One and the Same

by Michael McGrath

When it comes to possessing travel documents, I’ve been pretty fortunate in my life. Because my father was from Ireland, and because my wife, Malla, is American, I have both an Irish passport and a Green Card to go along with my Canadian citizenship. “Living the dream,” the U.S. Customs agent in the Dublin airport remarked after I explained my international status to him on my return to the United States a few years ago.

        On this occasion, I had been on a two-week vacation in Ireland and Portugal with Malla, the last five days of which I’d spent on my own in Dublin after she flew home to Chicago for work. “Have fun with Eileen while I’m gone,” she told me as she boarded a bus to the airport.

        Eileen, for lack of a better term, is my seventy-seven-year-old Irish “girlfriend” whom I’d previously introduced Malla to while visiting one of my favorite pubs, John Kavanagh’s, or as it’s more commonly known, “The Gravediggers.” Butted up against Glasnevin Cemetery and run by the sixth, seventh, and eighth generation of the Kavanagh family, it is an iconic Irish pub that quite possibly serves the best pint of Guinness in the world. I’d first met Eileen five months earlier, in November 2023, near the end of my previous trip to Dublin. It was the morning of my last Friday, three days before my flight home, and I’d arrived at The Gravediggers just as it opened in order to have a few quiet pints, preferably in their snug. I’d been wanting to sit in this particular snug ever since I’d first found out about The Gravediggers back in the late nineties, but each time I visited, it was either already in use—usually by one of the Kavanaghs—or I was told that it wasn’t available.

        “Why would you want to do that?” the barman, Ross, said after I asked him if I could sit in the snug. “It’s so lonely in there.”

        “Oh, I won’t be on my own,” I told him, “There’ll be four of us in all.”

        Ross looked around the all but empty pub. “And whom might that be?”

        “Me, myself, and I,” I answered, counting each one out on my fingers, “and my father, who died a few years back.”

        Ross smiled and nodded, saying, “Well, that’s different then, isn’t it?” After pouring my Guinness, he carried it through to the snug from behind the bar and unlatched its entrance for me. From the ancient scrapes and gouges scarring the timeworn walls and pew-like benches to the late-morning sunlight streaming through the frosted-glass windows—not to mention its close proximity to Glasnevin Cemetery—the radiant, golden-hued snug was transcendent, almost ethereal in nature, reminding me of Anthony Bourdain’s quote in The Gravediggers’ visitors’ book: “Heaven looks just like this.” Though I’d hardly consider myself a spiritual person—my Catholic upbringing essentially beat it out of me—I couldn’t have said it any better myself. For if heaven truly does exist, I was standing awestruck at its sacred gilded gate, expecting a choir of angels to start singing at any moment.

        “Give us a shout if you want another, and I’ll bring it ’round to you,” Ross told me as he set my pint down on a weathered table. Then he pointed at a battered-looking pink throw-cushion, which was no thicker than a heating pad, laying limp over the end of the bench in the snug’s far corner. “Just make sure to stay away from that cushion over there. Everyone who sits on it dies.” On noticing my look of surprise, he laughed and said, “Only joking with you. To be fair, though, that cushion and the ones who use it are all around the same age.” He took another glance at the lifeless cushion, then added, “And in about the same condition, too.”

        At that moment, were I twenty-five or thirty years older, I wouldn’t have hesitated to have taken a seat on that flaccid pink cushion, especially if I was guaranteed to drop dead on the spot, for I’d arrived at a perfectly acceptable resting place, Who needs their own personal Jesus, when I have my own personal heaven? I wondered, One that even serves the most divine Guinness? Reach out and touch faith, indeed.

        An hour—and three glorious pints—later, after having completed a leisurely, contemplative visit with my deceased father, I emerged from the snug to find a frail-looking woman, barely taller than the bar standing before her, drinking a glass of brandy mixed with lemonade. The woman’s eyes were plastered with a wide swath of purple eyeshadow, and her lips were painted bright red. Atop her thinning gray hair was a tiara inlaid with silver metallic stars, like something a child might wear. Her name was Eileen, she told me, and for the past twenty-seven years she’d been The Gravediggers’ cleaning lady. Life, I soon learned, had not been kind to her. Over the years, her luck with men had been terrible. In an act of rebellion against her father, Eileen impetuously married what turned out to be a controlling man who, she claimed, abused her in every way possible. With divorce still frowned upon by the church in those days, Eileen suffered through years of torment until her husband’s death finally ended the tortuous marriage. In her sixties she met someone else, a rabid Manchester United supporter named Wacker, but then he, too, died, leaving her alone with two budgies and some goldfish.

        As she reached for her brandy, I noticed a stained and soiled brace on her wrist. “I broke it a year or so ago, and it’s never healed properly,” she told me. “It hurts all the time, especially when I clean.”

        Though our conversation centered mostly around her doom and gloom, we managed to touch on a couple of other topics as well. Take Eileen’s view of the Beatles, for example. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who dislikes them. “Back in the sixties, my younger sister took me with her to the opening of A Hard Day’s Night, and I thought they were rubbish,” she told me. “Just awful.” As a big Beatles fan, I found this to be almost incomprehensible. Now, it’s not as if I expect them to be everyone’s favorite band, especially those who love the Rolling Stones, but still, to dismiss the Beatles altogether? I mean, come on. John, Paul, George, and Ringo? The Fab Four?

        Eileen made a sour face. “No, can’t stand them at all. I think they’re useless. Give me the Beach Boys any day.”

        As for other forms of entertainment, Eileen enjoys watching Bruce Lee movies, Mission: Impossible—”the ones with Peter Graves, not Tom Cruise”—and David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider. But nothing—and I mean nothing, absolutely nothing—compares to her love for David Caruso. She even has an autographed photo of the Miami Vice star. “I adore him,” she gushed. “He’s a gorgeous man.”

        And speaking of David Caruso, “I’m famous too,” Eileen will gladly tell you. as she has a framed picture of herself mounted on a wall in The Dead Rabbit pub in New York. She’s also appeared as an extra in a number of movies that have been filmed in The Gravediggers. Most impressively, though, a satellite bearing Eileen’s name and image has been launched into space. Imagine: Eileen, orbiting the earth for God only knows how long. I bet not even David Caruso can top that.

        Though Eileen lives in council housing on the far side of Glasnevin Cemetery, she has a lot of her mail sent to The Gravediggers, and so at the end of our chat, I promised to send her a card for her upcoming birthday. On my next trip, soon after introducing Malla to her at the start of our holiday, Eilleen informed me that she’d kept the card. “I love the picture of the budgies you drew on it,” she told me. “One of them isn’t doing very well anymore, though. It’s having trouble staying on its perch and it’s got something wrong with its wing. My goldfish are almost all dead, too.”

        On leaving the pub that day, I promised Eileen that I’d come back and have a pint with her once Malla flew home, and, ten days later, when I returned, I found her sitting in her usual spot at the pub’s entrance, a cramped little L-shaped nook with narrow slats for seats. “I thought you’d forgotten about me,” she said when I turned up just after twelve o’clock, late by less than ten minutes. “I was going to have one more brandy and then go clean out my goldfish bowl.”

        I noticed that Eileen’s tiara had returned, as had her garish makeup and the sour expression on her face, and she started in as soon as I sat down, rehashing her troubles in the retelling of all her same stories: her abusive past, her budgie’s poor health, her bum wrist, her aversion to the Beatles and intense love of David Caruso. On top of everything else, there was now a problem with her job. “After working here for twenty-seven years, they’ve gone and cut me back to three days a week,” she whined. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it. I can’t get by on me pension alone.”

        She sounded so destitute. “I’m so lonely,” she said to me for the third or fourth time that day. “Why can’t I meet a nice fellow like you?” The only thing waiting for her at home, she said, besides her sickly budgies and goldfish, was a bottle of wine and some leftovers needing to be microwaved.

        I’m not always this nice, I wanted to say. Really, Eileen, sometimes I can be a complete asshole. Instead, I told her not to worry, that I’d see her again in the fall, and, failing that, I’d send her another birthday card.

        “I might not be here when you get back,” she answered, her voice quivering.

        I didn’t dare ask her what exactly “here” meant: at The Gravediggers? In Dublin? Or being alive here on Earth, period? I felt obliged to say something, though, so I offered to buy her one last brandy before she walked back through the cemetery for home.

        Finally, Eileen smiled, if only briefly, and gave my arm a squeeze. “Don’t forget to put a splash of lemonade in it.”

        Whew, I thought, relieved, as I walked to the bar. Talk about a hard day’s night.

*  *  *

After Eileen left, I caught up with one of The Gravediggers’ regulars, a bearded flooring specialist named Tadhg, who, like Eileen, I’d first met back in November 2023. At that time Tadhg had informed me, while giving me a ride back to my Airbnb, that he was recently separated from his wife. Now I learned that he was about to make an offer on an apartment less than a block away from his old place so that he could remain close to his two children. Though not the most uplifting of conversations, compared to what I’d just gone through with Eileen, it was like a walk in the park. Better yet, scratch that: a walk in the park while listening to the Beatles.

        Next, ironically enough, I actually did take a walk, strolling around Dalymount Park, and wound up at another of my favorite pubs called The Hut. What I love most about The Hut isn’t the pub itself, exactly, or the quality of its Guinness, which, like The Gravediggers, is delightfully smooth and creamy, like drinking cereal cream, but it’s snug, which is a cozy, carpeted room that runs the length of the pub, is hidden behind the bar, and comes equipped with two private entrances and a skylight. There, I met a group of four off-duty officers from nearby Mountjoy Prison. The conversation was led by a boisterous man named Noel, who, with his spiky silver hair and rotund features, looked like an Irish version of Alec Baldwin. “Funny you say should that,” he said when I mentioned the resemblance, “the last time I was in New York, I had a cab driver tell me the exact same thing. In fact, when I first got into his cab, he thought I was actually him. He even called me Mr. Baldwin and everything.”

        “You from America?” a redhaired man in his late twenties named Sean then asked me, and when I corrected him and answered Canada, all four men shouted in unison, “Wayne Gretzky!”

        That’s all it took to be accepted into the group. A Conor and a Colin rounded out the table, and while Noel was wearing a pair of shorts and trainers, the rest of the men were dressed in navy-blue pants and black shoes, which, they explained, was standard-issue workwear for the prison. As it turned out, Noel had been recently diagnosed with cancer and thus had been off work for a while. “Here’s where they did the biopsy and removed a growth,” he said, showing me a fresh scar on the back of his right leg, just above his calf.

        When it comes to bad news, this day just keeps on getting worse, I thought, wincing.

        One pint led to another until, eventually, it was just Noel and me left in the snug. “How are you holding up?” I asked him.

        “What? With the cancer, you mean?”

        I nodded.

        Noel shrugged. “OK, I guess.”

        I told Noel that I had a friend in Canada named Peter who’d been diagnosed with stage four metastatic melanoma during COVID, and that he’d been cancer free for almost two years now.

        “Hmmm,” Noel said, his eyes focused on his pint, looking lost in thought. Then, after another moment, he took a drink and continued. “You know, if you’re not doing anything tomorrow, we’re having a retirement party here for a fellow at work, starting at around twelve thirty. You’re welcome to stop by, if you want.”

        He didn’t have to ask me twice, and the following day I arrived shortly before one to find The Hut jam-packed. Looking around, it seemed like the entire staff of Mountjoy Prison was in attendance, including, possibly, even some of the inmates, leading me to wonder who’d been left in charge of those still in their cells. Prison officers, administrators, hell, even the prison baker and the guy who looked after the prison canteen were there. The canteen worker’s name was Graham, but everyone called him Cracker, not because of an obvious connection to the pie crust ingredient but because of his uncanny resemblance to Robbie Coltrane, the late actor who played Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies, and his breakout role in the British detective series of the same name.

        First Alec Baldwin and now this? I thought. It suddenly felt like I’d wandered into the middle of a casting call.

        Once again, I found Noel holding court in the snug. “Where’s the man of the hour?” I asked him.

        “On the other side of the pub, sitting next to the jacks,” Noel answered. Then he turned to the fellow sitting beside him, saying, “Jesus, have you seen the state of him? His skin’s gone all yellow. His eyes, too. He’s as jaundiced as fuck.” To hear Noel tell it, it sounded as if the man of the hour had only hours left to live. “I offered to buy him a pint, but he said he was switching to minerals once his family arrives. Doesn’t want them to see him drink, he says.”

        Had I not known that this was a retirement party, I could have easily mistaken it for a wake. Everyone had at least one pint in front of them, even those who were on their lunch break, and the only food in sight was a few crumpled packets of crisps, courtesy of Cracker. I never did catch the Man of the Hour’s name or get around to meeting him, but I’m pretty sure if I had, he might have argued that he was taking advantage of a two-for-one deal. “What do you mean, a retirement party or a wake?” I imagined him saying. “At this point in my life, why should I have to choose?” Given his rapidly deteriorating condition, he probably considered this send-off to be basically one and the same.”

        The rest of the day was a blur: Guinness. Laughter. More Guinness and more laughter. A retired military man named Tony, periodically interrupting proceedings to sing songs—while earnestly playing left-handed air-guitar solos—followed by even more Guinness and laughter. A symphony of joy and exuberance, all conducted by the one and only Noel Donnelly, and at the end of the night, as I’d previously done with both Eileen and Tadhg, I promised to stay in touch. Noel and I exchanged email addresses and phone numbers, and, after returning to Chicago, I contacted my friend Peter in Calgary, who texted me the details on the immunotherapy treatments he’d successfully undergone, which I then forwarded to Noel.

*  *  *

For a while now, Malla has been suggesting we update our kitchen a bit by repainting the cabinets white. At first, I was dead set against the idea. “It’s not worth the hassle,” I initially argued. “They’ll do.” But then, like Noel and Peter, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer, and my stance suddenly changed. “That’s fine, honey. Whatever you want,” I told her the last time the subject came up. “It doesn’t matter to me.” Having recently lost two more of my close friends, who were only forty-three and fifty-six years old, and about to turn sixty-five myself, it has occurred to me that I, too, might be quickly running out of time. Like it or not, I’m on my last lap. I don’t know if I’m just rounding the first turn of old age or racing down the back stretch toward an early grave, but either way, once I hit the tape, it’s all over. Cancer, as I, like so many others, have discovered, doesn’t play favorites, and, apparently, neither do deadly killers like massive heart attacks, strokes, and aneurysms, all of which have claimed more than a handful of people I’ve known over the years. So, fuck the cabinets, I say, because it’s only money. Besides, these days I’ve got much more important things on my mind, like recovery. That, and spending a lot more time in Dublin, where I hope to share in multiple pints, laughter, and stories with friends like Eileen, Tadhg, and Noel, all of whom, I also hope, will continue to remain closer to retirement than they are to death. Regardless, from now on, like the custom agent said, I’ll be living the dream. Whether I’m in Canada, the U.S., or Ireland, it’ll make no difference. To me, it’s all one and the same.

© 2026 Michael McGrath  All rights reserved.

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