My grandmother was the most religious person I ever met. She was such a devout Catholic that she went to mass twice a day without fail and never missed an opportunity for a few quick Hail Marys and a surreptitious fiddle with her rosary beads. In her piously plain sitting room, only one thing stood out: in pride of place, hanging over the fireplace, was a benevolent picture of the Pope. My grandmother spent her life under the watchful eye of the Catholic church. She revered the parish priest to such a degree that she even asked his permission to have sex with her husband when she and my grandfather decided it was time to have children. In short, my grandmother would not have found Father Ted in the least bit funny.
But it was clear to me, even as a boy, that there was something very unhappy about her life. While on one level her religion meant everything to her, it didn’t seem to bring her much happiness. She was a paranoid woman who, as she got older, became increasingly suspicious of those around her. And she always had the medical encyclopaedia near at hand, so that she could decide what illness she was going to have that week.
One afternoon, she came back in outrage from a shopping expedition to the nearby town.
“I saw the most beautiful roses today,” she announced sternly as she was putting away her groceries.
“Really, Granny. Where?” I replied, feigning an interest in things horticultural.
She turned to me and spat her reply with an almost venomous hate. “In the garden of the Protestant church!”
I thought that summed her up. Her religion seemed based on fear and mistrust. But that was rural Northern Ireland in the Seventies, where no one took anything for granted.
Years later, when she was dead and buried next to her beloved Catholic Church – a safe distance away from those sinful Protestant rosebushes – my father sat me down to tell me he had some shocking news. Assuming the worst, I braced myself for some kind of family tragedy.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, son, but your grandmother was…” he hesitated, “… a Protestant!”
My jaw fell open in disbelief. He may as well have told me she was a dominatrix with a fetish for leather. My mind began to work overtime as I imagined her mercilessly whipping her very own sex slave, who she kept tied up in the S&M dungeon she had created out of one of the farm outbuildings. No, stop! It didn’t make sense. If my grandmother was a Protestant, then the Pope wasn’t a Catholic.
But as the story unfolded, I learned she had descended from a long line of French Huguenots who had moved from France to Ireland a century before and settled in Co. Laois. (That’s why there is a “French Church” in Portarlington.) Her mother, my great-grandmother, had been disowned by her strict Protestant family as a punishment for falling in love with a Catholic Irishman. The young couple married and left the area, reinventing themselves as a Catholic family and removing any references to their murky Huguenot heritage.
For the first time ever, I felt sorry for my grandmother. I thought that, underneath all that anxiety and paranoia, maybe she had been a very nice person. Now that I knew something of the guilty secret she had lived with, I found it much easier to understand why she had become the woman she was. But the message was still clear. No matter how hard you try, you can never fully erase the truth. Instead, you can end up living your life in fear that your shameful secret will be discovered and your whole life might be revealed as one dreadful lie.
As I thought of how difficult it would be to live your whole life under such a burden of denial, I decided to tell my father something that so many young men dread to put into words. At least if I said it now, I wouldn’t have to live my life pretending, as my grandmother had done.
“Dad, I have something to tell you,” I said quietly.
“What is it?” he replied, with his mind drifting elsewhere.
“I’m gay,” I said.
For a moment, he sat looking at me, saying nothing.
“That’s OK, son,” he said with a smile. “At least you’re not a Protestant!”