Rest in Peace

June 07, 2019

Rest in Peace

Today I stopped at the front desk and asked where I could do laundry. You wouldn’t think that would be a tricky question, but self-service laundry isn’t really a thing here. Finally, Wendy says, “Just go straight down this road, and it’ll be the second petrol station, it’s not far.” I said, “The laundry’s at the petrol station?” She says, “Yes, they have a machine.”

Okay. So I bag up my laundry and head out on foot. Twenty minutes of brisk walking later, I stop in a petrol station to ask again. The manager says, “Ah gawd yeah, it’ll be just tree-hundred yards down on the left. The Amber petrol station.” So I keep going. Another twenty minutes of brisk walking, and I reach the Amber station. The “laundry” is two washing machines and one dryer on the outside wall of the gas station/convenience store. They’re all full and cost €8 per load to wash and another €5 to dry. So I take my bag of laundry and head to the restaurant next door to (finally) eat some breakfast, get off my feet, and call a taxi.

My taxi driver, Bernard, is a talker. In the time it takes us to get to Ballygunner Cemetery, we cover Trump’s visit, an Irish police scandal and the new Commissioner, unemployment and youth flight out of Waterford, a settee he and his wife Anne are having reupholstered, his son’s job in Dublin, and the Magdalene laundries, about which Bernard says, “Ah the nuns time is gone now, right?” He gets out with me at Ballygunner to help me find markers for the Good Shepherd Magdalene women. The cemetery is built on a hill, and as we’re trudging straight up the hill, I tell Bernard, who’s fit but most likely in his early 70’s, that he should sit on a bench and wait for me. No, he says, his doc wants him to walk “for his sugars,” since he sits all day for work.

We finally find ten markers together in an older part of the cemetery. A total of 58 women (or their ashes, we don’t really know) are buried there, beneath a sort of small gravel square. A central marker says, “In loving memory of those who died at St. Mary’s Good Shepherd convent. Rest in peace.” The nuns are buried elsewhere, in a small private cemetery near WIT, where a few of the remaining Good Shepherd sisters now live.

There are a couple oddities about the plot: First, there’s a separate marker for Kate McSherry in the Magdalene plot. I don’t know who she is or her relationship to the laundry, but at least someone has been to her grave to leave statues, solar figurines, and a candle. If she’d been a Magdalene, she’d be listed on the black markers with the rest. If she’d been a nun, she’d be in the nuns’ plot. She could have been a life-long employee at Good Shepherd, but it’s odd she wasn’t buried in a family plot, and her marker is very much separate from the ones for the laundry girls/women.

Second, Kate’s death, and the deaths of several other women, are dated AFTER the laundry closed. My best guess is that these may have been aging women who were too institutionalized to leave Good Shepherd when it was sold and remained in the nuns’ care until they died. I'll have to see if Dr. O'Mahoney knows about this.

Of course there’s nothing at the plot about the women being Magdalenes, nothing about a laundry. No flowers. But the Good Shepherd Magdalene women are here, together at least. And once a year, a few people participate in something called "Flowers for Magdalenes," and they visit various cemeteries where the women are buried. For the most part, though, it's like Barnard says, “Out of sight, out of mind, as quick as you can.”