When I was younger, St. Patrick’s Day meant eating with my whole extended family, all of their closest friends and some people that my dad bumped into that day at the parade. It meant Irish soda bread and corn beef and gold coins from the candy store downtown. It meant waiting for my grandma on the steps by the door and anxiously twisting the plastic green beads from the cheap necklaces between my fingers until I jumped up in joy when I saw her at the door. It meant Irish goodbyes — or what I thought an Irish goodbye meant at the time.
Because I am a descendant of Irish immigrants from quite a long time ago, I had always assumed that my family practiced the Irish goodbye. I assumed that an Irish goodbye meant lingering in the doorway and taking an hour and a half to put on shoes and pack up the car. To me, Irish goodbyes were defined by getting one foot out the door, only to have someone produce a deck of cards out of thin air and start a game. They meant my family leaving my grandma’s house in a parade, one member leaving an hour after the other, because each of our goodbyes took that long.
Once, during a sleepover, when my friend asked if I ever pulled Irish goodbyes, I said yes confidently and assumed she laughed because I was so indulgent of others’ time or overstayed my welcome. Instead, she thought I was being sarcastic — I had a habit of lingering until the early hours of the morning at her house, just as my family would linger after a gathering, taking hours to say goodbye. It was then that she informed me that Irish goodbyes meant leaving without a word and just walking out the door.
I know how it feels to say goodbye for so long that my friend’s motion sensor porch light flickers off, to enjoy a conversation so much that I just wave my arms in the air to flick the light back on. The idea of leaving a place without hugging someone goodbye was foreign to me, if not incomprehensible.
I had always identified with this idea of being an Irish descendant in the U.S., however distant I may have been from actual Irish culture. I liked the idea that there was some faraway place that I was connected to through my heritage. I knew that the connection had severed a fair bit over generations, but there was still comfort in the in-between.
My mom learned how to make bread from my grandma who learned from her mother and so on, all so that I might learn to make bread the same way. I might eat the same meal as my ancestors all did, on the same day, at the same time, with the same people. That kind of connection is difficult to maintain, but it is so grounding and uniting. That is what heritage is to me. It’s knowing that your family, or your community, is connected to a history of choices
I’m not entirely sure if Irish goodbyes are an actual thing outside of the U.S., but I do know that I have never done one. Instead, what I once thought of as an Irish goodbye is what I now call a Michigan goodbye — the artful practice of lingering.
Lingering is inherited. My sister once cried at her birthday party when she was younger because even after nine hours of a family party, the guests were still laughing in the kitchen. We take longer packing up the leftovers and hugging goodbye at my aunt’s house than driving all the hours back home.
When I was younger, nothing was more annoying than standing by the door while my parents talked. I would tug on my mom’s arm and ask when we were finally leaving. Eventually, I learned that the answer was in about an hour. Instead of complaining to them, I’d play with my cousins for another hour. Over the years, those extended goodbyes became part of my nature as well. It turned into something I caught myself doing with friends. I found myself lingering a lot more. I’d stand in their kitchen well past my curfew just to talk and revel in their company.
There’s a lot to learn about someone when the clock is ticking and you have one foot out of the door. All of the secrets you avoided saying for fear of discussion somehow make their way out then. It’s when you’re a little sleepy and sitting on the steps of the porch because it’s too late to go outside that everything seems to become more funny, more sentimental and more honest. These conversations in limbo, dominated by the exit in the periphery, can be small talk, but sometimes the prospect of leaving lets people loosen their lips. They speak about stories they had never thought to mention before. All the details of the day that they’d forgotten live again in these moments. Anything that had been a hesitation is said. It’s a relief. The Michigan goodbyes that I previously scorned have become some of my favorite memories.
It made me love the idea of being from Michigan. I stopped wondering about the Irish countryside I had never seen and began to examine what my grandparents did, the holiday traditions only my generation experienced. A lot of them feel integral to Michigan, like swimming in the bay during the summer and watching the fireworks on the river. These moments that happen year after year make me feel more connected to my family now, and in the context of tradition, they feel a little heightened, the tiniest bit more valuable.
I now understand that my family has taken traditions from Ireland, though they may only be loosely related. We have recipes, jewelry, religion and values passed down that still follow what my ancestors followed. I love that these learned traditions connect me to them. But I’ve found that, as much as that history matters to me, the traditions that my grandparents left behind, the ones I was able to witness in the home that I knew, just meant more.
The ancestor who might have cooked the same recipe of stuffing wasn’t necessarily closer to me than my actual grandmothers were. I took for granted my close relatives’ familiarity. It wasn’t as fascinating to me as the idea of Ireland was. I wanted to have that connection to that bigger place and the ancestors there. However, I will always know Michigan better, I will always be more grounded here.
A lot of these traditions, like ice-skating on the bay or watching the St. Patrick’s Day parade downtown, would have no real meaning if they were taken out of my hometown. They’ve been shaped and adapted by the place my family has inhabited, even if only been for the last few generations.
Still, I’m sure that my ancestors weren’t picking out their corned beef at the grocery store. Some traditions simply cannot be done in modern-day Michigan the same way they were in Ireland generations ago. I don’t live in the same world as my ancestors 150 years ago did. It’s a little sad to lose the traditions that made me feel so connected to my heritage. Sometimes it feels a little like time travel when my sister braids my hair the way she learned from our grandma, who learned from her grandma, too. While I treasure that, I can still tell that a lot of change in this world has led to a lot of change in our family’s traditions. Even as those traditions might be lost to time, it provides the opportunity to create new ones.
I will continue with my Michigan goodbyes. For now, I’ll stick with my Michigan goodbyes, standing at the door with coat zipped and my backpack on, talking with my roommates until the last possible moment. I can’t claim an Irish goodbye, and I probably never will. To me, the tradition, and the conversations that come with it, are too valuable.
That balance between the old and the new lets me keep a different perspective on things. I get to think of what food I eat that my family was eating for hundreds of years, but I also get to think of how my grandchildren and beyond might inherit and eventually spin these traditions. I don’t know how the Michigan goodbye came about, but whatever spin it eventually takes, I hope people still treasure those easy conversations in whatever format they come. If my descendants decide to live somewhere else, I hope that’s braided into our family history as well. But there’s certainly no shame in letting the older traditions linger, so long as I can try new ones for a change.
Statement Columnist Meghan Dwan can be reached at mkdwan@umich.edu.
