This winter Sunday, I woke to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel, my da sharpening my bread knife because “it wouldn’t cut butter.” I stayed in bed, allowing the long metallic strokes on each side of the blade to carry me back to the kitchen of my childhood, my father making sure the knife was sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast or the Christmas turkey. Like changing a tire or wiring a plug, it is something he has always thought I should know how to do.
Regarding the honing of the bread-knife, he says I need only exert the same pressure on each side of it and then carefully test its sharpness on the inside of my thumb. I have tried – admittedly driven more by nostalgia than necessity – but I have never been able to get the sound right. My mother can’t do it either, nor has she ever tried. Without my father, I suspect the knives in her kitchen would be as dull as mine.
Packing clothes for the journey from Belfast to Dublin and on to chilly Chicago and on to my little house all empty and shimmering in Arizona sunshine, I noticed my boots were still caked with mud, presumably from that walk at dusk through the wet leaves and muck of Heaney’s Broagh. I handed my boots to my father and asked would he take them outside to shake off the dirt. In that instant, I knew – and I was ashamed – that when those boots were back in my hands, they would be polished to a high shine.
Twenty-five days later, it is an indelible image in my mind – my father, formerly strong as an ox and stoic, is alone and crying, his head in his hands, overwhelmed and undone by feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. All he could do in that spot of time was polish my shoes, the way he had done so many times when I was a child.
My heart broke for him.
Sitting on the stairs in my parent’s house in Castledawson, the boots gleaming in my hands, lines long memorized from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” filled my head:
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
...
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
In these early, endless days of whichever stage of grief the experts have placed me, I hope I am not speaking indifferently – as I have done in the past – to these parents of mine as they fumble in vain for the right way to comfort their newly widowed daughter; for the right way to approach their only granddaughter’s 16th birthday and make it impossibly less sad as another “first” milestone without her dad. I can’t contemplate Christmas and New Year’s Eve. How can it be only a year since we set off fireworks at the end of Montebello Avenue, giddy and full of good cheer for 2013?
Today, I feel like a barn sparrow in a nest. In spite of years of practice and watching others do it so effortlessly, I cannot remember how to fly. The timing’s off. Twenty-five days ago, the clocks all stopped. Some of those days, it was impossible to speak. It was easier to set words down on a page even though none of them was right. I would type a word or a phrase. Then I would delete it.
Of all the millions of words available to me, not one is adequate.
For my birthday several years ago, my husband – my late husband – bought a beautiful fountain pen. I had told him I wanted to resume the practice of writing in a diary each evening, and I wanted a good pen that was up to the task. With a nod to my teachers at Antrim Grammar School who only accepted work written in ink, I would use a fountain pen. I remember he looked at me over the tops of his glasses and asked me if I thought I was Bridget Jones. Oh, Ken, you would love the irony. Mark Darcy is dead, and Bridget is a widow. And, she’s 51. Seriously.
While I did not use the pen as much as I had hoped, it is always within reach. When breast cancer barged in two Novembers ago, along with it came a compulsion to write – but not with the pen. Thanks to a night class taken at Antrim Tech in 1980, I am a speedy typist. I still find something magical about watching words appear as a result of whatever I tap on a keyboard.
Ken loved that I was writing again – typing on my computer – even though it meant I retreated into myself for hours at a time and half the time, I never found the right words anyway. I suppose I was trying to do what Seamus Heaney talks about in “Personal Helicon” – trying to “see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” To see myself; to turn inward and then outward again as a woman changed again.
If we knew when these changes were coming – the unwanted milestones in the middle of lives being lived – would we do things differently to help soften the blow? Would we remember to say thank you to a father for sharpening knives or polishing shoes or making sure there was enough air in the tires? To a husband for making sure his wife takes her cancer medicine at the same time every night? Would we?
I am the family photographer, the historian, the collector and curator of the documentation of our lives – love notes, scrapbooks, concert tickets, handmade birthday cards, photographs; letters to and from Zoe, a Tooth Fairy that lived in the mesquite tree in our back yard along with her pixie pals, “good” lists from Santa Claus, cards from the Easter Bunny, and other figures that feature prominently in a little girl’s life; postcards from far away places, my mother’s recipes, newspaper clippings about people we know in Antrim or Derry, and handwritten airmail letters from home.
In 2011, my daughter and I made a Father’s Day scrapbook for my husband. I chose the photographs, and she was in charge of the writing which included thirteen things she loved about him, one of which was this:
“Every year of my life, your steady hand has lit the candles on my birthday cake. Thirteen wishes … shhh.”
With his steady hand, he would light the candles on only two more birthday cakes. And our steady smiling girl, just fifteen Christmases of age, would make reasonable wishes.
It never occurred to me that anyone else would light the candles on her birthday cake, or teach her to drive, or pick her up after school the way he did every single day for ten years, or hold her hand when she got cold in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store, or tell her to bring only the stale bread to the park to feed the ducks and incur the ire of two angry geese they had christened “Fight and Bite.”
The empty chair at the table, the first Christmas card to my husband and me from someone who doesn’t know yet that he is dead, the first tree ornament we bought in 1990.
Yet still I move through the house hoping to find him. Every room is full of evidence of his life – his laundry still folded on top of the washing machine, bills opened with reminders on post-it notes to pay them, unread sections of the Sunday paper on the coffee table. I noticed that he had refilled the prescription for my cancer medication so I wouldn’t have to miss a day. He had recorded The Daily Show so I wouldn’t miss an episode. There was a note to remind the landscaper to plant my favorite annuals.
Oh, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
A friend, one who knows, told me the other day that it will take at least a year before the sharp stone of grief will shift from the very center of my being. She told me not to make any big decisions until I make it through all the “firsts” – the first Thanksgiving without him, Sophie’s first birthday without her dad, Christmas and decorating the tree, New Year’s Eve and not-quite-legal fireworks at the end of our street, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, my birthday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July and fireworks over Morro Bay, summer vacation (will I ever be able to face Morro Bay again?), his birthday, Halloween and pumpkin carving, our Wedding Anniversary, and finally, the first anniversary of his death. His death.
My. Husband. Is. Dead.
And then she said, well, she texted me, which is a good thing because I would hate to have forgotten it:
. . . after a while that pain will feel like a friend. And you will be afraid to lose it because that will mean you are better and over it and not missing Ken any more.
~ just one of the mind games that Grief plays.
This grieving business has brought out the best in people who care about me, beautiful expressions of sheer humanity. It has also brought out the worst – albeit unintentional – in people who don’t know me and don’t love me but who are paid to deal with me, to deal with death for a living, to know what to say to new widows, to know not to say stupid things. (Recent days have brought me back to when I first landed in cancer country, but if you’ve visited this blog before, you know I have beaten that horse to death).
From the people at the mortuary, those with years of experience in the funeral industry, who called me with the first-time-I’d-ever-heard-it-details of Kenneth H‘s last wishes as opposed to Kenneth M’s which I knew like the back of my hand, to the automated email telling me about the online obituary and memorial page even though my husband, a very private man, had been adamant about no obituary and no fuss; to the doctor whose office assistant left a voice-mail telling me that there was nothing else she could do for me because I take four medications already; and then, my husband’s primary care doctor who wanted me to place myself in his position, to take a minute and see where he was coming from, regarding the whole debacle over who should sign the death certificate – hisposition, if you don’t mind – and then my oncologist (whose assistant didn’t return my call for help until after it was too late to call my primary care physician) who wouldn’t prescribe anything for me because, you know, the physical pain of grief has nothing to do with cancer, now does it?
I wanted to scream that if we were still in South Derry, there would be a very nice doctor on the other end of the line, telling my mother he was sorry for my trouble and that he would sort us all out with enough Diazepam to help cope with the shock, the journey back to America, the jet lag, the grief, the pain, the immeasurable sadness. The same doctor didn’t know my mother or me; he was merely the doctor on call, a kind stranger, and he had a heart of gold.
In the twelve days since my husband died – my husband died – can you hear me now? – I have cried and cursed and ranted and raged. I have been irreverent and exhausted and delirious and despondent. I have even laughed about things that should make me cry. I went out today and bought lipstick. Honest to God. I actually got up, showered, put make-up on a haggard face and drove to a store the way I have done thousands of times before, and I bought a cheery lipstick called ninety-nine red balloons. Just like the song.
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
I also bought a too-expensive-even-though-I-should-be-watching-my-finances-now-that-I’m-a-widow autumnal centerpiece for a Thanksgiving table that will be missing a place-setting. At some point, I noticed I had already changed my Facebook status to “widowed.” I don’t like the ring of it one bit.
Some of these trifling things are great distractions – wondering who will show me how to back-flush the swimming pool or tell me what that even means, or set the timer on the sprinklers or develop that intuition my husband seemed to have about knowing when to change the oil, or rotate tires, or change air filters, or get gas (I always forget to get gas, usually I’m on “E” with the light on. I used to joke about how running on empty is my last stab at living dangerously). It may actually not be that funny.
In the past twelve days, I have learned how to comfort people whose husbands are still alive. I held in my arms the neighbor I don’t know but who brought cheery chrysanthemums to my door. She couldn’t stop crying about the tragedy that has befallen my daughter and me, and I had to get some Kleenex for her and nod that time will ease the pain. Hell, I even consoled the discomfited doctor after she realized that my situation was sort of “urgent” and that, yes, Xanax might help.
Of course Xanax helps. Just ask any of my family members back home, who have endured incredible pain and loss in recent years. At every wake, there’s always some kindly soul passing around the Diazepam the way we used to pass around a pack of cigarettes at the pub. No. I’m not saying that Xanax, Diazepam, or Ativan numbs the grief or takes it away or helps me avoid the reality of loss. It just dulls – briefly – the excruciating physical pain of the sharp stone of grief that’s stuck somewhere in the vicinity of my heart.
Here’s the thing. I was Ken’s wife for one day shy of twenty-two years. That’s a lifetime. When we met, we both knew something special was happening. I used to think we would have fit in rather handily on the cast of Cheers. Ken wasn’t Norm or Cliff, but he was a regular. When he came in to the bar where I was a bartender, I always had a beer ready for him. I would position myself behind the bar, right across from him and nonchalantly wrap silver-ware in paper napkins, exchanging quips and innuendoes with him without making eye-contact, because when I did, I blushed.
A bit of a cliché I was a twenty-something Irish immigrant who had over-stayed her welcome in America and still had a broad Antrim accent. As such, I was the main source of entertainment for the men who had just come off the day-shift; they were easily enchanted by what they considered an Irish brogue, and the more alcohol I served up, the more they wanted to tell me all about their Irish roots. I often dismissed them as “Plastic Paddys,” which they considered a compliment. Now, this was before microbreweries were de rigueur, but I was still overwhelmed by the variety of beer in variously colored cans – yellow for Coors, the Silver Bullet Lite version, blue and white Miller Lite etc The regulars indulged me, “Hey Irish,” they’d beckon and to help me out, they ordered rounds of beer by color: “Gimme three silver bullets, one red and blue, two white and blue, and two yellow.” Ken said I always charged $11.50 a round, but none of them minded.
Ken wasn’t fictional Sam Malone, Cheers owner erstwhile recovering alcoholic and former Red Sox player with a little black book full of women’s names and numbers. Ken didn’t need a team of writers, and I never met a woman who didn’t love him; and, I wasn’t Diane Chambers (well, maybe just a little) but the chemistry between us was undeniable and made up for the lack of compatibility. For almost two years, we denied what was so obvious to everyone else. He loved that I loved music and that I could give as good as I got. I remember he was very impressed when I sneaked some of his favorite tunes on to the bar’s jukebox, a contraption that could be described as country thunder. When the bar-owner wasn’t paying attention, I added Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil,” Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” and the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Admittedly, I was a bit thrown when Ken told me one of his favorite songs was “All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. He didn’t think I’d remember, so it pleased me no end when I went with the other bartender to a wonderful warehouse packed with 45-inch singles. It was our job to replace some of the records in the jukebox. To stay on the owner’s good side, I’d throw in some Hank Williams, and I never interfered with Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” – nobody in their right mind would get rid of “Crazy” – but every new record I added was for Ken. And he knew it. Bob Seger’s “Sunspot Baby” would start, he’d wink at me and then complain to the owner about how the new Irish waitress was ruining the jukebox.
The banter and badinage flew like electrical sparks between us, and we made those around us laugh and wink knowingly. We were the entertainment, and everybody knew we belonged together. Even before we did. I imagine had Dr. Frasier Crane been a regular, he would have had this to say about our performance:
“I know, I know. Now you’re going to deny it. Even though it’s ludicrously obvious to everyone around you, you two will go on pretending it’s not true because you’re EMOTIONAL INFANTS. You’re in a living HELL. You love each other, and you hate each other, and you hate yourselves for loving each other. Well, my dear friends, I want no part of it. It’s time I just picked up where I left off. It’s time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So I’ll get out of here so you can just get on with your denial fest.”
And then one day, Ken confessed. I always loved that he broke first. It was January 13, 1990, which I always consider our official anniversary. I ran outside to give him his change. After all, $11.50 for one beer was a bit much, even by my standards. When he had me outside and alone, he looked right at me, told me he was crazy about me, that he always knew I had been out there, and that he had almost given up waiting for me. Quite a pick-up line, but it worked. Then he asked me to plant a kiss on his lips, and I reverted to being coy and strategic. But that didn’t last.
Within a matter of months we had moved in together. He brought nothing from his previous life, just a lot of love for me, and I dragged the collected Shakespeare, my Seamus Heaney poetry books, my collection of Life and Rolling Stone magazines, and a lot of crazy love for him. Crazy love – like the kind Van Morrison sings about, especially with Ray Charles:
Yes it makes me feel righteous, makes me feel whole
Makes me feel mellow down into my soul
While I never convinced him that Van Morrison was, in fact, God, I managed to turn Ken on to tennis, and we watched Wimbledon and the US Open on a tiny black and white TV-radio-alarm clock combo in a tiny apartment that amounted to a shack in the back of an old ranch house in central Phoenix. Then one day when we were watching TV, I said, “Let’s go get married.”
I got out the phone book (remember those?) and found a wedding chapel in an old neighborhood in west Phoenix. The preacher reminded me of one of those old men talking to Ray Kinsella about Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams, looking at us out of the bluest eyes. We asked a stranger to witness the ceremony, and we vowed to each other that we would stay together in sickness and health. Health is easy, but sickness is a bitch. Madly in love, we had no reason to suspect that breast cancer (mine) or aneurysms (his) would move in and turn things upside down more than once and make us resent our own bodies. Thus, we filled up that ordinary November morning with a time-honored succession of extraordinary promises. We couldn’t stop smiling. We didn’t even tell anyone. Young and wild, it was as though we had eloped to Gretna Green. I think we probably even went to work afterwards. Along with all the other rituals we performed every day, the getting married was just something we could have done any day, at any time. No fanfare. No hoopla. Completely ours. Private.
We loved being answerable to only one another, doing whatever we wanted to without having to worry too much about other people. I remember one night when I was homesick for the smell of the sea. I just wanted to stare out at the ocean which seemed another world away from the desert southwest. It was a Friday afternoon, and we had nothing else to do. Still years before Sophie was born, we got in the car and started driving. No map. No GPS. No specific destination. Just ocean. That night, we were in Los Angeles, and I was inhaling the sea air. The next evening, we were in Pismo Beach, strolling along the pier. As if to put America’s vastness to the test, I asked him to keep driving. Eventually, we stopped by a lighthouse where we balanced the camera on the car, set the self-timer, and took a picture of ourselves, windswept and clinging to each other, completely unaware that a decade later, we would stand once again on that very same spot on the road to Monterey, smiling for a picture that would be taken by our little girl. Then, for a decade, San Luis Obispo County – Morro Bay – became our family’s vacation spot.
We created hundreds of lovely little rituals and routines over the years. My mother always said I could set my watch by Ken. True. I always knew where he was, what he was doing, how much he loved me, how proud he was of things I had done professionally. He was my greatest cheerleader and the person who once told the young me who used to get her feelings hurt easily and who cared too much about what other people thought, that she needed to grow some hard bark, because she would need it. Well, Ken, I need it now. I know you didn’t want me to harden; you wanted me to be tough. But, it is just so hard to be tough enough to fully absorb the blow of your death, to look up and expect you to walk in with another cup of coffee for me and ask what I’m blogging about and then wonder aloud – with a wry smile – if the woman I once was would be coming back any time soon. Each of us wrestled with the truth that cancer changed me, as a brush with mortality would. It wasn’t bad or good. It just was.
One of our first arguments was over what it was he was thinking about. We never argued about that again. It went something like this:
What’s wrong?
Nothing.
Are you sure?
Yup.
So what are you thinking about?
Nothing.
Well, it must be something. I can tell. Are you mad at me? Is it about me? (I mean, isn’t it always about me?) Well, can you at least tell me what it begins with?
No baby. Just private thoughts. Private thoughts, my honey.
Private thoughts. Well, you can imagine how well that went over with someone who has to know the inner details, the finer points, the “how are you really feeling” details about everything. But he never told me. And the strangest thing happened. I realized over the years that we all have private thoughts, secrets never to be told, things that stay deep within us – not bad, necessarily, just private thoughts. Most people just wouldn’t say that out loud. But Ken did. He said it the same way he once told the cashier at a Pep Boys, after he’d paid in cash for new windshield wipers, that she couldn’t have his address. Not that he was a conspiracy theorist; he just hated his name and address being placed on some list only for it to be sold to someone who would profit from it. Annoyed because he was just not cooperating the way most customers did, the young cashier’s jaw dropped when Ken looked at her, deadpan, and with a twinkle in his eye, said quietly, “I just can’t do it. I can’t tell you where I live. The cops are after me.” And I had to walk out of the store because I was laughing so hard.
Then I learned to cook. It was before Food TV Network, and I relied on an eclectic group of chefs on PBS so there was lots of Cajun cooking going on in the early years. Our first Thanksgiving Dinner together was a foreign affair as far as I was concerned. Never mind the Food TV Network, this was before the Internet and Google, so I had to go out and buy a holiday cookbook from Williams and Sonoma to learn exactly what went into a Thanksgiving Dinner and what this quintessential American tradition was all about. I’m sure like most Northern Irish folk, I would have the natural tendency to ask, with just a touch of martyrdom “Sure what would we have to be thankful for?” And then there would be some hand-wringing and worst-case scenarios about what happened to your man whose wife took up with somebody else, or the state of unemployment or Maggie Thatcher and terrorists, or The Troubles in general, and the brain-drain with all our young people like me leaving for America, Australia, New Zealand – following the sun.
A quick study, I was soon fixing turkey and all the trimmings like a pro. I even made pumpkin pie and candied yams (nothing from a can), and amber colored side-dishes and butternut squash soup, fare that would never have shown up at a fork supper or tea after a Harvest Home service at a country church in Northern Ireland. As if there wasn’t enough food to feed a small country, I was compelled to assert my Irishness with Brussel sprouts which Ken hated and roast potatoes and, for good measure, a Pavlova or a sherry trifle for desert – I could only make sense of Thanksgiving Dinner if I considered it an early Christmas Dinner. As if I’m not confused enough about my cultural identity.
For tomorrow, I have ordered a turkey breast dinner. Just the breast, because that means there will be nothing to carve and no carcass for soup. Ken always carved the turkey, and he loved my turkey-noodle soup. Oh, how could I possibly brine and roast a turkey without Ken here to do the basting and the carving and telling me not to put apples or anything sweet in the stuffing? I always put apples in the stuffing. Why not? And when he wasn’t looking, I basted the turkey with maple syrup. I always add marmalade to the yams too and slices of clementines or even the syrup from cans of mandarin oranges. If it’s not sweet, what’s the point?
My parents are here, and already I am dreading the day they tell me it’s time for them to go back home to Castledawson and for me to resume living again. I hope they will stay for Christmas. My lovely irreverent friend in Tempe who hails from Ballynahinch and who knows about grief (as she will tell you herself, she is hands-down the winner in “The Sad Contest”) is going to bring a Pavlova and maybe even some currant squares and custard. And my mother will put the kettle on for us and make tea with Barry’s teabags and bring out a plate of Hobnob biscuits. I will complain if she puts too much milk in it, because I like a good County Derry cup of tea the way my Granda did, so strong “you could dance on it.’ Our meal tomorrow might feel a bit like a Northern Ireland Christmas dinner from days gone by. I just hope I remember to eat.
We have lots of food in the fridge – baskets of sympathy from near and far from heartsome people who ache for us. I don’t know what to say to them, other than thank you. And, my gratitude is heart-felt and genuine. But if I’m honest, I hate that it is these strange new gestures I am thankful for this year. It would be so much easier to give thanks that the turkey’s not dry.
Oh, Ken. Why did you have to die? There was something I wanted to tell you. It was important.
It doesn’t matter. By now, I have to believe you have run into Lou Reed, that the two of you have scored some really good weed from J.J. Cale, and you are feeling no pain. And maybe Seamus Heaney will raise a glass to you.
When is the time right to tell the world my husband died? When do I announce to everyone that I am (as the “On Being Alone” booklet points out) “newly widowed?” He always said – and I never understood it or really agreed with him – that “dying is a private business,” that when the time came, he wanted to die alone, just to sleep on.
And so he did. It was last week, and it was the day before our 22nd wedding anniversary. And it was when our daughter and I were far away in rural Derry, in the heart of Seamus Heaney country.
And it might even have been around the time I was talking to blacksmith Barney Devlin’s son in The Forge on the side of the road at Hillhead, hearing all about the great night’s craic behind Heaney‘s The Midnight Anvil when Barney struck the anvil twelve times to ring in the new millennium with another son listening in on his cell-phone in Canada. Posing for a photograph with Barry Devlin on the other side of The Door into The Dark I was happy to be back home and anxious to write about it, holding in my hands the anvil that made the sweeter sound.
All I know is a door into the dark.
Later (yet earlier in Arizona), I knew something was wrong when he didn’t answer the phone; when, troubled, I sent a troubling text to my best friend to ask her to please go check if he was home and alright; when, nervously, she told me that, yes, both our cars were in the driveway and that our little dog, Edgar, was sitting on the couch, silently staring back at her; when she found a key under the doormat; when she opened the front door and tentatively called my husband’s name once, twice, and then a third time to no response; and, finally when she crumpled.
“He’s passed away! He’s passed away!” she cried. “He’s so cold. I’m so sorry.”
Then our daughter’s primal scream, a horrible, harrowing sound from somewhere deep within her, a sound I will never forget as she heard me tell my friend on the other side of the Atlantic on the other side of America on the other end of the line to please call 911. Just. Call. 9-1-1.
Too quickly to be true or anything good, I heard the noise of our house filling up with strangers, kind and efficient, from the police and fire departments, the crisis management team, and finally the people from the one mortuary that agreed to take my husband’s body even though there was some as yet unresolved fuss over who would sign the death certificate.
If nobody would sign it, perhaps he wasn’t dead.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” I asked.
“Yes. He’s dead. Yes. I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”
Gone.
They pronounced my husband dead at 1:10pm not a full hour after I had called and left a message for him to please pick up the damn phone. Replaying my voicemails, back in America, my lovely loving parents with my daughter and me now, I can hear the irritation in my voice, and it reminds me that I find it easier to harbor annoyance than worry, and that anger is infinitely easier to bear than sorrow.
Blue morning over the LIffey
A week before, I had been so happy, wandering streets of Dublin still familiar to me, as though I had never left Ireland. I called my husband from Trinity College, where I’d happened upon a graduation, and when I told him how much fun I was having, he told me to have some more. And, I did. I was proud of myself, smug even, finding the perfect anniversary card for him in one of those bijou boutiques that have popped up on the south side of the Liffey and then breezily asking the concierge at The Brooks Hotel to mail it to America for me as though I were Meryl Streep‘s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada.
For over two decades, we had an ongoing contest, my husband and I, over which of us would present the other with the best birthday, anniversary, Valentine, and Christmas cards. I won. Hands down. Every time. Even after he thought he was on to something when he discovered a Papyrus store at the Biltmore Fashion Park. Naturally, some of our years shone brighter than others – they sparkle still – and browsing through dates and sentiments scrawled on cards saved in a drawer along with drawings by our girl, old polaroid pictures and postcards, business cards from my different jobs, I see our story unfold from beginning to end. Stranger than fiction, it shimmers with all you would expect from a page-turner. I’ll maybe write a story for you one day.
So when the anniversary card arrived from Ireland in my mailbox yesterday – too late in spite of my good intentions – I had to open it. Turning it over in my hands, the post-mark – 11.11.13 – brought to mind another anniversary – the second since my cancer diagnosis. There is no doubt that November is the cruelest month in this house.
Had I remembered what it was I’d written to my husband a week before, I might have left the card sealed in its envelope and put it in the pocket of the shirt on his dead body. But I had forgotten. When I scanned my handwriting on the inside of the card, I knew that, yes, I would have won again. He would have smiled, deadpan, at the last words he never got to read from me:
“See you 18th & I hope our next anniversary is without cancer, aneurysms, & dog shit.”
After our last dog, an over-anxious greyhound, Molly, my husband was adamant that we revert to being strictly “cat people,” but when our daughter rescued that tiny dog on a busy street a few weeks ago and immediately named him Edgar, he somehow relented.
Is it too soon to say that I am still alive, that life is for the living and for finding new rituals? Maybe. Then again nobody knows what to say or do. There are no rules. It is a complicated business, and it is neither private nor simple. It is painful.
Not long ago, I read a review of Bridget Jones: Mad About a Boy in which there was some hand-wringing about why Helen Felding chose to make a widow out of Bridget. The Telegraph columnist, William Langley, wonders if Fielding has made a leap too far, opining that the new book “ raises the awkward question of how far a character can reasonably be stretched.” Why is it an awkward question? Having joined Ms. Jones on this new path, I feel myself stretching more with every minute that passes, and there doesn’t appear to be any sign of a limit. I think I might be grateful to Helen Fielding for taking Bridget into widowhood, for going there. It somehow helps to know that Bridget probably doesn’t know how to back-flush the pool or when to rotate tires and change the oil or the ratio of sugar to water for the hummingbird feeder.
A good night’s sleep eludes me, and it feels a bit like I swallowed a sharp stone that has lodged in my very center. How I wish it would go away. But it’s early days. They tell me I am in a state of shock and to take one day at a time. They tell me he is in a far better place now. Really? How could any place be better than in our dining room next month to light sixteen candles on my daughter’s birthday cake or in the audience to cheer our girl as she walks across the stage to receive her high school diploma less than two years from now? How could any place be better than a ring-side seat at all those milestones that bring pure and simple pleasure?
I remember some years ago, I had one of those very lucid and realistic dreams in which I had misplaced a book and was frantically searching for it, high up and low down, in a dark and unfamiliar house. When I awoke, I was frantic and unsure if it had all just been a dream. Perturbed to have lost “the big book of simple pleasures,” I asked my husband if this book had ever occupied our bookshelves. It seems plausible, even tonight, that such a book could have existed in reality; it brings to mind a compendium of Martha Stewart’s good things or better yet, well-worn wit and homespun advice from Irish mammies – “sure who’ll be looking at you anyway?”
The very notion of a big book of simple pleasures appeals to me as does an ordinary day filled to the brim with them and time enough to fully savor them – I think it is in the mundanity of life, within commonplace conversations and overlooked ordinary spots of time, that we find the stories of ourselves, maybe even our best selves. Consider the ordinary things scratched and scribbled on post-it notes and paper napkins, the reminders to do or acquire the stuff we need to keep us on solid ground, the grand ideas hastily captured on a napkin over a glass of wine with a friend, our lists of instructions on what to do and what not to do, and then the extraordinary things on bucket lists of dreams yet to come true.
In the book of simple pleasures, there is no place for a message received too late, a fence never mended, undeniable evidence of a loved one’s descent into memory loss, or a last goodbye from someone who loves you. Between the covers of such a book, one would find only those ordinary certainties like the kind that used to make a Sunday morning around here.
I have always been slow to stir on Sundays, in spite of the predictable sunshine breaking and entering through slats of closed window blinds and the sounds of my husband making a pot of coffee. He always tried to do it quietly, but I was always awake and listening, enjoying the distinct sounds of newspaper pages turning, tiny showers of cereal falling in a bowl, slices of bread popping from the toaster, and tell-tale stifled chuckles from our daughter if she had successfully snagged the Sunday comics from the newspaper her dad had strategically arranged for reading.
Propped up against my pillows, I liked the outside interference too – the random arpeggios up and down, ringing gently from California wind-chimes that hang heavy and lower today from a Chilean mesquite tree that dominates our backyard; the distant rumble of a truck on an otherwise abandoned freeway; the plaintive coo of mourning doves, and the soft woof of a neighbor’s dog. Altogether it is a Sunday morning spell, cast just for me, selfish me, so I have to let it linger into the afternoon.
Workday mornings are different and will be different still when they resume. A little more hurried and harried by stupid thoughts of what and what not to wear, what needs to be turned in, last minute signatures on a permission slip, money for lunch, reminders to take vitamins and cancer medicine and maybe something to take the edge off and to have a great day. Just one more cup of coffee, a goodbye hug, a kiss, and a rushed and perhaps perfunctory “I-love-you-I-love-you-too-see-you-tonight-call-me.”
Before going to work for the past twenty-two years, I have counted on three things: 1. My husband blows me a kiss. 2. He flashes a peace sign. 3. He watches from the window until I disappear from view. These tiny, ordinary rituals made the perfect farewell. Fare well.Every day. So at the mortuary yesterday, my daughter and I gently unfolded his cold hands and created a sort of ‘V’ with two elegant fingers of his right hand.
Peace. Out. Baby.
Peace signs and hundreds of visits to Dairy Queen on the way home from school on Friday afternoons; feeding the hummingbirds, recycling the junk mail, and putting things in the tumble dryer when their labels clearly say “Dry Clean Only.” Thus we marked time.
Is it simpler to live life in these quotidian moments that can so easily saturate the space that stretches from sunrise to sunset? No subtext, no surprises, the secrets suppressed, each of us on solid ground – home and easy and boring?
“‘May you live in interesting times,’ Chinese curse
If you ask me ‘What’s new?’, I have nothing to say Except that the garden is growing. I had a slight cold but it’s better today. I’m content with the way things are going. Yes, he is the same as he usually is, Still eating and sleeping and snoring. I get on with my work. He gets on with his. I know this is all very boring.
There was drama enough in my turbulent past: Tears of passion-I’ve used up a tankful. No news is good news, and long may it last. If nothing much happens, I’m thankful. A happier cabbage you never did see, My vegetable spirits are soaring. If you’re after excitement, steer well clear of me. I want to go on being boring.
I don’t go to parties. Well, what are they for, If you don’t need to find a new lover? You drink and you listen and drink a bit more And you take the next day to recover. Someone to stay home with was all my desire And, now that I’ve found a safe mooring, I’ve just one ambition in life: I aspire To go on and on being boring.”
Our poet, Seamus Heaney, will be buried in Bellaghy tomorrow evening, his body brought home from Dublin to rest next to the grave of his little brother, Christopher, whom many of us know from “Mid-Term Break,” a poem now learned by heart by Irish children in schools North or South of the border.
The first time, I heard Mid-Term Break, was when Brian Baird, the late UTV newscaster and my beloved Anglo-Irish Literature Tutor at Stranmillis College, read it aloud a seminar one morning. It cleaved my heart open:
Mid-Term Break
“I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying– He had always taken funerals in his stride– And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble,’ Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.”
The young Seamus Heaney wasn’t there when it happened. He was away at school. Just another mundane evening, Christopher and another brother had been sent to the bus stop to give the bus conductor a letter to post in Belfast, as was the way in those days; his mother was at home, hanging clothes out on the line; his other two brothers, Pat and Dan, were walking down the other side of the road, on an errand to fetch paraffin oil. Heaney tells Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones that he can hardly bear to think about his little brother, just three and a half, noticing his big brothers on the other side of the road and running out from behind the bus to greet them. The driver of the oncoming car hadn’t a chance, and within only hours, Christopher died at the Mid-Ulster hospital in Magherafelt. He was later buried at St. Mary’s Parish Church in Bellaghy, where his big brother, Seamus, will be buried too, in the South Derry earth from which his father, Paddy, famously cut turf:
from “Digging”
“By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
“
If you were to ask me to draw a map of my child-world, the one in which I moved before I started school, all Heaney’s places would be marked on it. I belong to those places too, and they are mine: Magherafelt, Bellaghy, Castledawson, the Moyola river, The Moss, Upperlands,The Hillhead, Toomebridge, Cookstown, the Lough shore – and The Broagh – where my mother grew up.
from “Broagh”
. . . Broagh, its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades
ended almost
suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found
difficult to manage.
One of seven children, she was reared on a farm not far from the Heaneys. She remembers the man Seamus immortalized in “Digging,” his father, Paddy Heaney, in yellow boots and a heavy coat, trading cattle at the local fairs. She remembers Seamus as well, riding his bicycle, his face against the wind, his sandy hair flying behind him.
As a young mother, she frequently took me “up home” on the bus from Antrim to the Hillhead and then we would walk the rest of the way along the back road to my grandparent’s house. I still remember being scared of what might be hiding in the shadows of sprawling rhododendron bushes and the beech and alder trees that hung over us, but of course there was nothing to fear.
As I grew older and The Troubles boiled, indeed there were other things to be afraid of on the road back to Antrim. Real things, as we wondered silently what lurked behind the questions asked by British soldiers when they stopped my father’s car on our way home. Dimming our lights for them. Answering obediently. Waiting for them to release us onto our roads.
from: The Toome Road
“One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them?”
But when I was a little girl, I was oblivious to all of this. I stayed at my grandparents house in Broagh (Irish for riverbank, bruach), absorbing the rustic rhythmic speech of the men cutting turf, digging potatoes or baling hay, and the lovely heartsome sighs of my granny as she carried buckets of water in from the pump in the yard and then made milky tea for the men coming in from the fields, men like Big Jim Evans. Forty-five years later, and I can still see her, wiping her elegant hands on a flowery apron, wearing a sunny yellow cardigan and a big indulgent smile for me. How she loved me.
1. Mossbawn Sunlight
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.”
There were the long walks with my grandfather, down well-trodden Broagh byways that were wild with bluebells and foxgloves. On warm days, with my hand in his, he took me to McGurk’s shop for sweets and ice-cream sliders. Sometimes we spotted gypsies, or tinkers, as Granda called them, setting up camp. I remember thinking they must live charmed lives in a story-book world, with their tents and their colorful clothes and their caravans and ponies. Then, as now, I grappled with the idea of always being in between places.
The men were tinsmiths, hence the name, and one of them, Mr. Sweeney, used to visit my Granny. She made him tea and in exchange he brought hand-made tins for milking. The older I get, I find myself pausing to appreciate hand-made things, such as those my father still turns over in his hands, things I would have too-quickly dismissed all those years ago.
Fosterling
“That heavy greenness fostered by water”
John Montague
“At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –
Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.
The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can’t remember not ever having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.”
I shared with Seamus Heaney the phenomenon of being first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school. In Stepping Stones, he explains to Dennis O’Driscoll:
Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days,I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.
A university education in Belfast was a world away from the Broagh and necessitated a kind of verbal dance with his mother, when he returned from it to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word he says, weighing its impact before he utters it. My mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me to this day, ” you know all them things.”
From Clearances IV
Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.
She’d manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You
Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.
There are other tricky steps to learn as you move through the various dances of Northern Ireland, but once learned, they stay with you for a life-time. InMay the Lord in HIs Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who live there, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland have this mutual need to know, right from the start, about a person’s background, so they can proceed in the dialogue, in the longer relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” The schools we attended, our last names, the housing estates where we lived, the way we pronounce an “H” or an “A,” all became clues to help establish “who we are.” “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?” I remember the first day of my teaching practice in a Rathcoole classroom, when one of the pupils, showing off, asked me if I was a “Taig,” a derogatory word for a Roman Catholic. He thought I was “by the look of me,” but he had his doubts. My surname was Protestant, and my first name, Yvonne, could have been Catholic. How should I answer, knowing where I was and who I was?
from Whatever You Say, Say Nothing:
“The famous Northern reticence,
the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the “wee six” I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap.”
Artfully, we balance these two worlds, at once straddling the one that made us and that stretching far out in front of us, unknown. Far out. With age, I find myself turning inward and back to that first, to the Northern Ireland that made me and filled me up with questions and doubts; yet, at the same time, on an August evening when I’m alone in the car, a Phoenix sky a-tremble with gunmetal thunder-heads, I look intentionally homeward to the vast and too-bright spaces of the Arizona desert:
from Known World:
Were we not made for summer, shade and coolness
And gazing trough an open door at sunlight?
For paradise lost? Is that what I was taught?
Whatever I am made for, I am sad that there will be no new words from Seamus Heaney to help me get there, that he has gone back to his first place just when I need him most.
Anahorish
My ‘place of clear water,’
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
With his steady hand, he would light the candles on only two more birthday cakes. And our steady smiling girl, just fifteen Christmases of age, would make reasonable wishes.
The men were tinsmiths, hence the name, and o
