Tags
Blackthorn, Funerals, Northern Ireland, Postscript, Seamus Heaney, Second Anniversary of Heaney's Death, Stepping Stones, The Gravel Walks, Traditions of Dying, widowhood
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
He always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because it meant he wouldn’t have to miss me. Far better – for him. A private man, my husband also insisted that death was a private business. When the time came, he wanted to die alone, just to sleep on. There was to be no fuss, no funeral, no flurry of condolences, not even a goodbye if he could help it. Maybe he was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do or say; maybe he thought it would be easier if he just disappeared into nothingness without ceremony. He would have been wrong.
Like a catechism, I know what to do and say. Knowing is part of the culture that formed me – it is sewn tidily in our DNA – and I am bound to it. Where I’m from, we know to mark the time of death, to stop the clocks and cover the mirrors, to draw down the blinds and close the curtains; we know what to say and do when led silently into a bedroom where the deceased has been “laid out”; we know how to pay our respects in private and in public, how to offer condolences over tea in china cups balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits; we know when to shake hands, to whisper, to weep and when to throw our heads back in laughter over a bit of craic about a life lived in full.
Without these tiny rituals in the days following my husband’s death, I raged internally and selfishly. Only because he expected me to accept and respect his wishes – and because I had promised – I complied. Against my will, I privatized my mourning and got lost in the ever-widening distance between the Arizona desert and a blacksmith’s forge on the side of the road in rural South Derry. I wanted what I couldn’t have.I wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye and to fill the air with his favorite music, a traditional toe-tapping Irish reel. I wanted somewhere to go on his birthday, to bring flowers, perhaps a bunch of freesias because he loved their scent. He wanted none of it. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.
I was back home when he died. A few days before, I had visited the graveyard in Bellaghy where Seamus Heaney is buried. My recollection of that visit is fresh – the mound of Derry soil not yet settled under a sycamore tree, no marker other than a makeshift sign at the entrance to the car park, two plants, a bouquet, and a handwritten thank you note. The sycamore leaves scattered on the dirt and wet from the rain, the clouds hanging heavy and low, I remember thinking that when the time came, a naturalist like my husband would maybe consider it as a final resting place.
The local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to this particular task and moved by the number of people visiting to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
I don’t know what Seamus would have made of it but I think he might be pleased enough.
I think so too.
So when I returned to Bellaghy the following summer, I visited the grave again. This time, a simple wooden cross stood in the dirt. This time, I was a widow, changed and contemplative, convinced that cosmic strings keep us connected. This time, I wondered about the spiritual space in which both men might move. Where are they?
In Stepping Stones, Heaney tells Dennis O’Driscoll that he did not fear death the way he had done as a boy.
It’s more grief than fear, grief at having to leave ‘what thou lovest well’ and whom thou lovest well.
Unsure of what to say but saying it anyway, some people told me my husband had gone on to a better place. Then – and now – I rail against them. What place could be better than here among the living? What place could be better than at our kitchen table opening a hand-made birthday card from his daughter or at the Motor Vehicle Department when she nailed the parallel parking and got her license, or on the other end of the line to hear the news of her acceptance into a graduate program or that she’s madly in love with a boy who is kind and true? How could any place be better than a ring-side seat at the milestones yet to come?
Is there a more desolate space than the empty seat at the table?
For just a moment today, I’d like to hear him laugh again with my daughter. All these years later, it sometimes feels as though he just went missing.
Where is he?
The question that will remain unanswered, it is very different from the madness that accompanied the early urgent grip of grief, the all-consuming quest to fix the unfixable, stop time, close distance, find the right word, and do the right thing. Doing the right thing – as he had requested – felt wrong.
He did not want to be buried in the ground. He wanted to be cremated, and he wanted his ashes – all of them – strewn on a piece of ground in the desert, at the base of Black Mountain, where his childhood home had once stood – his first place.
We obliged. My parents, far from Heaney country, our daughter, and a close friend did as he asked, each of us taking turns to empty the bag that contained the cremated remains of this man we loved. That bag probably weighed no more than five pounds. I recall fixating on this detail, wondering about Ken’s soul and the weight of it and its whereabouts. Where was it? Where is it? Is it possible he knows we’re thinking of him today?
On his birthday, two years after he died, we returned to the spot where we had spread his ashes only to find “his” tree had been cut down and the area around it chained off for commercial development. For the time being, it was an empty space. I cried. Of course I cried, even though the rational part of me knew and knows that not for one second would he have expected his desert space to remain unspoiled. Coolly resigned to the price of urban progress, he would have been unfazed. Still, I was resentful again, angry that there was no grave for us to visit, no headstone to adorn with fresh flowers on milestone days – the anniversaries of the day we married, the day our girl was born, the day of his death, or a day like today – his birthday.
Then with the right words at the right time – again – came Seamus Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the new headstone in place for the second anniversary of his death. Lines he had explained once to the Harvard Crimson
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called ‘The Gravel Walks,’ which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like the in-betweenness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens. I think that’s where poetry should dwell, between the dream world and the given world, because you don’t just want photography, and you don’t want fantasy either.
The girl with her head in the clouds should never have doubted the man who kept her feet on the ground too. Not for a second.
All that’s left of him now is love – to give away. I am walking on air.
Happy birthday.
Photograph: Laurel Villa
So walk on air against your better judgement
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called The Gravel Walks that conjures green
