Her final wish: A home for the son she never got to hold

The house is at the end of the road, nestled behind a playground in Loughrea, an ancient town in County Galway, Ireland. Built of white stone with grey trim, it has lace curtains, a statue of the Virgin Mary and two small bedrooms, one pink, the other blue.

In the living room, a small, fragile woman in a plaid skirt sits in an overstuffed orange chair. She is 93 but lives alone, with an overweight mutt named Rex. Day after day, she busies herself with small tasks – praying the rosary, hanging the washing, letting the dog into the yard – while she waits for the return of the son she never got to hold.

She has been waiting for 76 years.

A home of shame and secrets

As a teenager, Chrissie Tully fell in love with a man in her neighbourhood, and in 1949, she became pregnant.

What happened next would follow a grim, common script in mid-century Ireland, where the Catholic Church and its rigid doctrine dominated nearly every aspect of daily life. Tully’s family disowned her; the town, Loughrea, spurned her. A priest took her to St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, a facility for unwed mothers in Tuam, about 48 kilometres north.

Such institutions remain one of Ireland’s enduring moral stains. Independent panels have excoriated them, religious institutions have apologised for them, and the Irish government has bumbled through a redress scheme, seeking to financially compensate tens of thousands of mothers and children who were banished to them.

St Mary’s was particularly notorious: an austere, gated structure that was once a military barracks and workhouse. Run by sisters from a French religious order known as Bon Secours, its grim reputation was so well known that locals avoided it and the fatherless children it housed.

Few spoke of the conditions within: forced labour for young mothers, high infant mortality rates, pervasive shame and emotional abuse. Still, for some like Tully, there was nowhere else to go.

On December 13 of the year she arrived, Tully was rushed to the Galway Central Hospital with labour complications. She delivered a boy, born breech at 3.4 kilograms. She wanted to name him Michael, but he was taken away before she had the chance. She never held him or saw his face.

“It nearly killed me,” she said.

Soon, the doctor returned.

“‘Baby’s dead,’” Tully recalled him saying. “They weren’t very nice about it.”

She had no way of knowing whether to believe him. The system was awash in shame and secrets. Some babies were adopted out to Catholic families as near as the same town, or as far as America. Others died in infancy and were buried in unmarked graves, disappearing into the collective silence that shrouded the facility in Tuam, and others like it.

Tully could not accept that her little boy never made it out of the hospital, that his story began and ended in 1949. Perhaps it was irrational.

But a few years ago, she got a new reason to hope.

‘We found your mother’

After losing Michael, Tully left the Tuam home and returned to her prior life.

She also resumed her relationship with her partner, and four years later, she became pregnant again. But the father – who Tully said was “not the marrying type” – left her and moved to the United Kingdom. For the rest of her life, she has carried a torch. She never married.

With no alternative, she returned to the Tuam home. She gave birth to a second boy in 1954, naming him Christopher.

Trekking daily to the children’s ward at the home to feed and bathe him, Tully had a deep conviction: She had lost Michael, but she would not lose Christopher. She would find a job, take him from the Tuam home and build a life, mother and son together, in Loughrea.

But Tully arrived one day at the boy’s bed and faced a “squinty-eyed” nun, who picked up the child and walked away, telling Tully she would never see him again.

Left with nothing – she and her family never fully reconciled – Tully stayed in Galway, working odd jobs in a cafe and later as a live-in housekeeper for a group of priests. She searched for her sons, but was stymied by byzantine adoption bureaucracies, much of them designed to keep those like Tully from answers.

Over time, Tully realised she might never live to find her lost children.

She settled for leaving a letter with a confidant in Portumna, a Galway town on the Tipperary border, meant for her boys if they ever surfaced. In it, she had tucked £IR3000 (about $6000) and an explanation for their separation, revealing that she had never given either of the children up willingly.

Then, in 2013, a professional-looking woman arrived at Tully’s Loughrea home and asked if she could come in for a cup of tea. Slowly, the stranger revealed her purpose: She was from an adoption agency that had been approached by a man from London in his 60s who was searching for his birth mother.

The man had no idea, but he was the boy Tully had named Christopher.

He was eager to reconnect, the woman said, but the decision would be up to Tully: Did she want to meet her second son, now known as Patrick Naughton?

“I loved it,” Tully said of the revelation. “He’s all I have.”

On a summer day that year, Tully arrived at a small hotel outside Galway city. Naughton flew in from London, stopping at a supermarket on his way to pick up a bouquet of flowers. When he walked in, the small woman before him was so overwhelmed she could hardly meet his eye.

“Chrissie,” he recalled saying. “I’m not that bad lookin’, am I?”

Since childhood, Naughton, 70, had known that he was adopted, but he had never felt compelled to find his birth mother. He had spent his early childhood in Galway until his family moved to London.

“My adoptive parents were so loving,” he said. “I thought if I ever looked, I would be going behind their back.”

After they died, however, Naughton felt tormented by questions about his origins. Who were his birth parents? Did they have other children? Had his parents kept them, and if so, why not him?

He had searched for more than a year and had mostly given up when he got a call from the adoption agency in Galway. “We found your mother,” they told him.

“I’ve come home every year since the day I found her,” said Naughton, who still lives in London with his wife, along with three adult children and a gaggle of grandkids.

It was a few years before Tully confided in Naughton that he might have a brother. When he heard, he was “over the moon,” he said – he had been raised an only child and couldn’t believe he might have a sibling.

‘I had a dream, and I seen him. And he is alive … nobody will tell me anything different now.’

Chrissie Tully

In the years since, Naughton and Tully have pored over birth and death records, scoured graveyards and hospital paperwork. Through Ireland’s Freedom of Information Act, they finally obtained the other child’s birth record, apparently written in the hospital in Galway in 1949.

“Stillborn,” it said. Under Tully’s name: “Return to Tuam.”

It was the first official indication Tully had seen that Michael was indeed dead. It wasn’t clear whether “Return to Tuam” referred only to Tully, or included Michael, but the possibility that the baby’s remains had been sent there carried a grim weight of its own. In 2017, a mass, unmarked grave was discovered in a septic tank at St Mary’s, which shut down in 1961. Within it were the bodies of at least 796 children.

Could Michael have been one of them?

For Tully, it seems impossible to know for sure what happened to the boy. She has still seen no clear record of his burial. And to Naughton, it’s implausible that a baby’s body would have been taken from the hospital in Galway to Tuam, 48km away, to be buried in a pit.

“I don’t know what to believe any more,” Naughton said. “He has to be somewhere.”

Rosaries and dreams

So Tully has waited in her modest home, which she has rented at a subsidised rate from the Galway County Council for 20 years.

As she nears 100, she and Naughton worry that Michael will return – however unlikely that may seem – to a house occupied by somebody else.

“I’d hate Chrissie to die, hoping that Michael will come back,” said Naughton, holding back tears. “And there won’t be nothing here.”

Hoping to keep the house in the family, he contacted Galway County Council to explore buying the home in Tully’s name. The house is valued at about €110,000 (about $192,567), but according to Naughton, the council said that because of her time spent renting the home, Tully could purchase it for €50,000.

Still, because of their respective ages, Tully and Naughton have both been denied a mortgage. They have tried to raise the money on their own via an online fundraiser. But the effort has fallen short, in part because they have struggled to navigate the online process.

At night, when Naughton sleeps in the pink bedroom, he hears murmurs from down the hall. It is Tully, praying the rosary for Michael, as she does every night. Not long ago, she called Naughton early in the morning, with news of a vision she’d had.

“I had a dream, and I seen him. And he is alive,” Tully said at the time. “And nobody will tell me anything different now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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