Una (Devlin Lynch): A Remembrance

 How many times have you heard an elderly person say, "Everyone I knew and loved has died!" 

As the years pass, that phrase has begun to resonate with me.  I realize that I have been losing people I care about since I was quite young, since the day my mother died at age 48, when I was 20. As likely do we all, I had the illusion that things which had been so seemingly settled for years, and the people that populated my days, would always be there. And then they weren't. And as I get older the losses increase as they inevitably must. What was it that Edna St. Vincent Millay (I think) said:  I know. I understand. But I am not resigned. 

One of the most reliable of the people in my life was Una Lynch. The idea that she wouldn't be there as long as I was, was one I pushed aside. I already knew her for nearly 40 years. She was tough. Stalwart. Bounded back always. 

I would say that she was the "mother of us all", all being the community of St. Victor Parish in West Hollywood. I tend, as I am guessing many of her friends did and will continue to do so, to consider her in a most proprietary way as a mother substitute-- just for me. 

Una was the niece of one of the early long running pastors of St. Victor's, Monsignor John Devlin.  I don't have all the details, but she left Ireland in about 1949, when she would have been just 23 years old and came to the United States. Whether she intended to stay I do not know, but she did, and became an institution at St. Victor's and in the lives of those who met her there (and elsewhere). 

My introduction was circa 1986, when I decided that my reversion to the Catholic Faith and to regular attendance at Church was firm enough to become an active part of the parish. I met Una at one of my first immersions into some group, and there was Una. With a reserved, but definite warmth, she invited me to have a "cup of tea" with her at the local IHOP just down the road off Holloway Drive, where the Church is situated. I don't recall what we spoke about, no doubt she inquired as to my history somewhat, and I don't remember if I actually had tea, being an inveterate coffee drinker on my father's side. (My mother, a first generation Irish American woman, was the tea drinker in our family, always from a large Russell Wright mug, which I still have). But not long thereafter, I was invited to the Sunday dinners at her little cottage on Orlando Street (in my podcast I said that it was West Hollywood; she would be scandalized for she was very insistent that it was the border, and in Los Angeles). It was there I became acquainted with about five of her 8 children. I was a little embarrassed at being Una's friend. Not because Una wasn't spectacular, and kind, but because it seemed rather odd that, though I was the age of most of her kids or in the vicinity, I wasn't one of their friends, but the friend of a woman my late mother's age. I thought they might think me a bit what? frumpy? Nerdy? Yeah, in those days such things still worried me. But I was mesmerized by the liveliness of these dinners, and that all sorts of people, friends of the kids, other friends of Una's, many from St. Victor, were also invited on a regular basis. I understood later on that Una's mother had been an unusual working mother, in Ireland, where Una was born (County Cork), and it sounded as if people coming and going socially was not a huge part of Una's young life. Una took the opposite approach. She opened her home to all her friends and her friends' friends.  "Come over and have a cup of tea!" was a refrain. A comfort to hear always. 

Her children grew up in that not so little house, of, let's see, five? bedrooms, but still crowded when it came to 8 kids. And she was, in the 1960s, a single mother. Although I assume that she had the support and help of her uncle should she need it, Una raisde them all alone. Finances were tight she always said, but she was proud of the fact that she managed to assure all of them had an education. Like many a mother she would joke that "none of them is in jail" or some such mini-prideful comment. In fact, among the vocations are lawyer, journalist and entertainment producers in the mix, and fathers, and wives and children and grandchidren. The line of Una Lynch is guaranteed for many a year going forward. 

She was a bookkeeper for some Hollywood folk. She was for a time the Principal of the Saint Victor grammar school though she herself, I believe, had never gone to college. She was for years secretary to the parish priests. She was deeply involved in charity, especially St. Anne's for pregnant women. For years, she ran the parish rummage sale which never failed to raise a tidy sum to keep the Church lights on as it were. 

The most important saint in her lexicon was St. Philomena, a Greek princess/martyr, of whom little is known, but is credited with many a miracle. 

Her faith was, in my opinion, heroic in the ordinary way of a Teresa of the Little Flower. It was also pure, uncomplicated. She simply seemed to understand that God's gaze was always upon her, and she quietly and respectfuly loved Him in return. 

Una managed to help out in the Church office until just around the time Covid hit in 2020. After that, she tended to keep to home, but after all she was going on 94 by that time. Her daughter, Joey, made sure Una got outside with a little table for the teapot and the china, so Una could watch the world go by. Una still encouraged visitors to come have a cup of tea. Even as she became unable to walk, and her hearing became worse and worse, she encouraged people to surround her and bask in her kindness and strength. On August 28, 2024, a small group of friends gathered in the dining room that was comfortingly the same as it had been when I attended my first dinner there in the 1980, to celebrate her 98th birthday with her favorite Princess Cake made of Marzipan. I only came to like Marzipan because of Una. It was lovely with that cup of tea. I think many of us knew that this would be the last birthday we would share with her, but it was as life giving as any gatheriing, especially her yearly St. Patrick's ones, she ever had had. 

Una died on December 3, 2024 in her own home, where she had raised her children and welcomed her friends. She died with love and prayer surrounding her. 

One of her friends, a lovely Northern Irish lad named Donal, said, and we all know it is no cliche regarding her, that "we shall not see her like again."  He said it in the original Gaelic. 

Each person I have lost in these last years, that many of us have lost, Fran, Bill, my father, Noreen, Erica, Bill, Barbara and I realize, those that I lost when I was younger, my mother, my aunts and uncles, my cousin Barbara, and more, have closed a chapter that I can't, that none of us can turn the page back to---and it reminds us with the joy of having had them, there is the loss-- a loss that was not intended when we were created. Having them, having Una, was a glimpse of Paradise. 

The Mind Boggling Experience of One Los Angelean Amid Wind and Fire

As I write, it is January 16, 2025, one week, two days after the beginning of the conflagrations known now variously as the Palisades Fire, Eaton Canyon Fire, Hurst Fire, Sunset Fire and more.

It is a quintessential California, Los Angeles day, the kind that enticed me on a first visit now nearly 48 years ago. I came in the summer then, so it's a little cooler today, but as then there is that crystalline blue sky and crisp colors of the God Made hills and the man made buildings, and the ability, to enjoy the mostly always temperate weather. I was on my terrace as the sun went down. My hummingbirds seemed unaffected by the trauma many humans and animals have experienced over the last week and two days. I felt even greater warmth for their comforting presence. They were dive bombing each other as usual for that last sip of nectar before the sun sends them into their nightly sleeps in the trees. Happily our trees, though many blown to kingdom come during the wind that fueled flames all around us, were still intact. Tonight, it looked like those of us in West Hollywood were safe enough. Elsewhere the two biggest fires I mentioned, Palisades and Eaton, were still not fully contained, and the destruction they have already wrought has left some of the most beautiful topography and homes in war like desolation. Too many families have lost their loved ones as embers, then flames overtook them. Those who survived lost the artifacts of their years' long memories, more important to most than the valuables left behind that other disgusting human beings have begun to pillage. 

A friend of mine, Andrew McCarthy, also a transplant from New York many years ago, said it best. At once what we are experiencing in this County and City is Paradise and Apocalypse. Even for those of us that were not touched or lightly touched by the experience, there is an almost ungraspable incongruity. Over here, things are as always, driving on the local streets, Santa Monica Boulevard, Fountain, even Sunset, which runs from the ocean to downtown. Much of it is closed in the west. Most is still open on the east side of things where ordinary commerce continues. Over there, there are ashes. There is also a ripping away of the veneer of safety we in America have tended to enjoy--until a disaster strikes and reminds us that our lives are on loan from God, and if you don't believe in God, from the Cosmos.  And if you don't believe in any order at all, from Chaos.

My experience of the fires began on Tuesday last, when I was driving to Santa Monica to visit with an elderly friend who was in rehabilitation from a broken hip. It was about 1 p.m. and I noticed on the horizon a black and white cloud that I assumed was some kind of structure fire.  Once I got to the facility, though, with everyone, from staff to patients watching the TV in the lanai, I first became aware of the Palisades fire. By the time I left at nearly five p.m., the whole sky was blackened. The fire explained why the power was out in the rehab facility, given the closeness of the Palisades to the it. But at that point, there was no indication that there would need to be evacuation, and, strangely and happily enough, though the facility remained in the warning area throughout, there was never the need for its evacuation. The fire remained north of it, though other parts of Santa Monica were threatened. My home is less than 12 miles from Santa Monica, but I was still surprised by the intensity of the traffic as I wended my way home. I assumed they were seeking to get out of the area and well we all needed to do so.  It took an hour and a half for me to make it home, trying all sorts of short cuts in which I ended up blocked. When I looked back through my side view mirror, I saw this:

If there truly is any such disposition, we are "used" to fires and earthquakes in California. There are endless numbers of homeless living in the hills and brush who have tent households and tempt the pagan gods of fire with their cooking, people throw cigarette butts out of their car windows, and broken glass that litters the ground can focus the sun to an ignition of the brush that environmentalists discourage being removed. (I believe the climate changes. It always has. The dinosaurs and other extinct species could testify to it, if they were here now--long before humans had the hubris to think they can dispose the climate to be more cordial).  And wind? Well the Santa Ana's begin in around September and go on through May so, January would not be an unexpected time for a burst that would fan flames. The word was, however, that these winds would be unlike any other, and sure enough they were. On Wednesday, the view from my little West Hollywood terrace (so calm today) was thus:

Malibu and the Palisades were already being consumed. And, like everyone, I was hoping and praying that people and places would be spared. On a glorious sun day, there is nothing like coming out of the tunnel from the 10 to the Pacific Coast Highway and seeing the sparkle ocean and the lines of houses along the beach, and hanging at some of the restaurants that abut the beach. But now, it seemed little was being spared. And there seemed to be surprise by our leaders that it could get so bad, even though there had been advance reports of the wind, and long knowledge of the nature of firestarting, accidental and wilful. Oh, yes, we have those creatures who just like to burn things, called arsonists. 

I watched the live news concerned for others but not particularly concerned for myself or my immediate neighbors. And then they reported there was a new fire, in the hills, less than a mile from me, the Hollywood Hills, Runyon Canyon, and it was sweeping down toward Hollywood Boulevard. That friend who described LA as Paradise and Apocalypse was ordered to be evacuated. The area from there to Sunset, which I abut on my block, was a mandatory one. I was on warning, but it was only one block from mandatory. My HOA folks were walking the roof because embers could easily flee the hills and rest on our building. I would be leaving, though some of my neighbors chose not to do so. I would take my friend to a safe place with my friend Len, relatively safe in the Westwood area, and return to be with my cousin, not too far away, such that she too had a go bag, just in case. I hustled my startled cat into a bag and waited as Andrew walked to me because the traffic had already jammed in his area, and mine was on its way to gridlock.

Two things mitigated that fire such that it was out by the next day. The winds quieted briefly, and the Lake Hollywood Reservoir was nearby for the large air drops from helicopters. I learned about the app Watch Duty and read every update, and listened to KNX 1070 through the night in which I hardly slept. I was lucky as too many people were not.  But for the first time in my life, I had a small sense of what a refugee experiences taking the few belonging they can and escaping the potentiality of destruction--hopefully escaping the potentiality of destruction. 

Days of danger and darkness. They are not necessarily gone. But today, a peace and quiet, at least in this small pocket of Los Angeles. 

I could imagine that it never happened. But it has. A pretty good close up of hell.