Stephen Hazlett

Family O'Shea Stephen Hazlett

A tragic/comic tale of a dysfunctional Irish-American family. John O'Shea, an Irishman living in America for sixty of his seventy-six years, learns that he is dying. Ever the loner, he has always believed that his "Family" included no one but himself. Yet he has his secret regrets over the ones he left behind. As a young man he had two sons, abandoning them in their youth. Now they are grown and barely know him. When John makes a dying wish of them in hopes it will bring them all together, they are at first reluctant. The sons, Jack and Tim O'Shea, both hold John in the same contempt for leaving them as boys. Will John's strange request ultimately win them over? Will the "Old Country" of their father's dreams become part of their dreams too? Will new aspects of each be revealed, finally to be left with a new sense of family they never had before?