A Mother’s Day Remembrance of the Pulse of Our Hearts

In Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million-Dollar Baby, his character, crusty Frankie Dunn, is reluctantly persuaded to train young female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald. Eventually warming to her, the Yeats-loving Dunn nicknames his protegee “Mo Cuishle." It’s an adaptation of a Gaelic phrase, A chuisle mo chroí, whose translation, Dunn reveals toward the end of the film, is “My darling.”

I, however, prefer something far more poetic, and closer to its literal meaning: “Pulse of my heart.”

For more than 50 years, the "pulse of my heart" for me and my brothers was our Irish-American mother,who died this past September. (My eulogy for her is here. )

On this first Mother's Day without her, we can say that death might have ended her life, but not the love for her that rests in her sons--a love sure to endure, in fact, to the last pulse of our hearts.