It Happened To Me: My Mother Predicted Her Own Death - On My 18th Birthday
From as early as I can remember, without any rationale for it, my mother talked about dying young every day.
By Sarah Lally
My parents had very different outlooks on life. My father predicted he’d live to be 100. My mother didn’t care as long as I became an adult.
Kathleen Lally was a formidable and funny woman. She was loving and caring and tough as fucking nails. She was such a grand and imposing figure, and I was her biggest fan and defender. I think people had an idea of who she was outside of the home — a loud, brash woman who could hold her own against anyone (which she was). However, to me she was the woman who always kissed me goodnight, with a blessing of “See you in the morning please God,” the woman who supported and championed her family and would scream herself hoarse when her beloved County Mayo would play (and inevitably lose) in the Gaelic football, she was a card shark who played every Friday night, and she loved trashy TV. She was loving, caring and the most intelligent woman I had ever met. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t talk to her about.
Her death prediction was three-fold:
Go quickly
Go painlessly
That all her children were adults at her passing.
She was 40 when I was born. She had raised four other children and I bet she thought she was done when this happy little accident came along. As such, I spent much of my childhood hearing “I’m lucky to see this day.” One memorable occasion where that was said was at my First Holy Communion. I was six. This is not hyperbole — there was a videotape (long gone now, I’m sure) that cataloged this.
Because of my mother's constant reminder that her death was just around the corner, I spent my childhood thinking she was going to die. In fact, I have a morbid curiosity about death that far exceeds that of my culture. (In Ireland death is a part of everyday life. The radio announces local deaths and funeral services, www.rip.ie is the 21st most visited website in Ireland as of February 2025 — beating out both pornhub and TikTok — and the life of the deceased is celebrated with an ironically titled “wake,” a gathering of the family and friends of the deceased to share stories, support and to celebrate the life of the dead). I think some of that morbid curiosity stems from her. I remember one night being inconsolable about death. She reassured me that everything was going to be OK and not to worry about it so much. So I, the ever-dutiful daughter, did just that. For a while, at least.
It was a strange thing to grow up with her death looming over me. Like every moment was precious. Maybe that’s why I have hoarded away every argument, every hug, kind word, piece of advice, funny saying, everything. I find myself bringing her up in conversation because I feel like the people I know and love who were not fortunate to know her would both love her and understand me a bit more; the people who did know her would see her in me, and in that way she would never truly be gone.
All this is to say that she knew she’d go young. At my debs (that’s prom for my American friends), she told my now father-in-law that this was the closest she would get to my wedding. As it turns out, she was absolutely correct. This photo of us at my debs was our final one together.
There seemed to be a bit of a witch about the woman. I remember her not only guessing the gender but also the birth date of a child. Or the time she knew a boy had asked me out before I even had the chance to tell her. When my sister went into labor with her eldest, my mother, in her break-the-tension-with-a-joke kind of way (which I also have), said to her “10 pounds, 8 ounces - beat that!!”, referring to my sister's weight when she was born. And sure enough, she did. Baby Lally was born 10 pounds 13 ounces. I think, without meaning to, she put a curse on her. There was power in her words.
Whether it was “a little birdy” telling her things or just plain intuition, she passed that down to her children. One of my older sisters certainly has her unnatural ability at prediction, all of us are good at spotting a bullshitter, and I also have had a few moments of my own. While I am skeptical (well as much as a child of the myth-soaked land of Ireland can be), I can’t help but find comfort in the mysticism.
We were a house that believed in the mythical cures for warts (cut a potato in half, rub it on the warts and bury it in the garden), cures for a stye of the eye (rub your mother's wedding ring on it), praying to St. Anthony when things were lost, and that if a bird shits on you, it’s good luck. But we were also a house of science. My engineer father was an extreme skeptic, but he was right there, cutting the potato for us.
So while our home wasn’t exactly bursting with magic, it also wasn’t not there… if you get my meaning.
On my 18th birthday, my mother died at the age of 58. She had a heart attack, like her father. She went painlessly, in her sleep (When I was 11 she had her first heart attack where she felt no pain).
She even gave me my birthday gift a week early, almost like she knew.
And here comes the resentment. Could she not have picked a better day, for crying out loud? Let us have the big family get together. We served birthday cake at her wake, and the first alcoholic drink I bought was a pint of Guinness for my father at her funeral, for Christ’s sake. Not exactly the memories you want to associate with your 18th. And (perhaps) selfishly… maybe let me have one day a year that I could celebrate without her death looming over it like an unwanted guest.
Or what about predicting something a bit further out? Could she not have predicted that she would live until she was 90? Or wish to see all her children married or her grandchildren graduate? Why was the bar so low?
The worst thing is, I know why the bar was low — it’s because she was an unwell woman. She was unwell when she was pregnant with me. She had heart conditions. She was in and out of the hospital for a lot of my childhood. She stopped smoking when she was pregnant with me, but I’m sure smoking at least two packs a day from the ages of 13 to 40 did untold damage. She had asthma (that untold damage is actually very telling when I think about it). She simply wasn’t in good health. There were a lot of factors.
My mother was overweight for my entire life, but I’m not going to blame her health issues entirely on that. For one, we don’t know for sure that it was the cause of her death. Just that it was a heart attack. Heart problems run in her family, and also let's not forget the “Celtic curse,” also known as Haemocromotis. It’s a genetic condition very common in Irish people and others of Celtic backgrounds that can lead to heart issues, including heart attacks. Anyway, I only mention this as it was something she struggled with, it was something we were very aware of growing up. I suggest reading Charlie’s article here, for a bit of insight on what it’s like because there’s no point in me trying to articulate it when he’s done a super job already.
There’s part of me that likes the idea that maybe there was something supernatural about her and her abilities. After all, I am her daughter, and just as I inherited her dirty laugh and some of her looks, maybe I also inherited her sixth sense. Maybe that makes me special as well?
The skeptic in me (who sounds extraordinarily like my father) tells me it's a coincidence. The whimsical, airy-fairy child in me tells me I come from a line of witches, and to be honest, I take comfort from both. Maybe she accidentally cursed my sister with an almost fully grown human at birth because of her own fears? Maybe she did the same with her death? Or maybe we have no say in the workings of the Universe and we just have to get on with it.
I know that this is more a case of self-pity on my part, but what can I say, I wanted her with me forever. The number of times I’ve had to figure out what to do by myself because I couldn’t ask her for advice, and I’m sure there are decisions I’ve messed up because I lost her guidance at such a vital age. Don’t get me wrong —‚ my father was amazing, and my siblings still are, but there was something exceptional about my mother.
I just thought that after 20 years, it would get easier.
However, maybe if she had lived we wouldn’t get on? I lost her as I was becoming a person. Maybe my views nowadays wouldn’t align with hers. Maybe the advice she would have given would have derailed the life I have now. Maybe this “perfect” relationship I had with her only remains that way because I will forever be 18 and she will forever be infallible.
On the 19th anniversary of my mom's death, I arrived back in Ireland. I was called home as my father, Michael, was dying. He wished me a happy birthday, his voice weak and his body tired. He was no longer the giant of a man he had been. He had no birthday gift but the smile on his face when he saw me. That night, as I sat in the room with my siblings and my dad, I watched the hands on the clock tick by. As the clock struck midnight, I’m ashamed to admit, I breathed a sigh of relief. Losing one parent on my birthday was hard enough.
We lost him five days later.
I guess in 20 years I’ll be ready to write properly about my father, and how I resent that his prediction to live to 100 didn’t come true. I know you can’t have it both ways… but it would have been nice to at least have it one way.
Sarah and I bonded over our membership in the Dead Moms Club shortly after we started working together, usually trying to one-up each other as to who suffered more. It always came up in some form of morbid joke (it was an interesting workplace!), so I'd heard a lot about Kathleen Lally before I started to edit this piece. That being said, I wasn't ready for such a nuanced and vulnerable story. Reading this made me feel like I finally understood where Sarah came from and more than anything I wish our two moms could have met. They'd sit around the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes (Salem Ultra Light 100s for my mom) and telling tales.
Thank you thank you thank you for this beautifully written story. I'm sure my mom and I are going to talk about this more, because it brings up so many memories of my father's side of the family, all of whom talked about dying almost every day, as well. I'm certain that my own father's death, in a hit and run just after his 59th birthday, was connected to the fact that he always said he would go at around that age. Or, as you have enlightened me to here, looking at this in the context of his supernatural powers (or mine) may be part of my coping mechanism.
In any case, thank you for telling this so much more eloquently than I could, and for making me think even more deeply about it all. Sending you love and support and strength.