Happy Mother's Day, Moose
Mom would sometimes chide me: "You could drive Christ crazy!" (Not to mention myself, and others, Mom.)
By Gary Gately
As Mother’s Day slips into night, I miss the best and truest friend I will ever know, my mother, "Moose,” more than words could possibly convey, as I have each Mother’s Day since her death in May 2020.
Mother’s Day, of course, can be among the most painful days for anyone who has lost a mother, but also a day that can make us smile and laugh as we remember Mom and marvel anew at her inner strength and beauty, her boundless love, mercy and compassion, her ability to teach us that, yes, we have met Love, God, and she is right in front of us.
I can still see Moose as she laughs her gravelly, Lucille Ball laugh, exclaiming “Blessed sunshine!” while sipping her coffee (“aahhh”), dragging on a Marlboro 100 and performing her own little miracle of the loaves and fishes, somehow stretching a pound of jumbo lump crab meat to feed more than a dozen of us — children, spouses and grandchildren — thin crab cakes fried in oil.
Margaret Elizabeth Donohue Gately — a child of the Depression who lived the first 12 years of her life with her mother and three brothers in a 12-foot-wide row house in East Baltimore — earned the nickname “Moose” after remarking decades ago, “I’m tough and hearty, hearty like a moose.”
I don't know if I ever recall Mom happier than when she wore her white sweatshirt adorned with the words"Merry ChristMoose!" in red and green on Christmas morning when all her children and grandchildren and in-laws came to her house to celebrate.
Moose was tough, indeed.
She died at age 97, family matriarch, mother and hero to five children and 11 grandchildren.
Moose’s first grandchild, Maeve Donohue Gately, the daughter of her first son, Mark Donohue Gately, aptly describes her grandmother as a “woman of steel”— one who overcame enormous challenges that would have crushed others lacking her faith, her hope, her fortitude, her love.
She taught me, and all of us, to search for light, even when things seem darkest, to find reasons to hope, reasons to believe even — no, especially — when hope and reasons to believe seem most elusive.
Moose lived the timeless wisdom of Winston Churchill:
“If you find yourself in hell, keep walking.”
Again and again, she showed us the meaning of those words, for she had been well-acquainted with tears, loss, grief and heartbreak since her very beginnings.
One night when Mom was 3 years old, her father, John Donohue, who like many an Irishman of his time liked drinking too much, left behind his pregnant wife and three young children living in that cramped house in East Baltimore and headed for New York.
Mom didn’t see her father for two years, until one sunny afternoon he surprised and delighted her when he showed up, kissed her, tousled her hair, smiled — and walked off.
She never saw him alive again.
They found his body floating in New York Harbor five years later.
Mom’s mother, Mary Weisner Donohue, cobbled together enough money to pay to have her husband’s body shipped home and for a proper Catholic funeral and burial.
Moose’s mother and hero taught her some of the lessons in life that matter most, and ones Mom never forgot or failed to live, one of them being how to keep walking — and how to keep the faith and hope in your heart and soul — when you find yourself in your own personal hell.
Desperate, with four young children to support, Mary Weisner Donohue took the trolley one morning and went into every building with lights on that she could get into and pleaded for a job. She stopped at the Daily Record newspaper building, which needed somebody to clean the offices. “A man there told her, ‘Lady you’re too classy and well-dressed and well-spoken for this,’” Moose recalled. “But Mom said, ‘I have four children at home. I’ll take it.’”
She took on two other office-cleaning jobs and earned enough to pay tuition for her four children to attend Catholic primary schools.
Moose’s mother taught her another lesson she never forgot and never failed to live: Look upon even those who have sinned most grievously against you with the eyes of Christ, the eyes of love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness.
“My mother,” Mom told me near the end of her life, “would never say a bad word about my father. She just said, ‘Your father was a good man who had a problem with the bottle.’”
Two years after burying her husband, Mary Weisner married Michael Norr, a teetotaler printer whose worst vice was chocolate, when Moose was 12. Michael, his bride, their two sons, my mother and her three brothers found a little bit of heaven here on Earth when they moved from that tiny house in an industrial section of East Baltimore six miles away — and a universe removed — to an airy house with a big backyard and covered front porch at 4211 LaSalle Avenue in Gardenville.
That move may help explain Moose’s devotion to and faith in Saint Anthony and her favorite prayer: “Saint Anthony, find a way” — for she and her family worshiped at the church just two blocks from her new home, Saint Anthony of Padua Church, then the biggest parish in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
Mom married my father, Bernard Patrick Gately Jr. at St. Anthony’s in 1949, and she gave birth to five children in a span of 13 years.
Dad — a proud graduate of Mount Saint Joseph High School whose grandfather had arrived in Baltimore from County Roscommon, Ireland, around 1860 — went on to become a star car salesman, then manager of dealerships, and his sales team broke every sales record in the history of one dealership, Brooks Buick, in the Baltimore suburb of Towson. He could work a party or a showroom with equal panache and polish, convincing everyone he spoke to that almost nothing else in the world mattered at that moment as much as what they were saying.
I perhaps inherited some of his tendencies to express inappropriate delight in espousing contrarian views. His Irish kin, among others, would try to fathom the unthinkable: how my father, an Irish Catholic, could publicly proclaim this new president, Jack Kennedy, greatly overrated.
But Dad’s Irish tendency to drink to excess would slowly, but inevitably, it seems in retrospect, exact a heavy toll on his family.
As I got older, I loved Christmastime for all it was and for all it wasn’t. At Christmastime, I felt like we were a real family, even though my parents no longer slept in the same room by the time I was 5. I savored the sort of holiday truce in part because it could be so elusive the rest of the year. It meant none of the screaming matches between my mother and father that came more and more as his drunken rages worsened when he began suffering the slow drowning alive that is emphysema and went bankrupt.
Mom, now destitute, fed us for a time by relying on food stamps and had no choice but to move my little brother, my sister and me to a tiny townhouse. She returned to work after raising kids for 20 years, starting at the bottom as a typist at the Social Security Administration, attending community college, then the University of Maryland on Uncle Sam’s dime (a perk of her new government job), finishing just shy of a bachelor’s degree in business. She prevailed in federal age-discrimination complaint against the government and retired as an executive at one of the highest-ranked grade levels in the federal government.
My brother Mark, a retired attorney who had been widely regarded as one of the best litigators in the country, still marvels at Mom’s ability to once again apply Winston Churchill’s wisdom that if you find yourself in hell, you must indeed keep walking to find light amid darkness, faith amid doubt and sometimes to start all over again.
“It just seemed impossible,” Mark says, looking back. “How can you do this? She hadn’t worked since I was born in 1952. It had to be very tough to go back to work after raising five children, with the youngest two at 8 and 10. I do think back on it, and all I can think is, ‘How did she do what she managed to do?’
"If she had been born a generation later,” my brother and on-again-off -again surrogate father of 45 years adds, “she would have been a CEO."
Mark’s daughter Maeve says: “When I really think about what made me a strong woman, a woman who expects, who demands fair treatment and her place in the world, a big part of that identity must come from my grandmother."
“It just seems almost impossible. How can you do this? She hadn’t worked since I was born in 1952. It had to be very tough to go back to work after raising five children with the youngest two at 8 and 10. I do think back on it, and all I can think is, ‘How did she do what she managed to do?’ If she had been born a generation later, she would have been a CEO.”— Mom’s first-born son, Mark Donohue Gately
I swear I can still feel Moose’s presence right here in front of me again as I sit alone in my apartment.
I can still hear her too.
She had her unique way of sometimes not so gently coaxing me, with words, however indelicate they may seem, filled with wisdom and love.
It takes me all the way to the sweltering Summer of 1985 to my first desperate weeks of that 14-month, euphemistically named "Reporter-Trainee Program" internship at The New York Times, one of the many nights when the skinny, terrified kid with bad teeth would close the glass doors of the wooden phone booth in the basement of Ruggles Hall at Columbia University, where Columbia let lower-income interns live free during the summer months, and I'm sobbing uncontrollably, and Moose says this, written in the reporter's notepad before me now: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop your sobbing and moaning — put that in one hand, piss in the other and see which one fills up first — and just start writing the damn thing, just a sentence. That’s the hardest part, and then you’ll be able to stop going on like a hoodle.” (Hoodle, in old Baltimore parlance, is used to describe one who’s not all there in the head, or as Moose might say: “You act like you don’t have all God Gave you! You could drive Christ crazy!”)
On the phone that long-ago night, she managed from 200 miles away to once more hug my tears away.
But inevitably, I would call sobbing again from a wooden phone booth in the basement of Ruggles Hall:
It’s so dirty in New York and so loud, Moose, sirens going nonstop, and there’s always track fires on the Broadway Local subway tracks, the air-conditioning on the No. 1 line subway cars covered in graffiti never worked so hot winds whip through them, and by the time I arrive at the Times newsroom on West 43rd Street, I look as if I’ve been drinking all night. And everybody else is so smart, these Ivy Leaguers with perfect hair and perfect teeth and perfect bodies. And I’m this skinny University of Maryland grad with bad teeth, I know I’ll never make it here and I never should have accepted this internship, Moose. I should have taken the offers for actual jobs at the Detroit or Raleigh papers or the AP. I’ll never make it here, Moose.
I’m testing her patience. I can tell when she snaps:
“I don't wanna hear this horseshit about how they're all rich and Ivy League and how and they're smarter than you and you'll never make it there. Always remember this: Don’t ever think you're better than anybody else, but don't ever think anybody’s better than you either — and trust in God."
I’ll try to remember, Moose but sometimes I forget, as I get lost in all that Catholic guilt, shame, self-loathing, self-flagellation, too often turned outward (“hurt people, hurt people”) and the rare and insidious form of OCD scrupulosity, which convinces sufferers they’re sinning when they’re not and even that their very souls are in danger.
I know, I plead guilty, Moose: I could drive Christ crazy (not to mention myself, and others).
Miss you so much, Moose.
Happy Mother’s Day, and please pray for us.
Dear Gary, Thank you for this beautiful story about your mom. She certainly is an inspiring Woman and Mother. Your story is well written and it is a Personal story that would be well received at our Toronto Storytelling Evenings. Blessings Br Raymond Pierce, Toronto