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Carmel Mc Mahon Biography

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“The industrial ghost towns, the late spring rain, the wide, low skies. The old sadness rising. An excess of black bile, they used to say, made the melancholic personality. Freud said that mourning and melancholia are akin in that they are both responses to loss. Mourning is a conscious and healthy response to the loss of a love object. Melancholia is more complicated. It operates on a subconscious level. All the feelings of loss are present, but for what? The melancholic cannot say. This, Freud says, is a pathology.”

LoveLossGriefSadnessMourningMelancholyFamily LifeFreud
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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“Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me - halting, hesitating - that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.”

PregnancyWomens RightsForgettingComplicityIrish HistoryUnmarried WomenSilencing WomenMagdalene Laundries
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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“We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.”

MemoryStorytellingFamily HistorySilencingHealing TraumaGenerational TraumaIrish HistoryUnburdeningBiological Trauma
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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“The city had not yet woken on the frigid Sunday morning of February 20, 2011, when the body of a young Irish woman was found outside St. Brigid's Church in Manhattan's East Village. The news reports cited alcoholism, homelessness, and hypothermia as contributing factors in her death. They said that earlier that month, on St. Brigid's feast day she had turned thirty-five years old. They said she wanted to be an artist. They said her name was Grace Farrell.”

TraumaExileAlcoholismHomelessnessIntergenerational TraumaIrish ImmigrantSt Brigid
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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