Until our next-door neighbor Catherine Corcoran died last week she lived Irish and proud in the same spacious, well-kept white house where she grew up on North Irving Avenue in the Hill Section of Scranton. Independent and bright, Catherine, 81, paid attention to what mattered in the neighborhood. She cared about the world and did what she could to help make life better for people who needed a hand.
Since I wasn’t born or raised in Scranton I always looked forward to hearing her reflect on more innocent times in her hometown where my immigrant Irish grandfather put down roots more than a century ago and dug coal underground for 45 years. Catherine spoke lovingly of what she called the “chapel” just up the street from our houses, the Immaculate Conception Church where her funeral will be held on Tuesday, St. Patrick’s Day.
Unlike today, she said, everybody who lived in the old neighborhood during the 1950s and ’60s seemed to know everybody else who resided in tidy homes on that long tree-lined block that ended at the East Gibson Street corner where I live. Miss Hay lived in the house my wife Stephanie and I now call home and kept a beautiful garden with bright summer flowers which she took great pride in showing off to the neighborhood children. Catherine said her brother even wrote to Miss Hay when he was fighting in the jungle as a soldier in Vietnam.
During the almost 20 years we lived as close neighbors, I always enjoyed seeing Catherine hanging clean, crisp white sheets with old-fashioned wooden clothespins from the clothesline in her backyard. Occasionally I’d see her talking over the fence to Sis Murphy who just turned 80 and whose homestead backyard adjoins Catherine’s. I thought about them growing up together in those same sturdy houses as young girls who remained the dearest of friends after all those years.
Time marches on I have lately taken to saying too often.
But I, too, at almost 75, now take solace as I once took comfort knowing Catherine worked hard to build an orderly, disciplined life as an old-school role model. A former kindergarten and math teacher whose academic achievement included three master’s degrees, Catherine lived alone as a good citizen with even better manners, a woman to whom mature respect for our neighborly Irish traditions still mattered.
In recent years on March 17 Stephanie would pick up an extra loaf of Irish soda bread still warm from the bakery to take over to Catherine. I’d don my tweed cap, pick up my handmade shillelagh and go over to stand outside her front door and bellow the words to “Mickey Brannigan’s Pup” with an encore of “Tread on the Tail of Me Coat,” two of my father Shamus’ favorite Irish ditties he taught me as a boy. Catherine, Stephanie and I would laugh and talk a little more on the sidewalk. Then we’d go about our business as neighbors who looked out for each other however and whenever we could.
When I spotted the ambulance outside Catherine’s house about three weeks ago the cop standing on the sidewalk simply said Catherine was headed to the hospital. Stephanie texted Catherine that evening and said she should let us know if she needed anything.
Catherine politely texted back, “Thanks.”
We didn’t want to bother her so we waited hoping to see the color television light flashing in her living room window to alert us she was home. Then we’d go over and knock on the door. But the TV light never came on. Word traveled fast through the neighborhood she was gone.
The Irish sometimes say, “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; Love leaves a memory no one can steal.” Yet, as hard as one of life’s last lessons is to learn, Catherine Corcoran taught us in the end that even the greenest, most vibrant shamrock must one day lose luster, wilt and disappear.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Tuesday, March 17th, at 10am at Immaculate Conception Church, 800 Taylor Ave., Scranton. Visitation will be from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. prior to Mass. In honor of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday and Catherine’s love of her Irish heritage, the wearing of green is encouraged.
