Dear Seamus Heaney,

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Editor in A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Act Two, Door into the Dark, Postscript, Seamus Heaney, The Underground

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Fifth Anniversary of Heaney's Death, Irish DIASPORA, Noli Timere, Seamus Heaney, The Underground, Van Morrison

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996

Dear Seamus Heaney,

Six years since you left us, I want to let you know your poems are still with me, all those well-crafted words showing up like old friends who catch my heart off-guard and blow it open. I often wish I’d had the chance to let you know in person, that one day, maybe at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge, our paths would cross. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you would remark on the weather – something colloquial that would remind me of the way my father speaks – and I would agree and then weave in a thank you before it was too late.

I would thank you for all those times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written, and for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy. I would thank you for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest small things, and for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” But the opportunity eluded me.

My Mother’s Bookshelf – By Sophie

Over the years, during the worst of times for those I love and who love me, when I didn’t know what to say, I would turn to your pitch-perfect poetry and wrap up my condolences in your certain sure words. When you died, Seamus, I remember being struck by the realization that only you would be capable of producing the right words to assuage Ireland’s sorrow over your passing. Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I found myself in “limbo land,” uncertain – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – myth and reality – maybe not unlike Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold

If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

On this sixth anniversary of your death, I am pulled back to “The Underground,” one of my favorite poems. I didn’t know until recently that it was a favorite of yours too, and that back in 2009, when asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry, ‘The Underground’ was one of them.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

You never looked back.

When I found out that your final words were in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I remembered your Orpheus in the Underworld, and the Latin you loved.

Noli Timere.

Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”

There was a surety in that, wasn’t there? All those years after first publishing your poems under a pseudonym, Incertus (Uncertain), you left us with a simple, spare, and forward-looking reassurance. You had told us once before after all, that “it is important to be reassured.”

So thank you, Seamus. I am still looking forward. I am walking on air.

For that, I am forever in your debt.

Mexico ~ With My Own Ones

23 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by Editor in Ajijic, Chapala, Irish Diaspora, Jalisco, James Taylor, Lake Chapala, Mexico, Mexico, Paula Meehan, You're So Vain

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" Saratoga Springs, Ajijic, Diaspora, immigrant, James Taylor, Lake Chapala, Mexico, Northern Ireland

“I am the blind woman finding her way home by a map of tune.
When the song that is in me is the song I hear from the world
I’ll be home. It’s not written down and I don’t remember the words.
I know when I hear it I’ll have made it myself. I’ll be home.“

~ Paula Meehan, Irish poet

Vibrant, foreign, and far away, Mexico was once nothing more than a James Taylor song on my first radio. It was too far beyond my reach to present an alternative to the Northern Ireland of my childhood, a grey and divided place, its capital city, a ‘no-go’ area in the 1970s. The United States or Canada presented a more accessible option, and to escape the rain, unemployment, and The Troubles, I turned to America, to its music and movies – to the dream of it – and I devoted most of my time in school to planning my exit strategy. Instead of Spanish, I opted for French, contemplating Quebec I suppose, but when a summer job opportunity presented itself in New York, I seized it.

Laden with a heavy backpack and a tell-tale paperback book on how to ‘do’ America, I arrived at John F. Kennedy airport in the summer of 1984. With the bravado we attribute to youth and not knowing any better, I sauntered through Customs and Immigration. The officer who stamped my passport greeted me to the New World with an impatient, “Keep on rollin’, lady,” confirming what I probably already knew – that I was too slow for the big city and the big country that had been the stuff of my dreams for a decade.

Apprehensive and alone, I spent my first night in New York in the YMCA on Times Square and 42nd Street, long before the area had been spruced up and transformed into the glittering intersection we know today. Still with one foot in Belfast, when I ventured out that hot summer night, I stood for too long in the doorway of a drug store. With my backpack held open, I waited expectantly for someone to search it for explosives. So ingrained was this habit, the girl from Northern Ireland had forgotten she was on a New York city sidewalk.

Within the weeks that followed, the initial culture shock gave way to an enchantment that remains within me. Just three hours away by train, Saratoga Springs beckoned me with a series of concerts celebrating the 15^th anniversary of Woodstock. Saratoga, the place in “You’re So Vain,” where his ‘horse naturally won,’ according to Carly Simon who was married to the man who had sung about Mexico on my radio back in Belfast. Undaunted and reckless, I hitch-hiked my way to hear him perform, which he did – with Randy Newman. And of course, he sang “Mexico.”

I would later find out that the song came to James Taylor while he was taking a break during the recording of the “Gorilla” album. As he remembers: “I went down to spend a long weekend in Mexico with some friends in Puerto Vallarta, and while I was down there, this thing just … sometimes you go some place, you know?”

Yes, James. Thirty years later, I know.

A cross country trip from New York would bring me to the desert southwest, tantalizingly closer to Mexico. I settled in Phoenix, a sprawling metropolis connected by streets with Spanish names – Via de Ventura, Calle Guadalupe, Casa Blanca Drive – and when I bought the house I still live in today, I planted a jacaranda tree that explodes with purple blossoms. In the blazing days of summer, when my friends would escape to those beautiful Mexican beaches that slope into the Sea of Cortez, I opted instead for Morro Bay on the central coast of California, with its misty morning fog and colorful wall murals; or I would go back to a Belfast that now shimmers as a cosmopolitan city in Game of Thrones country. Mexico alluded me – but not this year.

In Spring of 2018, we found ourselves at Mi Patio, a neighborhood Mexican restaurant in the middle of Phoenix. Before long, as is our way, we had befriended the stranger at the bar. Affable and interesting, he joined our conversation about Van Morrison and Northern Ireland – each synonymous for ‘home’ for me. He even sang the first line of “Celtic Heartbeat”

Oh won’t you stay, stay a while with your own ones. . .

~ and I was at home in a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona.

And then he pivoted, drawing our attention to a little place he knew we hadn’t heard of but that we should definitely visit. He spelled it out. A-j-i-j-i-c. Something about the way those letters fell from his lips compelled me to ask more. To help us place it on an imaginary map, he said it was close to Guadalajara on the shores of Mexico’s Lake Chapala. He told us Ajijic was a magical place with a perfect climate and a welcoming international community of ex-pats like me, a place we would love. April, he said, might be a good time to visit. So, by the end of the evening, we had a new friend and a plan in place. We would visit Mexico to mark my 55^th birthday, and we would be his guests at The Hotel Casa Blanca in Ajijic.

When we arrived there on my birthday, far away from the country that made me, I was struck by how much I felt at home. Walking the cobblestoned streets of Ajijic, my feet were on familiar territory – my heart, too, hope burning as it had done once before in the summer of 1984. And, catching a glimpse of the man I love buying roses on a street festooned with papel picado, I knew I was home.

Together, we ventured to the plaza for a birthday drink. A jocular Canadian spied us and invited us to his table, and within minutes, he was asking us when we would be back. He found out we were celebrating my ‘double nickels’ day, so he presented me with a candle and led the people around him in a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” The plaza hummed with the sounds of strangers singing and children laughing, and church bells ringing out in what felt like gratitude for the dimming day. Seated there at my makeshift birthday table, I wept silently, undone by the wandering spirit that I thought had left me. I have missed her.

Contemplating the first step into a new journey, a new country, I remind myself not to be afraid of taking what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls that “spectacular risk” – to emigrate. Having spent more than half my life in Arizona, far from Northern Ireland, I know well the unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a visceral longing for “ home,” perhaps even for the things that sent me away in the first place. And, I am called back to my childhood and to a time with my grandmother, who died when I was just six years old. Hers was my first experience with death, and it was as her grandchild that I first experienced complete and unconditional love.

When the sun rose in Ajijic on the first day of my 55^th year, its light filling our hotel room, I could hear once again my grandmother tell my mother, who also told me, to “follow the sun.” Follow the sun, daughter dear, she once told me. Standing in the morning light in Mexico, I knew I was home again – with my own ones.

At this moment, bear in mind Omagh.

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by Editor in Birthdays, bombing, IRA, John Hewitt, Loughinisland, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Peace, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, UVF, W.B. Yeats

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"Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto", 1994 World Cup, 2004 World Series, bombings, Boston Red Sox, Giants Stadium, Good Friday Agreement, Ireland, Irish DIASPORA, John Hewitt, New Jersey, North Antrim Coast, Northern Ireland, Omagh, REAL IRA

photo-62 As we plan to mark the 20th anniversary of the Omagh bombing, I am drawn back to the summer of 1998. A new mother, I had taken my baby daughter back home to Northern Ireland, my lovely, tragic Northern Ireland. Between my father, my brother, and a handful of relatives who could keep a secret (an impressive trait in rural County Derry) we had planned a “This is Your Life” style surprise for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. It was delicious, knowing we had all swallowed the same secret, and that my all-knowing mother was completely in the dark.

The Troubles had tainted previous visits home, but this time would be different – there would be no bombings, no shootings, no army checkpoints. There was something symbolic, magical even, in returning home with a new baby girl in my arms to a new optimism fueled by The Good Friday Agreement.

It had been different four years before. That trip had coincided with Ireland’s qualifying for the World Cup. The country was ecstatic, with factories, offices, shops, even banks, all closing early so everyone could make it home, or to the pub, in time for kick-off at the Ireland v Italy match being televised live from Giants Stadium in New Jersey. We had considered going to the pub to watch the first-round match, but my father convinced us to stay home, have a few drinks, and watch from the comfort of the living room. So we stayed in and watched – in joyous disbelief – as Ireland went up 1-0 against Italy at Giants Stadium. When the lads in green scored a goal, we roared with pride even as we were afraid to look, not unlike Boston Red Sox fans prior to the 2004 World Series.

The second half of the match was well underway when two men, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, stormed into a tiny packed pub, The Heights Bar, in the village of Loughinisland, County Down. With an AK47 and a Czech made rifle, they shot madly and indiscriminately at the sixteen men gathered around the bar watching Ireland beat Italy. They killed six of them. According to witnesses, the two gunmen laughed as they made their getaway. The first killed, Barney Green, was in his eighties, someone’s grandfather, and as I recall from the stories that later poured from that heartbroken village, he had put on his best suit to mark Ireland’s making it to the World Cup.

It chills me still to think of Barney Green struck down with such savagery in the very moment as that jubilant Irish squad burst out of an American football stadium, awash in green, buoyed by the chanting of 60,000 supporters, anticipating champagne and a night of revelry, only to be silenced and sickened by the hideous dispatch from a country pub back home. Surely that would be the last time we would hear of such horror. No. It would not.

For many Northern Ireland families, mine included, the youngest generation knew only a country in conflict. But in 1998, my daughter would witness a new country, a country at peace. The people had voted for it in anticipation of the brand new day Northern Ireland deserved.

When my mother’s sixtieth birthday arrived that year, I telephoned in the morning with love and good wishes and a promise that we would arrange a trip home soon. Yes, she had received the flowers I’d sent, and she was looking forward to going out for dinner with daddy that evening. On their way to a favorite restaurant, he took a detour for a quick visit with my Aunt Sadie, where delighted shrieks of “Surprise!”exploded from the well-hidden gathering of family and friends whose cars were parked on another lane, far out of sight. One of my cousins even assumed the role of This is Your Life host, Eamonn Andrews, complete with a big red book, and she related the story of my mother’s life to all assembled. When she reached the part about my mother becoming a grandmother for the first time just eight months earlier, she suggested calling me so I could at least be part of the celebration by phone. Naturally, I was unavailable, given that two days earlier, I had flown in to Belfast with Sophie, and had been holed up at my Aunt Sadie’s house enjoying secret visits with my dad and my brother, the three of us delighting in the fact that my mother was oblivious to all the subterfuge.

Naturally, she was disappointed that I wasn’t home when she phoned, but she was quickly distracted by the doorbell ringing. Thinking it was yet another cousin or a friend with a birthday present, she opened the door. There, looking up at her from a nest of pink blankets, was her beautiful baby granddaughter. It was a perfectly executed surprise, planned down to the very last minute, and one my mother would cherish always, as a jewel in a box.

At the same time, unbeknownst to us and to most ordinary people in Northern Ireland, another plan was coming to fruition. A diabolical scheme, it would just a week later, rip asunder the tiny market town of Omagh in the neighboring county of Tyrone, devastating families from as near as Donegal and as far away as Madrid, Spain, and reminding us all that Northern Ireland’s Troubles were far from over.

I don’t know all the details. I’m afraid of them.

It frightens me to consider the machinations of minds that could craft a plan to load a nondescript red car, plate number MDZ 5211, with 500 pounds of explosives, park it in the middle of a busy shopping area, and place two phone calls to the local television station, one to the Coleraine Samaritans, with a warning 40 minutes before the bomb inside it exploded. There was confusion as the police evacuated the shoppers – mostly mothers and children on back-to-school shopping sprees. Thinking they were moving them away from the Court House to safety, the police moved people to the bottom of Market Street, where the bomb was about to be detonated.

I wonder if they felt that familiar relief, the kind you know from past experiences of bomb-scares and hoaxes, if they felt they were out of harm’s way and just in time, believing that it would all be alright. Maybe they told themselves it was just a bomb scare, like old times, not to be taken very seriously but still they would cooperate with the authorities so they could get back to their Saturday afternoon shopping, seeking out bargains for backpacks and books, new uniforms and lunch-boxes, full of the promise that accompanies the start of a new school year.

I cannot write about it without weeping.

Spaniard Gonzalo Cavedo and child posing by the car carrying the bomb that killed 29 people, many of whom are in the picture, including the photographer. Mr. Cavedo and the child survived. (Source: Belfast Telegraph)

Mere seconds after this photo was taken with a camera later retrieved from the rubble, the 500 pound bomb inside the red car exploded, blowing the vehicle to bits. Like a butcher’s knife, the blast cut through the row of little shops. I recall the harrowing accounts of witnesses, forever altered, who saw blood flowing in the gutters and pieces of people in the street, describing the savagery, the carnage before them as a war zone, a killing field.

At the same time, my brother, his girlfriend, and my baby girl were driving around the North Antrim coast, listening to Neil Young and Paul Brady CDs, occasionally breaking into song as we took in wild scenery around us. We stopped to show Sophie the horses and cows that peered over gates along the country roads. It was a beautiful, windy Irish day, and we were happy.

We were not listening to the radio that afternoon, so we didn’t hear the news. We had no reason to believe anything was wrong, until, heading home at dusk, we were stopped at a police checkpoint, where we were told to take a detour. And we knew. It had happened again. My parents knew too. Worse, they were worried sick. Something horrific had happened, and they had no idea where we were. Worried, they paced the floor until their driveway was lit up again with the headlights of my brother’s car.

There was no peace.

Another atrocity. Another anniversary for the people of Northern Ireland that would leave us wondering how we would ever recover from the maddening, wrenching anguish that visited us once again. My country is so tiny – I’ve been told it fits into one third of the state of Kansas – that I imagine everyone knew someone who knew someone maimed or killed in the largest mass murder in its history. A relative of an Antrim barman had been killed in the Omagh bombing, and I remember wondering what I could possibly say to him by way of condolence, knowing there are no adequate words.

I felt sad and foolish. I felt cheated, having dared to believe that peace had come to the country I had left but still loved. I should have remembered what we must never forget from The Isle of Innisfree – that “peace comes dropping slow.”

Nothing had changed, and everything changed at 3:10PM when the bomb exploded, injuring over 300 and killing 29 people and unborn twins. And there would be no justice. Twenty years later, no one has been convicted.

The Omagh list of dead “reads like a microcosm of Troubles deaths, and left no section of Irish life untouched. The town they attacked is roughly 60:40 Catholic:Protestant, and the dead consisted of Protestants, Catholics, a Mormon and two Spanish visitors. They killed young, old and middle-aged, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and grannies. They killed republicans and unionists, including a prominent local member of the Ulster Unionist Party. They killed people from the backbone of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They killed unborn twins, bright students, cheery shop assistants and many young people. They killed three children from the Irish Republic who were up north on a day trip. Everyone they killed was a civilian. The toll of death was thus both extraordinarily high and extraordinarily comprehensive.”

May we never forget them.

“Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto” by John Hewitt

So I say only: Bear in mind

Those men and lads killed in the streets;

But do not differentiate between

Those deliberately gunned down

And those caught by unaddressed bullets:

Such distinctions are not relevant . . .

Bear in mind the skipping child hit

By the anonymous ricochet . . .

And the garrulous neighbours at the bar

When the bomb exploded near them;

The gesticulating deaf-mute stilled

by the soldier’s rifle in the town square

And the policeman dismembered by the booby trap

in the car . . .

Patriotism has to do with keeping

the country in good heart, the community

ordered by justice and mercy;

these will enlist loyalty and courage often,

and sacrifice, sometimes even martyrdom.

Bear these eventualities in mind also;

they will concern you forever:

but, at this moment, bear in mind these dead.

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James Barker (12) from Buncrana

Fernando Blasco Baselga(12) from Madrid

Geraldine Breslin (43) from Omagh

Deborah Anne Cartwright (20) from Omagh

Gareth Conway (18) from Carrickmore

Breda Devine (20 months) from Donemana

Oran Doherty (8) from Buncrana

Aidan Gallagher (21) from Omagh

Esther Gibson (36) from Beragh

Mary Grimes (65) from Beragh

Olive Hawkes (60) from Omagh

Julia Hughes (21) Omagh

Brenda Logue (17) from Omagh

Anne McCombe (45) from Omagh

Brian McCrory(54) from Omagh

Samantha McFarland (17) Omagh

Seán McGrath (61) from Omagh

Sean McLaughlin (12) from Buncrana

Jolene Marlow (17) Omagh

Avril Monaghan (30) from Augher

Maura Monaghan (18 months) from Augher

Alan Radford (16) Omagh

Rocio Abad Ramos (23) from Madrid

Elizabeth Rush (57) Omagh

Veda Short (46) from Omagh

Philomena Skelton (39) from Durmquin

Frederick White (60) from Omagh

Bryan White (26) from Omagh

Lorraine Wilson (15) Omagh

out of this world – robin williams

13 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by Editor in Addiction, Dead Poet's Society, Death and dying, Depression, Good Morning Vietnam, Good Will Hunting, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Mental Health, Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams, saying goodbye, Self-medicating, widowed

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Dead Poet's Society, Death of Robin Williams, depression, Good Morning Vietnam, Good Will Hunting, Mork and Mindy, Robin Williams, stigma of depression, substance abuse

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.

I first encountered Robin Williams on the TV in our living room in Antrim. Remembering his death four years ago, I am a teenager in Northern Ireland once more, and Robin Williams is an alien from outer space on the Mork and Mindy show.

images-1 Brilliantly, he was Mork from Ork. Pam Dawber, as Mindy, was the perfect foil. Easy to like, she shared my taste in music with the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album hanging on her apartment wall. Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too. But there was no one like Mork in Belfast. He was unlike anyone we had ever seen in rainy, slow 1970s Northern Ireland. With his rainbow suspenders and the catchphrase that caught on with all of us, “Nanu Nanu,” Mork was enchanting, a lovable clown with an inexhaustible range of funny voices and a child-like exuberance for all he was learning about being human.

Somehow, he was accessible to everyone. And even though he was out of this world, Mork learned about being in it, about being human, about falling in love, eventually reporting back to his invisible mentor, Orson:

Love doesn’t make sense. That’s why Earthlings think it’s so wonderful.

We loved Mork, and we loved Robin Williams being Mork. Like Mork, the actor was constantly evolving and surprising all of us, perhaps even himself, as he improvised through his various roles. So quick and agile in body and mind, he disappeared into roles such as that of the teacher we would all want for our own children in Dead Poet’s Society; the broke dad masquerading as a no-nonsense housekeeper and nanny for his own children in Mrs Doubtfire; Adrian Cronauer, the DJ who spoke truth to power in Good Morning, Vietnam; the heartbreakingly vulnerable homeless, Parry, in The Fisher King;and, the widowed psychologist, Sean McGuire, in Good Will Hunting, who would go to the ends of the earth for the love of his life. This last was my late husband’s favorite Robin Williams role, and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked it too, and awarded Williams with an Oscar.

At the end of the movie, when Will Hunting leaves that note on his best friend’s front door, Ken always said he could have written the same for me, as a farewell to the life he left behind on January 13, 1990, to begin a new one with me, his girl.

“I’m crazy about you,” he told me that Saturday afternoon in a dive bar doorway. “I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, and I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show up.”

Within just weeks, we had embarked on a new life together. It was unexpected and off-script, but it was also meant to be.
Like Sean McGuire, my man had no regrets about all he had left behind. He understood exactly why Sean would give up his tickets to see the Boston Red Sox play in Game 6 of the World Series. Sean had to go “see about a girl.” And even though he was a made-up character in a movie, there was something about the way Robin Williams delivered these lines that made me believe he was still the same guy who shone through in Mork, the guy who knew what it meant to love:

That’s why I’m not talkin’ right now about some girl I saw at a bar twenty years ago and how I always regretted not going over and talking to her. I don’t regret the 18 years I was married to Nancy. I don’t regret the six years I had to give up counseling when she got sick. And I don’t regret the last years when she got really sick. And I sure as hell don’t regret missin’ the damn game. That’s regret.

From afar, we have learned a little about the man who played Mork – more than he may have wanted us to – and of his suffering. Robin Williams was a stranger, a celebrity, and while I didn’t know him, I know about depression and despair, addiction and self-medicating, denial and co-dependence and all the other words from the Big Book. I would come to find out that the man who had waited for me for so long also struggled with all of these. Until the end, it turns out. For most of those years, I had no idea, because he hid it so well – masterfully and with shame. No one would ever have known, on the outside looking in, because he was attentive to those around him. He was funny – so funny – and warm. He listened more than he talked so that he knew so much more about others than they did about him. He kept those demons at bay until it exhausted him. I know that now. Side-stepping the disease, each of us engaged in self-preservation or a kind of selfishness, we were no match for it. And now that he is gone I find myself remembering all that was good – all the laughter and love wrapped up in random road-trips and surprise bouquets and trips to Dairy Queen every Friday with our daughter. So much good, that I have to believe Gabriel García Márquez was right:

..the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past

Ah, endurance. Often we endure quietly and alone and wonder what we could have done differently or better – when it is too late. We don’t like to talk about depression very much. It’s not quite “as acceptable” as some physical illnesses, is it? It isn’t pink with ribbons and races. It is dark, and it lurks beneath the surface, nipping at the heels every day. Unlike other diseases, it is non-communicable and highly treatable, but there are only certain diseases, disorders, addictions, and ailments that can be the subject of “polite” conversation.

Depression can be unrelenting. It can be lonely, and loneliness – as Mork reported back to Orson – all those years ago, is a disease:

. . . loneliness is a disease of the spirit. People who have it think that no one cares about them.

Unlike the “common cold,” its symptoms unapologetically made public with persistent sniffles, sneezes, loudly blown noses, and a tell-tale trail of balled-up Kleenex in its wake, the “common” depression – and it is more common than we think – is more of a secret never to be told. So those afflicted often find ways to conceal it. Perhaps it is somehow, heartbreakingly, easier to camouflage depression with the routines and rituals by which other people define us. Perhaps.

For a while, we had Robin Williams. He made us laugh and cry and feel better about our lot in life. Remembering him today the way his widow requested, grateful for the “countless moments of joy and laughter” that will sparkle forever.

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