By John Leahy, SPECIAL TO THE ADVANCE
Editor’s Note: Fredericksburg’s Ceili Leahy, a graduate of James Monroe High School, was 19 on January 27, 2016, when she died from acute myeloid leukemia at Children’s National Hospital. She had stopped treatment a few months earlier so that she could “live vividly” through her last days. Her father, John Leahy, wrote this Caring Bridge essay about Ceili—a Gaelic name pronounced “Kay-lee”—on what would have been his daughter’s 30th birthday.
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Not long ago while I was hunting for songs for a playlist of rock anthems, I rediscovered “The Story,” Brandi Carlile’s 2007 song. I’m not sure it counts as an anthem, but the beginning of it caught me:
All of these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I’ve been
And how I got to where I am
But these stories don’t mean anything
When you’ve got no one to tell them to.
Almost 20 years after first hearing that lyric, it resonated with an older me. We carry lines, scars, both physical and emotional, that we earn doing the work of living. They might define us. We may carry them as badges of honor. We could try to hide them. And they say something about who we are.
But like a tree falling in the forest, it signifies nothing if no one is there to hear it, to see it, to bear witness, to listen.
One of Ceili’s superpowers was her ability and willingness to listen, to affirm, and to make you feel understood and valued. There’s a line later in the song: “Even when I was flat broke you made me feel like a million bucks.” That was Ceili, able to make you feel worthy despite whatever you think you lack.
On the flip side, I feel Ceili’s story needs to be told because she’s not here to tell it.
Ceili appreciated the magic and power of stories and was an active listener. In time, she became a wonderful storyteller, too. Stories, like memories, evolve with each telling, and as our friend Matt humorously observed, sometimes Ceili’s stories were not completely accurate in the details, but the way she told them made you keep listening. Ceili knew stories are not history; they are meant to be enjoyed and sometimes to make you think.
We were reminded of this on Easter a few years ago. As we sat down to dinner I put on an old playlist Ceili and her brother John had made for me called “Daddy’s Smorgasbord.” It’s one of a hundred we have, a mash up of my favorites and the music the kids were discovering at the time. After running through all the songs, when dessert was just about done, we suddenly heard middle-school Ceili talking to us.
Then I remembered. Ceili, for a while, recorded “podcasts” for me to listen to during my long train commute for work in D.C. It was a lovely window into the mind of a young girl coming of age, figuring out who she was, and sharing her musings, observations, and stories with her dad. What an Easter treat to hear her telling those stories again: the thoughtful insights of a young girl entertaining her dad on his way to work.
Ceili would typically play a song and then tell me what she liked about it. She might mention another song and say she was considering purchasing it… if it was OK with me. In a later episode, she played a song by Plain White T’s and said she knew I like it because I started dancing when she played it for me, and she told me where to find it on her “Ceili’s No. 1” playlist should I want to hear it again.
In another, she talked about seeing the movie, Marley and Me, crying, and knowing that it would hit me hard, too (it did). She then compared our dogs, Oona the puppy, and Micho, the recently departed old man. She mused that Oona would have been a great mother and describes her as “half normal, half dog, half cat, half monkey, half human, half run-into-wall kind of dog; a lot of halves, like 4 times the dog of any other dog.” She apologized that she secretly liked Oona more than Micho, who was a good dog, but I suspect we all enjoyed lovable Oona more than willful-and-aloof Micho. Ceili said, “Micho is now in the eternal hunting grounds, as Chief Awokawoka would say.” (I have no idea who that is, maybe a character in one of her stories?)
In yet another episode, she played an upbeat Celtic spiritual song by Robin Marks and said she would like to find more music like that and maybe we could explore it together. I had listened on my way to work, and then forgot all about it. Hearing her say that again on Easter, I felt the pain of regret, knowing that I had failed to help her explore music she wanted to explore with me.
One success: She said later how she loved Alfred Hitchcock’s movies Rope and Rear Window and that she’d like to see more of his movies. We watched a lot of Hitchcock over the years.
In a later episode, she apologized for not recording for a while, and then read from a story she was writing at the time about a teenage girl with twin 2-year old siblings, a single mom, and an absentee dad who ran off with a nurse. The girl’s self-centered mom (definitely NOT Leslie) has just started dating, so she drags the teen narrator to Chincoteague Island (a Leahy family favorite) for the whole summer to stay with her great aunt, whom she barely knows. The narrator says, “I was made for mountains, not beach,” so she’s not enthusiastic about the plan. There is a hilarious scene when they arrive in Chincoteague and she watches a mosquito land on her mom’s face and grow fat while mom tries to sell her on how great the place is. The girl hates Chincoteague at first, then slowly warms up to it, and then doesn’t want to leave at the end of the summer.
Ceili said she liked writing the story because it’s an important theme; the narrator realizes everything has a point and a purpose, and that she has a point and a purpose. The people she meets on the island all help her find her purpose despite her wacky mom. It’s very much a tween-conceived story, but it’s funny and charming. When Ceili finishes the story, she lets me know she keeps her notebook on her desk and invites me to read it anytime. I flushed with pride at this gift of trust.
As we sat that Easter, listening in wonder, it occurred to me that sometime, maybe while fighting cancer, she had the foresight to know that we would treasure her podcasts in the future so she added them to “Daddy’s Smorgasbord.”
Her episodes are numbered, and several are missing—no #1 or 2, no 5, no 12, no 15 or 16, and nothing after #23. Perhaps she removed those, not wanting the future to hear those stories?
Ceili bore too many scars for her age—actual surgical and chemo-port scars, but also less literal scars like baldness, radiation tattoos, brain fog from medications, and the unimaginable emotional scars of her cancer diagnosis and ultimate prognosis. Some certainly diminished her, made her less than she wished to be, physically and mentally. But those scars also burnished her, added contours and context, and even lent a patina to her body and spirit. She ultimately accepted them, even celebrated them.
After she died, a friend, in tears, left a voice message on her phone, sobbing, “Remember me, Ceili, remember me.” I found that message both strange and powerful: the idea that we would want someone who has left this mortal coil to bring memories of us forward into whatever lies beyond the gate. Maybe it’s in our DNA to want to be remembered by those we love. And when you have found someone to listen to your stories, it’s hard to bear the loss of that person, and with them, your stories.
Being able to tell your stories, revealing your scars—even the ones of which you are not proud—is akin to therapy: It’s not what the therapist tells you, but what you are willing to say.
I don’t know if “The Story” is a rock anthem, but the way Carlile belts it out like an old soul, and how it made me think about Ceili’s stories and her scars… well, it made the playlist. I think I’ll call it “Happy 30th, Ceili.”
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John Leahy is vice president and cofounder with his wife Leslie of the Ceili Leahy Service Project, a local non-profit organization that promotes community service and volunteerism. You can learn more about Ceili and the service project at CLServiceProject.org.
