult phone calls we
needed to make, Nance spotted Mom’s pocket book and opened it to retrieve this address book.

(Show book)

As you can see, she kept it for decades. It is battered and torn. The pages inside are faded and some are stained
with her afternoon Dunkin Dounts coffee. I think the phone number of everyone in this church today might be
found inside this notebook. (Some of you are even listed more than once. And one individual’s phone number is
printed on different pages no less than five times! I would like to say that this was me—or even one of my
siblings. But the truth is that the listing belongs to a “Stevie,” of Vito’s Hair Design.)

This address book was, I think, something of a lifeline to my mother’s world. Especially as she aged and grew ill
and ventured less and less often outside of her home. Inside the front cover of the notebook, my mother had
taped the following words:

We each have a limited amount of energy to spend on people and things. If there is one imperative in the Bible
concerning this subject, I think it would be this: “Give your love to the persons in your life. Don’t ever let a thing—
whether it be money or pleasure or power—possess your heart.”

My mother’s heart was a fount of compassion. And my family and I have all been continuously nurtured and
comforted and healed by the outpouring of her love. Our gratitude to her is incalculable. And our gratitude to all of
you, gathered here, today, to remember and to honor her, is deep and lasting.

So let’s go out now and continue that conversation, that story, about decency and empathy and nurturing and
love.