For generations, the McCarthy family has passed along a small bundle of words that has travelled further than any of its members. It is not a deed, a photograph, or a piece of jewellery, though it has been treated with the same reverence as any heirloom. It is an Irish blessing, recited aloud by Loni's grandmother in kitchens and lounge rooms, whispered over the phone during difficult weeks, and scribbled on the inside of greeting cards for decades.
The blessing is short enough to memorise in a single sitting, yet dense with the kind of hope that families lean on when the year turns cold. Its rhythm has become familiar to anyone who has shared a meal with the McCarthy descendants, whether in the dining room of a Queenslander in Brisbane or over a video call from a flat on the other side of the world.
What makes this particular blessing worth recording is the woman who kept it moving. Loni's grandmother, a quiet woman with a soft Kerry lilt that never quite left her, refused to let the words become a museum piece. She said them at births, at weddings, at funerals, and once, famously, to a startled taxi driver who had asked how she was going. Fair dinkum, the driver is said to have replied, before driving off slightly dazed.
The McCarthy name is everywhere in the southwest of Ireland, but the branch Loni descends from traces back to farmland outside Killarney. The family spoke Munster Irish at home long after English had become the language of the schools and the post office, and the women were known for keeping old sayings close at hand. Proverbs were a kind of currency, exchanged at the hearth when news had to be softened or a child needed steadying.
Loni's grandmother, born in the early years of the twentieth century, grew up hearing her own mother murmur blessings before sleep. The practice predates written records in the family, and no one has been able to pin down exactly which verse is the original. What is certain is that the form Loni's grandmother favoured was the one beginning "May the road rise up to meet you," recited with the same intonation her own mother had used, as if the melody were stitched into the words.
The family left Ireland in stages, with cousins bound for Boston, Sydney, and other ports. The blessing travelled with them in every direction, a portable piece of home requiring nothing more than breath to pass along.
Anyone who knew Loni's grandmother will say the same thing about her voice: it had a quality of weather in it, something between a soft rain and the hush before a storm. She was not a woman given to long speeches, and she disliked fuss, but when she said the blessing she slowed down so each phrase could land. Children would stop squabbling to listen. Adults would set down their cups.
Her version of the blessing was slightly different from the one found on souvenir tea towels and greeting cards. She leaned into certain words and let others pass quickly, and she almost always ended with a small personal addition. For a grandchild leaving home, she might tack on "and may your suitcase be light." For someone grieving, she would add "and may you find your rest."
This habit of personalising the ending turned the blessing from a set piece into a living thing within the McCarthy family. It signalled that the words were not being recited at the listener but were being offered to them, tailor-made for the moment.
The core of the blessing, as Loni's grandmother spoke it, runs along familiar lines. May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and the rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.
She would pause after the second line, as if giving the wind time to do its work. She would linger on the word "fields," even when the person she was blessing had never owned a field in their life. And she would always make eye contact during the final line, a gesture that turned the prayer into a kind of pledge.
For decades, the family assumed everyone knew the blessing by heart. It was only when a cousin married outside the Irish-Australian community and the words drew blank stares around a Brisbane kitchen that the McCarthy relatives realised how particular their inheritance was. The blessing was theirs, and it had been shaped by them, even when the verses belonged to a much wider tradition.
The blessing made the journey from Kerry to Queensland, from Kerry to Massachusetts, and from Kerry to wherever a McCarthy could find work and a quiet kitchen. In each new place, it picked up small additions and lost others. Some branches added lines about the sea. Others dropped the mention of fields altogether and spoke of gardens instead.
Loni's grandmother, who eventually settled in regional New South Wales after a period in Melbourne's inner north, kept the Kerry version largely intact. She had a habit of writing the blessing out by hand for anyone who asked, using a fountain pen on the back of envelopes, shopping lists, and once, memorably, on a paper napkin from a cafe near the MCG on a chilly July afternoon. She would fold the paper twice before handing it over, as if sealing a letter.
She also kept a small notebook of every occasion on which she had said the blessing aloud. Weddings, christenings, farewells at Mascot, welcome-home dinners in Footscray, a few hospital rooms, and one emotional afternoon at a Bunnings car park after a sausage sizzle went sideways. The notebook, now in Loni's keeping, is more a record of a life than a record of a prayer.
The blessing still gets said, though the audience has changed. Loni now lives in Australia with Allen, and the pair maintain a personal website that serves as a family archive, complete with chronologies, obituaries, and original writing. The McCarthy blessing has its own quiet place among the photographs and documents, and it is recited from time to time on family occasions, often after the pavlova has been served and the cricket has been muted in the next room.
Younger members of the family have taken to texting the words to one another before big events, a habit that would have made Loni's grandmother laugh. She preferred the spoken version, where a stumble or a tear became part of the blessing's texture. Still, the reach of the words has only grown, and the blessing now travels through group chats and voice notes as readily as it once moved through sitting rooms.
A small movement among the cousins to have the blessing printed on a card has stalled, partly because no one can agree on which version to use, and partly because the blessing has always resisted being pinned down. It belongs to the moment it is spoken, not to the page.
The blessing now lives in several places at once. It is handwritten in Loni's grandmother's notebook, scanned into the family archive, and spoken aloud on the phone whenever a McCarthy descendant faces a milestone. Reflections on what these inherited phrases have come to mean in everyday family life occasionally surface on Loni's blog, alongside photographs and the small daily updates that keep distant relatives in touch across time zones.
There has been some discussion about whether to formalise the blessing, perhaps by commissioning a framed print or recording a family member reading it aloud. The proposals have been gently set aside, partly out of indecision and partly out of a sense that the blessing's strength lies in its informality. Pinning it down too tightly might rob it of the breath that carries it.
For now, the words continue to move through the family in the old way. A niece memorised it last year and recited it at her father's birthday, pausing at the exact spot where her great-great-grandmother would have paused. No one had taught her the pause. She simply knew.
What Loni's grandmother understood, and what the family has come to understand in turn, is that a blessing is not a relic. It is a renewed act each time it is spoken, and it changes depending on who says it and who receives it. The McCarthy blessing has been said in hospital wards and at kitchen tables, on the phone across continents, and once, very softly, in a hospice room in the small hours of the morning.
The words themselves are simple, and they have been set to music and stitched into samplers a thousand times over. Their power within the McCarthy line has never been about novelty. It has been about continuity, about the soft persistence of a woman who refused to let the language of her childhood fall silent.
For anyone who has ever had a grandparent murmur something over them before a long trip, an exam, or a difficult year, the McCarthy blessing is a reminder that those words still echo. They travel further than we think, and they cost nothing to pass along.