On a bone-chilling cold afternoon in late January on Manhattan’s East Upper Side, Frank McCourt’s younger brother Malachy received the last rites at Lenox Hill Hospital.
It was somewhat surprising because the last surviving child of the penurious Limerick family immortalised in Angela’s Ashes was an atheist. “But I decided to hedge my bets,” he joked.
The 92 year old accepted he wouldn’t be around for much longer, as he grappled with prostate cancer, skin cancer and inclusion body myositis. He also had 11 stents in his heart. Yet, somehow Malachy battled on for another half-dozen weeks, before slipping away while listening to Will You Go Lassie Go by the Chieftains on March 11th.
In truth, family and loved ones had not expected the born fighter to last this long. They had prepared for the worst two years earlier when he entered home hospice care, but he surprised everyone when he outlived the six-month time limit allocated for palliative care and was withdrawn from the service in November 2022.
Still very lucid near the end, Malachy was in a surprisingly jovial but equally reflective mood when we spoke only a few minutes after he had received the last rites. It was our third lengthy conversation as part of what transpired to be his final interview.
How did it feel to hear a priest utter those unsettling words?
“Isn’t it great fun? I’m above ground and I just got the last rites from Fr Pat, and I’m all set,” he joked.
Limerick-born Fr Pat Moloney was once described as an “underground general of the IRA” when arrested for gunrunning, but the charges were dropped. Next, he received a five-year prison sentence after $2 million (€1.84 million) of the $7.4 million from the 1993 Rochester Brinks robbery was discovered in his apartment but he has always professed his innocence.
Malachy also had a Brinks’ heist link. As part of a successful acting career – which he credited to Richard Harris, another Limerickman, who “opened doors” for him – he appeared in Peter Falk’s 1978 film The Brink’s Job about an infamous robbery in 1950.
Even with the Oil of the Sick still fresh on his forehead, Malachy made light of his situation. “Of course I am mentally prepared – I am dying. I can’t help myself! One of these days there’ll be the call to [go] elsewhere – goodbye world!” he said.
Even on his deathbed, he did not ponder too much about the possibility of an afterlife. “I don’t know where the hell it is, or if our spirit goes anywhere. And I don’t give a fiddler’s f**k because it’s not my business,” he stated.
“I don’t believe in gods, devils, evil, heavens or hells or punishment. Nobody’s ever given me a satisfactory answer to where we’re going afterwards. And myself, I’m searching for ‘dead’. There’s a great sound to that word – dead! I always remember when one fellah said, ‘I woke up dead!’ I love the Irish contradictory statements.”
Malachy had no last wishes, apart from wanting his remains to be “burned”, as he bluntly put it. “Why should I care? Sure, I’ll be dead,” he said.
He was pro-euthanasia. “People should do whatever they want to do without anybody getting in the way. Some people get very evangelical about death. ‘Oh, respect for the body’. F**k the body! It’s dead. Cut it up. Give it to science,” he said.
His nonchalant attitude towards the Grim Reaper could be put down to the fact that he’d been mentally preparing himself for many years. In 2017 Malachy pondered it all in his book Death Need Not Be Fatal. He even made light of the heavy topic by posing in a coffin on the book jacket.
“The publisher didn’t like the idea. The gas thing about it is, nobody dies in America – it’s always, ‘He passed on’, or ‘He’s no longer with us’, or ‘He’s with the Lord, under the sod’ and everything [else] but dead!” he mused.
Malachy wrote several best-sellers and toured a successful two-man show, A Couple of Blaguards, with his brother Frank. Yet the affable character had no delusions of grandeur about his own writing career.
The Brooklyn-born entertainer and raconteur dismissed the idea that it was cathartic for him to write about his “miserable childhood” in Limerick and his later battle with alcoholism in his memoir, A Monk Swimming, which had a phenomenal first print run of 250,000 copies in 1998.
“Ah, not at all. I would just sit down and scribble. I didn’t care what they did with it. It was the idea that I was getting paid a lot of money for it [that appealed to me] – about $300,000,” he confessed. [The Washington Post claimed in their obituary that he received $650,000 to write it.]
[ Malachy McCourt: ‘Frank wouldn’t be happy unless he was miserable’Opens in new window ]
He added, “Frank was educated at university and became a teacher. So there was no way of putting them two books [Angela’s Ashes and A Monk Swimming] on the table and saying, ‘Which one is better?’ I wasn’t in competition.”
Angela’s Ashes might have been lauded around the world and even won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, but its portrayal of abject poverty outraged many in Limerick. It riled up Malachy that Frank was accused of exaggerating his family’s impoverished upbringing in the city’s slums.
“The criticism was unfair. Jealousy, I suppose. We’re very judgmental [in Limerick]. It was worse than what Frank wrote, because if he wrote it all, we’d have been driven out of Limerick altogether. It was bad enough as it was,” Malachy claimed.
“We were destitute. The father had gone to England and forgotten us. And here was this woman with four young children, trying to get a couple of bob from St Vincent de Paul. And then this guy came along and we moved into his house, and it was awful because he was a drunk. He’d belt us out of the blue, give us a whack on the head.
“We were bereft. I failed everything in school because I couldn’t study, as your man was always drunk and present. So, Frank and I decided to get out of there. We went to live with another uncle, who was a decent old sort. ”
Was he able to forgive his namesake, Malachy McCourt snr, described in Angela’s Ashes as a “shiftless, loquacious alcoholic father”, who died in 1985?
“The thing in my life now is forgiveness. Forgive everybody. They didn’t mean it. They’re human, they’re weak. Don’t hold grudges,” he said philosophically.
“He taught me about serenity. So, all I asked for – it’s not happiness – was serenity. Whatever happens, I am serene and I’m enjoying life. If you keep things going, it gives you pain – and I don’t want pain.”
Sadly, it was a case of like father, like son when Malachy ended up an alcoholic, too.
“I haven’t had a drink in about 40 years. I’d f****d up one marriage. I was about to f**k up a second one, and I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to lose Diana. I’m glad to say that love came first,” the former publican said about his second wife.
“I f***d that up, too,” he added about his bar. “So everything I did, I messed up due to drinking. I used to miss the pint, but then the blessings of sobriety helped me a lot. Some of AA is a bit too religious, but mostly it’s good. I appreciate all the good that AA has done over the years for all of us. I highly recommend it if anyone is in any difficulty.”
I wondered if he still thought much about Angela, who passed away in 1981. “Sometimes I reflect on her. Reflection is different from memory because memory hurts. She was a lovely woman. She was very kind but persecuted. Simple education. She didn’t have much. She never had literature in her life, but she had a great sense of humour. She was loving, but she stood by while her man clouted us. She’d say, ‘No, no, that’s enough. Stop hitting him now.’”
Malachy was the first McCourt to find fame in America, thanks to his prominent role in the TV soap Ryan’s Hope and his own controversial TV and radio shows in the late 1960s. But, according to Malachy, Frank would have launched his successful writing career much earlier in life if it wasn’t for the first of his three wives.
“She used to be after him for writing. ‘Why don’t you stop that bloody messing around with your writing and wasting time?’ She was not at all happy that he had turned into a world-acclaimed writer,” he revealed.
“The thing about it, he got happily married [again] and it was great to see him prosper and die happy.”
For the past 10 years of his life, Malachy co-hosted a Sunday morning radio chatshow with John McDonagh, an Irish-American cabby, comedian and playwright, on New York’s public radio station WBAI.
No doubt, it was mostly the show and his family that kept him going until the end. Even shortly after he received the last rites, Malachy thought about doing the next show from his hospital bed. “The show must go on,” he quipped.
As for his own obituary, Malachy modestly said he would like it to simply read, “He was a nice guy.
“That would do me fine. It’s been an amazing life,” he concluded. “We’d a miserable Irish childhood, but I escaped all of that and I had a happy life.”
