Celebrating Catherine Hennessey's Life

Last night was a Celebration of Life for my late friend Catherine Hennessey. It was a lovely event, held on the lawn at Beaconsfield on a perfect summer night.

I was asked to be one of the speakers, to reflect on my relationship with Catherine. I ruminated a lot about how to express the essence of how important Catherine was to me, and I went through many drafts. As I wrote, I excised out the “and then this happened, and then this happened,” the way my writing can often tilt absent a compass. 

I tried to heed the words of Mathew Dicks—”So a story is about change over time. Usually, it’s sort of a realization.” And the advice of Lisa, who’s forever encouraging me to write with a deeper connection to my feelings than to the chronology.

I think I ended up with something honest, and I got the sense, watching the audience as I spoke, that more than a few people saw themselves in my story.

Here’s what I said.

We sat around the kitchen table, my late partner and I, in the kitchen of Catherine Hennessey’s house on Pidwell Lane.

It was Christmas dinner, 1994, cold and snowy outside, with a roaring fire in the wood stove.

Around the table with us were David Weale, Reg Porter, and Darren Peters, between them a veritable braintrust of Islanderness, but each, as well, with a not insubstantial need for a kind of mothering that Catherine was uniquely capable of offering.

Mothering is not a word one usually hears spoken about Catherine.

She was a lively host, a harsh critic, an inveterate gossip, a collector, a flirt, a lover, a politician. She was self-involved, fiercely independent, a determined iconoclast, a passionate advocate for “her causes.”

But motherly?

Yet I can think of no better word to describe our relationship.

When I landed here in Charlottetown from Ontario, 33 years ago, I was 26 years old, full of piss and vinegar, arriving in a place I knew very little about, a place where I knew nobody.

In short order, Catherine had taken me under her wing, fashioning herself, by times, as a guide to this complicated place, a protector, a supporter, a critic, and a co-conspirator in her various misadventures.

She generously invited me into her world, a world that, by all rights, I had no place entering.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, there is a test called “Are you a connector?” that measures the size of your social network: from a list of 220 surnames, drawn at random from the Manhattan phone book, you score one point for every person you know with that last name.

The mean score was 40. Gladwell had never heard of anyone scoring more than 130.

I gave the test to Catherine and she scored 180.

Which is to say: she knew a lot of people. And she introduced me to many of them: academics, musicians, artists, writers, politicians, architects, entrepreneurs, all part of her impossibly large and diverse network of friends and familiars.

I met these people around Catherine’s supper table, or at parties she regularly hosted at 222 Sydney Street and Cranberry Wharf, parties where she was forever exhorting me to get out of my shell, get up off my perch at the back of the room and “mingle, Peter, mingle.” Mothering.

Now I happen to have a perfectly wonderful mother, the one who bore and raised me. She would be the first to admit that, as a determined introvert, she never quite understood Catherine’s extreme extroversion, nor my attraction to it. My mother taught me many things; how to be a social animal wasn’t one of them.

And so there’s the thing: the mothering I got from Catherine was the mothering I needed to fill in exactly the cracks and holes that I arrived here with.

I needed to learn how to meet people.

I needed help cultivating my curiosity.

I needed a nudge or a kick from time to time, to loosen up my shyness and help me get over myself.

I needed someone to explain to me this peculiar city, on this peculiar Island, to school me in the deft mix of humility and bravado that allowed me to both remain true to myself, and to make my way here.

And, far from home as I was, I needed someone who would serve me a cup of tea—milk, no sugar, as she struggled to remember over three decades—and provide me with a safe, warm place to land.

Over the years, Catherine boosted my car battery when it died, fed me more macaroni and cheese than one should ever eat, made me a Chocolate Chip Chiffon Cake for my birthday, took me on a tour of her old haunts in Boston, loaned me a bed when I got storm-stayed, and shared a gin and tonic over her balcony rail during COVID.

The peak of her motherliness, though, came on October 1, 2000, the day my daughter Olivia was born.

It was and remains the most agonizingly stressful day of my life: an emergency C-section, an APGAR of 0, a rush to the NICU, huddles of concerned doctors gathered around Olivia’s cot.

By the time I left the hospital around 9 p.m. things had stabilized, and I headed home, alone. I stopped in at Catherine’s on the way there, and found her entertaining friends from Cape Breton. She welcomed me in, fed me a late supper, let me calm my frazzled nerves, and sent me off into the night with poached pears in chocolate in a Ziploc bag. It was exactly what I needed. I am forever grateful.

This is not to suggest that being mothered by Catherine was without its challenges. Chief among them was her habit of casting people out when offended.

My time came in 2003 when, writing on my blog about her 70th birthday party at 222, I made a private event too public for her taste, and she didn’t talk to me for months.

Eventually, all was forgiven: it was hard to be in Catherine Hennessey Siberia, but I survived and life went back to normal.

Many years later, I visited Catherine at Harbourside, after the worst of COVID had passed. I brought my new girlfriend Lisa to meet her for the first time. She put a pot of tea on, and I got to introduce my new gal to my de facto Island mother. It was a big day.

As things were winding down, Catherine stood up from her chair to show us out, and, suddenly, right before our eyes, fell straight over onto the floor, like a tree.

She was okay, somehow, if a bit shocked. We helped her up, made sure she was truly okay, and said our goodbyes.

While Catherine might have been okay, I’m still recovering from the sight of a stalwart pillar of my life, the very measure of vitality, becoming suddenly and inarguably frail before me.

I never went back to Harbourside, and soon thereafter Catherine moved to longterm care; I didn’t visit her there for the longest time either, although she was often on my mind. Something held me back. Was it fear, grief, shame at having waited so long, or some other deeper emotion? I don’t know; whatever it was, it roiled me deeply, as Lisa can attest.

Eventually, I simply plucked up my courage and went for a visit.

I need not have been afraid: Catherine was, dare I say, content in her now-much-smaller life. She was diminished, yes, but by no means dimmed.

We had a lovely chat, about all manner of things, as we had many times before. It was, I didn’t realize then, goodbye.

When Catherine died, a year later, I felt myself unable to write about her. Blogging has always been such a conduit for explaining myself to the world; I found it suddenly unavailable to me.

Being among others who loved her, at the June sale of the objects she’d collected over the years, was what unlocked me, and I could start to write about her.

For a time, Catherine was a blogger too.

Back in 2000, at the very dawn of the medium, I convinced Catherine to try her hand at writing in public, and I agreed to be her guide, her editor, her troubleshooter.

She dove in with both feet. Her writing there, over 3 years, is as concentrated an essence of Catherine as you will find.

On Mother’s Day, 2002, she wrote this:

I am thinking of all the Mothers I know and all the Mothers I knew and all the people who have mothered me over the years.

In that spirit, I will finish with thanks to Catherine for all the mothering she mothered my way over the years.

I miss you dearly, and feel so blessed to have known you.