This is not the Sunday newsletter I'd planned.

"Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far. Truth is a fixed star, Eileen Aruin."

Aileen Aruin is such a beautiful song. My son Conall and I made our way to the mainland to see my ma last Monday and she had us help her sing it. Her dad used to sing it to her when she was a girl.

Anyway, she’s gone. Eight o’clock this morning, a beautiful cloudless day. She should be just arriving at Tir na Nog right about now.

Eileen Glavin was 101, she lived bravely and well, died bravely and well among those who loved her. Strangely, I’m not sad. Just disoriented. Her death isn’t just an event in my life but in the lives of a great many people. She was the matriarch of a far-flung tribe. Also a bit of a celebrity.

Eileen Glavin. Avon lady, laundromat proprietress, devout Catholic, Nazi hunter, formidable authority in kosher law.

My mother the spy, as I used to refer to her. One of “the Bletchley girls,” code-breakers in Alan Turing’s storied wartime operation.

The U-Boats were sinking all the big ships that America was sending to us with food, ammunition, everything. They were all going to the bottom. We knew we were losing all these ships, but we didn’t know what we were doing was going to help. It did. We knew where the submarines were once we broke the code. We knew where they were going.

Royal Roads University has set up a bursary for ma here for “students with financial need who have overcome a personal challenge.” Marsha Lederman wrote a nice piece in the Globe and Mail a while back, here.

She’d had a fall. It seemed unlikely she’d rally from it so the last few days at the Kiwanis home in New Westminster (so grateful to the lovely hardworking staff there) she was rarely alone. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and nieces and nephews and so on were in and out, and my brothers David and Anthony (brother Michael died in 2018). Father Nick was in the other day for her Last Anointing, and a good thing too because the place just had a Covid outbreak on Wednesday.

Ma managed a video call with my daughter Zoe and poor Zoe’s taking it a bit hard. She’s on the road with her band at the moment. It was just sons ma raised at first but then came her “Jewish children,” the rebbe Feuerstein’s kids that she loved as her own - Leah, David, Shifra, Penina, Aviva, Yosef, Alishava and Nechama. “Little Aviva” came all the way from Washington D.C to be with ma in her final days. Aviva was with her when she died this morning, bless her.

I was talking with my cousin Douglas back in Ireland just now and the thing of it is, he said, she was the last of them. My dad died 12 years ago, Douglas’s ma Angela died last month and her brother John the same day, following my beloved Uncle Tony’s death four years ago. The people there were back then I wrote about here, The Stories That Haunt The House.

One of these days I’ll write ma’s family story properly. Apart from her wartime work my favorite chapter involves the story of her grandparents Patrick John Kelly and Mary Twomey, a horse groom and parlour maid at Curraghchase, the grand estate of the Anglo-Norman De Vere family in County Limerick.

It isn’t my custom to say nice things about the landlord class but the De Veres were good people. Did everything they could to care for their tenants during the Famine. Stephen De Vere was a crusading journalist who signed onto one of the “coffin ships” carrying the Irish away to Canada during those killing times, to tell the horrible story of that armada. His account caused Lord Elgin, Governor-General of Upper and Lower Canada, to back the Passenger Act of 1847, for what little good it did. Stories about Stephen from when I was a kid first put me in mind of taking up a life in journalism.

I’m not going to go on, because I don’t even know where I’d start let alone stop. I’ll end just by saying my brother Anthony has been absolutely indispensable and my son Conall has been a rock through it all, absolute granite, although both us had a hard time keeping it together when ma was singing that song.

Is it the laughing eye? Is it the timid sigh? Is it the tender tone, soft as the stringed harp’s moan? Oh, it’s the truth, alone, Eileen Aruin.