Laughing Angel Productions

Laughing Angel Productions

Current Projects: These are projects—a film script, children’s books, an angel book—that have lived in my heart and are now ready, willing and able to be produced, read and shared!

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” ––Sean O’Casey

sister mary cyril age 97 1952This is a story I had to tell. First, though, I had to find it and that took the better part of 30 years.

It began with a ring and a newspaper clipping from the Terre Haute (Indiana) News of 1953. It was about a relative of mine I knew nothing about, Sister Mary Cyril. Years earlier, when I was 23, I was visiting a pen pal in London and I went to the British Institute of Psychical Research. A Swedish psychic, Mr. Bogaron, told me about a woman he “saw” around me, a religious person, he said. He described her as someone who had left the land of her birth at an early age and never returned.

I knew nothing about her, but when I got home my mother showed me a newspaper clipping about a cousin of my great-grandmother, whose name was Sister Cyril. At the age of 13 she left her home in Ireland for what was supposed to be a two-year visit at the invitation of an uncle in Indianapolis. The visit was in repayment of a debt owed to her father. Her father agreed to the visit with the stipulation that she continue her education while in America. She was enrolled at a school run by the Sisters of Providence. She fell in love with the order and with America! She was allowed to join as a 15-year-old and eventually became a Superior. The article went on to tell of her last year spent in the convent’s infirmary before her death in 1953 at the age of 98, much of it spent talking of her family, her father’s cousins Michael Davitt and Archbishop MacHale, and her love of Ireland.