Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Coughlin--My Mother

A day doesn't go by that I don't think about my mother, Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Coughlin. She was one of the great people to walk the face of the earth, and her likes will not be seen again. My Mom died on December 8th, 2003, slipped quietly and gracefully from this life as we gathered around her hospital bed. I can just imagine that she was piped into Heaven, welcomed there by my Dad, her sister Julia ("Dudie"), her crazy twin brothers, Dick and Don, and brothers Fenton (Skip) and Al. And that's for starters. The welcome would have been Irish-rambunctious.

Margaret Ann was born on November 10th, 1923 (we thought it was 1924 all her life--a little white lie she manufactured long ago!), born in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time, the Fitzpatrick's lived on East 169th Street in Cleveland, a hop skip and a jump from Euclid Beach Park and Lake Erie. Her dad, Jack [John Francis Fitzpatrick], was a yard conductor at the New York Central Collinwood Yards. Her mom, Margaret Ann Sullivan Fitzpatrick, was a homemaker. I think a couple factors really marked my mom's life. She had a wonderful sister and wonderful brothers. She was the baby of the family, and they helped her and stuck up for her and loved her. And she had wonderful cousins (some names come to mind: Pat and Sally Kearns, Lois Cherry) and wonderful aunts and uncles. She really loved the sweet Sullivan aunts, her mother's sisters (all of whom died fairly young). Her father, I think, was a little distant. He worked hard and sometimes went on dark drinking binges. And her mother's health started failing when my mother was still very young. The problem, we think, was high blood pressure, and possible kidney damage from it. In our era, this problem could have been easily treated, but in 1935 it was a serious issue. It led to terrible headaches and I think she became a semi-invalid in the late 1930's. This was my Mom's teenage years, and she had a distant and often absent father and an ill mother. I think my Mom was a kind of orphan, raised to a large extent by her sister and her brothers.

[I will continue writing about my mother in subsequent posts and will invite my sister and brothers to share their memories also--I'll post them here. In the next post on Mom I'll do a little Fitzpatrick/Sullivan genealogy, talk about her getting expelled from Villa Angela Academy, and finally talk about her meeting the Coughlin boys in Willoughby soon after World War II.]