My family with Uncle Malcolm at a family reunion a few years back.

This my Great Uncle Malcolm, my dad Malcolm and myself with my sister and mom. My grandfather decided to name his firstborn son after his brother because his brother was a brother — both biologically and religiously. As a Christian Brother, Uncle Malcolm wouldn’t have kids of his own, so my grandfather honored him by naming his firstborn after Malcolm. As a Christian Brother, he currently lives with other brothers in his religious order in New Jersey. He’s also the closest to a grandfather I’ve been able connect with in my adult life (both of my grandfathers died well before I was born). At 86 years old, he’s the last surviving O’Sullivan from Ireland.

Uncle Malcolm came to America on the boat from Limerick (by way of Cobh) in April 1927. He was four years old. When I called him a few weeks ago, I asked what he could remember about Ireland. He said he had two memories. The earliest one was just a moment in time: He remembers waiting outside his childhood home in Limerick in a horse-and-buggy with his five siblings for his mom to come out of the house to go to Sunday mass. His next memory was from the boat on the way to America. He was separated from his parents for a number of hours midway across the ocean. His mother was terrified that he had fallen overboard and drowned in the frigid waters of the Atlantic. She was understandably relieved when she found young Malcolm in another part of the ship.

I only reconnected with him in the last few years. In addition to having lots of family, Uncle Malcolm was active in outreach ministry, spending half the year teaching English in Honduras and Mexico and occasionally heading to a boys’ school in Toronto to teach Spanish. His monastery was based out of New York City. Until recently, the most contact our family had with him was when my dad made his semi-annual phone call. But as his age has caught up with him he’s had to stop leaving the country every year. Luckily for me, this has meant I’ve got to know this man from another era.

He went into religious life when he was a young teenager. Not for God, but for sports, he tells me. You name a sport and he played it. Being in the seminary meant he had the opportunity to both play and, later on, coach the sports he loved so much. It was only later, he tells me, that he realized sports were God’s way of getting him into religious life.

Whenever I speak to him I’m struck at how infused with Catholicism his everyday language is. Instead of inconsequential verbal ticks like “um” and “uh” he interjects a “God bless ya,” or “God willing,” or “…and thanks be to God for that.” He wakes up at 4:30 a.m. every morning for an hour of prayer before breakfast. He is a supremely religious man, but not in the irritating way Christian fundamentalists can be. The closest he ever got to evangelizing me was when he heard I was writing for my school newspaper and lectured me on the “supreme responsibility” I had as a journalist. I think he may have used the words “liberal media” in there somewhere.

But by and large, he’s a textbook case of living his life by example. He’s in his mid-eighties and is understandably unhappy with his body starting to fail him. However, I can say with the experience of working in a nursing home that he is by far the most active man in his eighties I’ve ever known — by a long shot. Only having the opportunity to get to know him in adult life has been such a pleasure, because I never had the opportunity to take him for granted. I met him just before coming to study abroad in Ireland for the first time. Since then I’ve seen him two or three times and spoken on the phone a few more times. Even though he was very young when he came over here, his demeanor is unmistakably Irish. Knowing him has made my journey to Ireland seem a little more like a homecoming, two generations removed.