Knock Knock Knockin On Heaven's Door

Death has been hard at work this week. My Aunt Sue passed away on Sunday, June 26, my friend Carole’s mother passed away on Sunday, June 19, and my friend Debbie’s father-in-law passed away on Saturday, June 25.

Susannah McConnell Zimmerman Eccles, my mother’s sister, was one of NINE children. She was the last of the nine to pass away. Although there are still children and grandchildren and cousins spread around, those days of the McConnell martini drinking, Chesterfield smoking get-togethers are over.  

The McConnells were quite a bunch of characters. My childhood was filled with endless Irish wakes, somber Catholic weddings, and uproarious drunken receptions. I just thought that’s how EVERYBODY did things. At wakes, Uncle John would inevitably reflect on “Why does somebody have to DIE for us all to get together??”  And cousin Jackie would always ask someone to sing “Danny Boy” at the funeral home. D Reilly, of Reilly’s funeral home in Belmar NJ, was an honorary McConnell because we saw him so often.

Charles, Ruth (Mom), Sue, James,Mary (front), Agnes, cousin Margaret Mary Green, Grammom, Ann, Willie, John.

William: Oddly, my Uncle Willie was the only one of the brothers who wasn’t addressed by his FULL name – Charles was never called Charlie, and James was not known as Jimmy. Whenever Uncle Willie came over our house, and I began to introduce him to whomever of my friends was visiting, he would thrust out his hand (the one that didn’t have a beer in it) and say, “Hi, I’m Uncle Willie”. Instant family. Just add beer. Uncle Willie and his wife Gloria had three children, Billy and the twins, Liz and Sean.

Agnes: Aunt Aggie LOVED dogs. Her back yard was full of German Shepherds and rabbit hutches and cats. There was always a huge Shepherd with giant feet named Teddy. And for a time there also was a monkey in the house. Aggie had five kids, Bruce, Jackie, Brian (who passed away from leukemia at a young age), and twins Charles and Richard (Richard passed away at an older age from……let’s just call it embracing his Irishness). I do have one other set of twin cousins, but they’re on my father’s side so we won’t talk about them here. When Aggie sold her house and moved into an apartment, it was right over Don’s Pizza King in Belmar, overlooking Main Street and the grandstand where the St Patrick’s Day Parade Grand Marshall, dignitaries and local celebrities sat and all the marching bands stopped to perform. Oh, the St Patrick’s Day parties! Everyone came to those parties. We would hang out the windows and enjoy the parade up close and personal. There was so much food, so many people, and it got larger every year. Families grew, friends brought friends….it was an epic event. In fact, when my own children were baptized, the day (selected by my church, not me) fell on the same day as the St. Patrick’s Day parade/party. The only family that skipped Aggie’s party in favor of the baptism was my sister, who is my son’s godmother.And it was at a New Year’s Eve party at Aggie’s that I had my first underage cocktail, a yummy Sloe Gin Fizz, served up my cousin Bruce’s first wife, Paulette.

Charles: Uncle Charles served in the war in Germany, where he met and married Aunt Hilde. After he left the service, he was an editor for the NY Times. He worked nights and slept days and we rarely saw him. After he got older, he became very reclusive and rarely ventured out of the house. His wife Hilde came to all our family events. She was more of a family member than Charles was. Hilde was a fabulous baker who would get up an hour early in the morning to make a cake to bring to work. I still have a copy of her “Sunday Go To Meeting Cake” recipe, typed up on an old fashioned typewriter. Hilde & Charles had three children, Gerald, Christopher and Gregory.

John: Uncle John always liked to tell the story of how he was going to a dance as a young man and claimed he was going to dance with the prettiest girl there, and he did, and he married her, and that was my Aunt Ceil. And she is still beautiful. Their children were Mary, Tim, Mark, Theresa and Kevin.

My cousin Theresa with her mom, my Aunt Ceil.

Ann: Aunt Ann was my mother’s best friend and maid of honor at her wedding. She was the baby of the family and never learned to drive. She often babysat me in my kindergarten days and she would take me on walks through the woods behind her house to a nearby convenience store to buy milk or whatever else she needed that day. She loved cats. She had an orange cat named Willis and later she had a Siamese named Booby, and finally, she adopted some black and white strays. She was often at our house for martinis and dinner or to go shopping with my mother. I remember one time hanging on my front porch with my friend Carole, talking to Tony and Denis, two guys from France that we had met and had crushes on, who had somehow found their way to my house and just appeared unannounced (much to my horror – I was always one of those “meet me around the corner” kind of girls when it came to boys, and I never invited them home, but that’s another story). I introduced the boys to my mother and Aunt Ann when they came into the house carrying groceries, and Tony said in his broken English, “How many mothers you got?”  Aunt Ann & Uncle George had one son, George.

Sue: Aunt Sue lived in the apartment across the hall from Aunt Aggie so she was part of the ever present evening martini get-together. The office that I worked at for nearly 20 years was just a few buildings away from Aggie’s and Aunt Sue’s apartments, and both of them gave me keys to their apartments so I could hang out at lunchtime if I wanted.  I don’t really remember Sue's first husband, Walter Zimmerman, but her second husband, John Eccles, just embraced the whole McConnell clan and became one of us. John drove a great big motorhome. It was his only vehicle, used for traveling, grocery shopping, or driving around town. It also came in handy one late night when, after leaving some bar at 2am, my friend Patty and I decided we needed to see Cousin Charles. We parked in Belmar Plaza and I hopped from the hood of Patty’s camaro to the roof of John’s motorhome, then onto the metal canopy that surrounded Belmar Plaza at that time. I stumbled across the canopy to Charles’ bedroom window and knocked. Surprisingly, Charles was not overjoyed to wake up and find me at his window. He dragged me in through the window and escorted me down the stairwell between Aunt Aggie’s and Aunt Sue’s apartments. I must have been loud and giggly, because Aunt Sue couldn’t wait to tell Aggie the next day all about how Charles had had a GIRL in the apartment during the night!  Aunt Sue had one daughter, Maggie.

James: In my mother’s photo scrapbooks, James was often referred to as “Specks”, in recognition of his Irish freckles. James married Eleanor and moved to the Philadelphia area, but he used to bring the family back to the Jersey Shore to go to the beach on weekends. Uncle James and Aunt Eleanor had three children: Eleanor, Ruth Ann, and Marian. When the family came to visit our house, the girls would play the piano and sing to entertain us. Although I didn’t hear him say it myself, Aunt Ann used to say that James would get so mad at Aunt Eleanor because she never wanted to put her teeth in.

Mary:  Aunt Mary was the oldest of the bunch and I didn’t know her very well as she was on the periphery of the family. According to my mother, my grandmother’s sister always wanted children but was unable to have any, so when my grandmother’s second child was born, her sister convinced her to let her first child, Mary, go live with her. So Mary was raised as an only child by her aunt, and was fortunate to have “nice things” given to her, whereas the remaining eight children stayed with their parents and dealt with the usual money issues and hand-me-downs that a large family has to go through. Aunt Mary married Ev and moved to Santa Barbara, so she wasn’t around at family events. She did come to visit NJ one time, and bunked in my room with me. She was very observant and noticed that I had an obsession with horses. After she went back to California she occasionally sent me cards (with horse designs) with newspaper clippings from local horse shows in her area. Mary did not have children.

Ruth: Ruth was my mother. She was the eternal nonconfrontational softspoken people pleaser. Ruth and Alex had three children, Margaret Ann, Christine, and Theresa (me). To the casual observer, it appeared that my father wore the pants in the family, but after my mother passed away, my father was lost without her and he had to learn how to do everyday household things like balance a checkbook and buy groceries. I was only 20 when my mother died. And my mother was only 54.

Grammom and Ruth (Mom) on Mom's wedding day

My mother passed away on July 2, 1980, and her viewings and funeral were held at Reilly's Funeral Home over the Holiday weekend. Imagine a huge Irish entourage trying to park near Belmar Beach on a holiday weekend at the shore. It was crazy. As I get older, this time of year makes me pensive as I get closer and closer to the same age my mother was when she died. I worried so much about my sister Maggie as she approached and passed that milestone.  I know I shouldn't worry because there is also longevity in the family. My grandmother lived to just a few months short of her 100th birthday.

Now that generation of McConnells is gone. But they have left us with many memories and many stories to tell. Oh, yes, there are stories.

Godspeed, Aunt Sue, and may you all raise a martini in heaven to toast being together again.