Category Archives: Memory

Ready to Turn ~ Winter Solstice 2015

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Aging, Arizona, Birthdays, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Death and dying, Diagnosis, Family, Fireworks, Irish culture, Irish mammies, John Hiatt, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Muriel Rukeyser, New Year, Newgrange, No Country for Old Men, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Themes of Childhood, Time

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Again, the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago.

In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved into the stone walls. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.

This year, out of over 30,000 applicants, only 50 were selected to experience the solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunatley, Irish weather was as you would expect with clouds and rain keeping the light out.

NEWGRANGE_ITIMES_800

 

From the outside, my house glitters like a Christmas card with its tree twinkling in the window and a sign for Santa to please stop here. A little house, it is no different than any other year, except the two women inside it are different, each of us adjusted and adjusting to a life and to living without the constancy of a man for whom our happiness was his heart’s only desire. Each of us wondering what’s next for us – what will begin and what will end.

I remember reading something about a woman who described two distinct lives – the one she lived before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis – her turning point. When I close my eyes to recollect my own diagnosis, I can see myself get up and walk out the door, leaving behind the woman I used to be, offended by the nerve of that Breast Cancer Navigator telling my husband and me that I had cancer. Me? With cancer?

Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips and rendered me wordless. In conspiratorial whispers, she informed my husband of all the details I would forget. It reminded me of the way we quietly speculate about the cause of a death when all the evidence points to hard living. On and on she talked, as if trying to soothe us even as she filled our ears with fear. So many scary words.  Not to worry. She stressed that what we were hearing that day in her dimly lit office was not a death sentence.

Nonetheless, I heard a crack, the sound of a life being altered that would have me pondering still and more how to handle poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

I think it might.

I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into our lives, interrupting our plans to celebrate our daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. But we celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a party for Sophie and invited friends over. We remembered to laugh. We went to a  Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve. We scheduled the blood-work and the biopsies, the mammograms, and the mastectomy. The healing began. Sort of.

And then, another Christmas, the cancer contained, the promise of a better year. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents came to Arizona to help us bring in 2013. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion and for good luck, we designated my dark-haired husband “the first footer” after midnight. Such relief to shut the door against 2012, a year that had skulked in and scared us, each of us terrified by the cancer and what it might do.

For me – and the woman I used to be – cancer became The Scariest Thing in my life. Like every scary thing that comes to fruition, it had never previously crossed my mind. No. My mind was too consumed with all the things that most likely will never happen. All that worrying. Why? It is such a waste. But the cancer happened, and I wanted everyone to feel as sorry for me as I did for myself and howl about the unfairness of it all. I wanted sympathy – the kind delivered by an Irish mammy over endless cups of tea with reminders that there’s always someone worse off. Always. 

I remember my mother cursing the cancer for the thief that it is but she’d temper her remarks with reminders that I was so lucky to be married to the best man in the world.  “You could set your watch by him!” she’d say, and then she would jokingly ask him how in the name of God he had put up with me for over twenty years. Not known for my punctuality or having a place for everything and everything in its place, she regularly wondered aloud how I would ever manage without him since he waited on me hand and foot. Without him. In our house. Now that would be a scary thing. Me? A widow?

But in the wee hours of 2013 on a magical New Year’s Eve, I was still Ken’s wife, one half of an “us,” and I was looking ahead and happy. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one July 4th in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with cider that shone in one of the good Waterford crystal glasses, it was a magic time – life was sweet. I remember thinking, believing “All. Is. Well.”

20130101_2445

When everyone went to bed on January 1st 2013, I stayed up, savoring the silence of our slumbering house and the opportunity to consider Ted Kooser’s assessment of life, that it is “. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …”

It is just like that. And on the shortest day when the sun stops for a moment,  I find myself in between two cars, aware that I still have some distance to travel.  Forward. And I am ready for it. 

But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.

my ‘slow turning’ ~ winter solstice 2013

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Aging, Arizona, Birthdays, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Death and dying, Diagnosis, Family, Fireworks, Irish culture, Irish mammies, John Hiatt, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Muriel Rukeyser, New Year, Newgrange, No Country for Old Men, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Themes of Childhood, Time

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It is the shortest day of the year, when the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will get to experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago.

In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved into the stone walls. Out of 30,000 applicants in 2013, only 50, Irish weather permitting, will experience the solstice at Newgrange. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.

NEWGRANGE_ITIMES_800

I am not ready for it. I am not ready for days that stretch out even longer than each of the thirty-six that have passed since the day my husband died. Thirty-six. I cannot bring myself to convert those  days to weeks or to say it’s been over a month already. I’m not ready, not equipped to turn away from a life with him to one without him, even though the bank is clamoring for a certified copy of the death certificate so they can erase his name from the checking account and the mortgage, make things that used to be “ours” all mine.

From the outside, our house – my house – glitters like a Christmas card with its tree twinkling in the window and bit of whimsy – a painted wooden sign for Santa to please stop here. It’s no different than any other year, except everything inside has changed.  In a pile on the kitchen countertop, sympathy cards mingle with utility bills and an accidental Christmas card from someone far away who didn’t find out until after she’d mailed it that Ken is dead. Recorded on the DVR are the unwatched episodes of “Alaska: The Last Frontier” and “The Daily Show” scheduled indefinitely.  When he died, the television was on and tuned to the Comedy Channel.  He would have appreciated the irony.

There are the movies he never deleted, like No Country for Old Men, probably his favorite after Goodfellas. He loved the book too, much to my chagrin – Cormac MacCarthy leaves me cold –  and I think he may have even re-read it while he sat in the hospital waiting room for almost nine hours while they removed and reconstructed my cancerous breast. Still, it was much better reading material than any of that provided by the breast cancer industry people on how he should support his newly-diagnosed-with-breast-cancer-loved-one. Sophie made me watch No Country last week, fast-forwarding to his favorite frame in the coin-toss scene at the gas station when Javier Bardem‘s Anton Chigur tells the befuddled proprietor to call heads or tales even though he “put nothing up” . . . The candy wrapper un-crinkles on the countertop, the tension grows, and I’m hooked.

Yes you did. You’ve been puttin it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it. You know what date is on this coin? …1958. It’s been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails and you have to say. Call it.

I can imagine Ken telling me he told me so. I wish I had watched it with him.

Most mornings now, I get in the car and play a guessing game before turning on the radio. Sophie plays along. We’ll look at each other in disbelief when a ‘Dad’ song comes on. Again. Never, in almost twenty-four years together, did his favorite tunes get such airplay. Even John Hiatt‘s “Slow Turning” came on the other day. I know Ken would have turned it up loud and stayed in the car until it was over. And he would have been mad if he’d missed his favorite line:

I’m yelling at the kids in the back, ‘cause they’re banging like Charlie Watts.

There’s a conspiracy at work. It reminds me of how it wasn’t until I was diagnosed with cancer that I began to notice the hundreds of pink ribbons and so many women with bandanas covering vulnerable, shorn heads.

I remember reading something about a woman who felt she had two distinct lives – the one before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis – a turning point, by any other name. When I close my eyes to remember my own diagnosis, I can see myself get up and walk out the door, leaving behind the woman I used to be, offended by the nerve of that Breast Cancer Navigator telling my husband and me that I had cancer. Me? With cancer? Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips and rendered me wordless.

I remember how she spoke. She was conspiratorial and quiet, talking to my husband in a knowing way that reminded me of the way we quietly speculate about the cause of a death when all the evidence points to hard living. On and on she talked, as if trying to soothe us even as she filled our ears with fear. So many scary words.  Not to worry. She stressed that what we were hearing that day in her dimly lit office was not a death sentence.

Nonetheless, I heard a crack. The sound of a life altered that would have me pondering still and more how to handle poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

I think it might.

I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into our lives, interrupting our plans to celebrate our daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. But we celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a party for Sophie and friends over. We remembered to laugh. We went to the Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve. We scheduled the appointments, the blood-work and the biopsies, the mammograms, and the mastectomy. The healing began. Sort of.

And then, another Christmas, the cancer contained, the promise of a better year. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents came to Arizona to help us bring in 2013. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion and for good luck, we designated my dark-haired husband “the first footer” after midnight. Oh, such sweet relief to shut the door against 2012, a year that had skulked in and scared us, each of us terrified by the cancer and what it might do.

For me – and the woman I used to be – cancer became The Scariest Thing in my life. Like every scary thing that comes to fruition, it had never previously crossed my mind. No. My mind was too consumed with all the things that most likely will never happen. All that worrying. Why? It is such a waste. But the cancer did happen, and I wanted everyone to feel as sorry for me as I did for myself and howl about the unfairness of it all. I wanted sympathy. I even wanted the kind you get from an Irish mammy over endless cups of tea with reminders that there’s always someone worse off. Always. 

I remember my mother cursing the cancer for the thief that it is but she’d temper her remarks with reminders that I was so lucky to be married to the best man in the world.  “You could set your watch by him!” she’d say, and then she’d jokingly ask him how in the name of God he had put up with me for over twenty years. Not known for my punctuality or having a place for everything and everything in its place, she regularly wondered aloud how I would ever manage without him since he waited on me hand and foot. Without him. In our house. Now that would be a scary thing. Me? A widow?

But in the wee hours of 2013 on a magical New Year’s Eve, I was still Ken’s wife, one half of an “us,” and I was looking ahead and happy. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one July 4th in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with cider that shone in one of the good Waterford crystal glasses, it was a magic time, and I remember thinking, believing “All. Is. Well.”

20130101_2445

When everyone went to bed on January 1st 2013, I stayed up, savoring the silence of our slumbering house and the opportunity to consider Ted Kooser’s bang-on assessment of life, that it is “. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …”

It is just like that. And on this shortest day when the sun stops for a moment,  I find myself in between two cars, aware that I still have some distance to travel.  Forward. Ready or not. A slow turning. From the inside out. 

But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.

back to Anahorish ~ Seamus Heaney’s ‘first hill in the world’

31 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in Anahorish, Anahorish, Antrim, Arizona, Bellaghy, Borders, British Army, Broagh, Castledawson, Dennis O'Driscoll, Fosterling, From the Republic of Conscience, grandmother, IRA, Language matters, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Personal Helicon, Poetry, Politics, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Tony Parker, Writing

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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.

“

photo (92)

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.

208396_1027235642283_3852_nThe 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. In May 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.

heaneyatarnahorish

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.

breaking bad news & long distance love

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Blogging, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Culture of breast cancer, Diagnosis, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Facebook, Family, Hair, Jackson Browne, Language of Cancer, Little Feat, Lowell George, Memoir, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Music, Pink Ribbons, Sherman Alexie, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, Van Morrison, Writers, Writing

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Yesterday, I discovered Rendezvous, “a digital meeting place for the globally engaged, hosted by the International Herald Tribune.” As such, Rendezvous is a global tribe seeking “to inspire international discussion and intelligent debate that enlivens the global conversation.” Sounds like the perfect place for members of the Irish diaspora, scattered far and wide across the globe. People like me. While my circumstances were different from my grandparents and so many irish before me, who were obliged to leave home because of famine or poverty, or diminished possibilities and broken promises, I can barely remember a time when I did not harbor a desire to come to America, eager to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls that “spectacular risk.” And, although I have now spent almost half my life in these United States, there are still unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a crushing loneliness and a cry for “home.”

Before Skype, it was by telephone that bi-continental families like mine delivered and received the most important news of our lives, from tidings that could not be shared soon enough: “I got the job!” “I’m going to have a baby!” “It’s a girl!” to the shrill ring that will startle a slumbering household too early in the morning or too late at night to be anything good. I distinctly recall such a moment, one September morning before dawn broke in Phoenix. Barely awake, I answered the phone to hear the anguish of a lifelong friend calling out from a village in Wales, “My darling is gone! My darling Kev is gone! Gone!” her husband killed outright in a car accident. Then the phone ringing in the hall of my parent’s Castledawson home, so far away, on a Friday night in November, after The Late Late Show. I can imagine my mother glancing at my father, the two of them held momentarily in a kind of dread, fearing the news that might come about my brother or me.

Like me, my mother can tell by the exhalation of the first syllable of  “hello,” if something is wrong, so I had avoided her for a week. Taking advantage of the eight hour time difference, I had made myself unavailable ever since I found the lump. Away from our home phone, I could shop or run for miles or do anything other than talk to my mother about the lumpish thing in my right breast, the MRI, the three-then-four tumors, the core needle biopsies, and the pathology report. Across distance and time, avoidance and denial cleverly converged, with me convincing myself that when it all turned out to be nothing, it would unfold as the kind of melodrama that so effortlessly fills up a long distance phone call with my mother on a Saturday morning.

Waiting for the results of those biopsies was excruciating, and it was lonely. More than anything, I wanted to talk to my mother, my best friend; to drive to Sky Harbor airport and hop on a plane; to go “back home” where it was probably raining or about to rain. Home to endless cups of tea or something a wee bit stronger and well-meaning people who love me and don’t want me to die, all of them waxing poetic about how things could be worse. For the uninitiated, a hallmark of growing up in Northern Ireland is that no matter what befalls you, someone is bound to remind you – and it will be strangely comforting – that there is always some poor soul worse off than yourself. That, and you’re not half thankful enough. But I could not bring myself to call my mother without having something definite to tell her. My mother and I don’t care much for loose ends. We like a tidy ending. Of course, I could tell her about the tumors. But what kind? Benign? Malignant? Wait and see. Treatment? Surgery? Chemotherapy? Radiation? All possible. Wait and see. The Breast Patient Navigator had taken over and was beginning to help me navigate a trek through “wait and see” with a team of people that would also wait and see. Being far away from home made the waiting even worse.

If the news was bad, how would it be broken?  How would I break it to my mother, and she so far away? My seventy three year old mother who thought her work was done, the real worrying over, her two children well-raised with children of their own, making their way in the world and causing relatively little trouble. I even found the Regional Guidelines for Breaking Bad News published by the Northern Ireland Department of Health, Social Services, and Public Safety. I confess it had never occurred to me that there were so many steps in breaking bad news. The day before my diagnosis, I finally gave in and told someone from home, because someone from home would know what to say, soft albeit shocked and colloquial, funny even. But not my mother. Not yet.

photo (64)Thus would begin the trail of over 3,000 Facebook messages with my brother whom I adore. My wee brother, now a man. A husband, a father of three, in the middle of his life on the other side of the ocean and on the opposite end of Ireland from my mother. I knew he would make me laugh, and I knew he would keep a secret. As he has always done. 
When Rendezvous asks how we expatriates cope with a death or a health crisis on the other side of the ocean, my response is that it is always with a sense of un-reality, with guilt over things that should never have been said, and with promises that it won’t be too long before a visit home, because you’re a long time dead, and then a rush of communication, words tumbling over words, such as this between my brother and me.

Ostensibly out of the blue, but the day before my diagnosis, I sent a message to him:

November 10, 2011

  Can we talk this weekend?

  Not sure when we’ll be in the house exactly; we might take the lads out if the weather is fine, because it gets awfully claustrophobic if we’re cooped up inside all day, but I’ll drop you a line on FB and let you know. Is all okay?

  No – will know for sure in 16 hours. Do NOT alarm the folks.

  Sixteen hours? That means there’s only eight to go. Sounds intriguing. I hope it’s nothing serious. Hopefully your new day will begin with some positive news  Drop me a line on FB when you know. I’ll be here until 5pm our time, which is another four hours, so I guess you won’t know by then, but if you’re up and about, let me know what it’s about x
 November 11, 2011
 So… what in tarnation’s going on Yvonne?
  
  PROMISE you won’t tell ma. You have to promise me. PROMISE you won’t tell mam. PROMISE.
  
 But sure of course I won’t. Unless you’ve murdered someone, natch …

  OK  … here goes … I found a lump last week. Went to doctor for mammogram. Found two tumors in right breast. Then on Wednesday they found another. Did three biopsies. Find out the results today. Do not tell ma. If you tell her, I will NEVER EVER tell you another thing. EVER.

  Fuck. Of course I won’t, Yvonne. Cross my heart. Jesus. I’m shell-shocked here. How are you feeling, if that isn’t the DUMBEST question in the world.
  Well … scared. The core needle biopsy wasn’t too bad. kind of sore. just after they say “tumor,” you don’t hear anything else. Sophie doesn’t know. Ken’s being all brave, but I just keep losing it. Want so much to tell ma, but the distance and the worry is too great.  So now I’m crying. Again. So scary. It’s the not knowing and the waiting that is so cruel. I hate it.
 The last place you want to hear the word ‘tumor’ is in that context. Yvonne I’m stunned. You poor, poor thing. I am hoping and praying and engaged in all manner of ‘offering it up’ here. Telling mam would be SUCH A BAD IDEA, and of course I will not breathe a word. Oh, my dear God.
   I know. You’re right about ma. I know you’re right. The waiting would destroy her, and daddy would probably wander the roads, all stoic and stone-faced, while cursing the miles and miles between us. Anyway, I’m trying not to break in pieces … we find out at 1:30.  BTW … can I just say every woman I know admits that they do not do self-exams. And what was the bloody point of all those clear mammograms?
 Okay, just take a VERY deep breath. It’s out of your control for the next few hours, and there is NOTHING you can do in that time except to remain as positive and strong as you possibly can. So, so easier said that done, but you’re … a tiger, and whatever happens, you can deal with it.
  Well thank God you didn’t say cougar.
  Hahaha. See?

  AND …. I’m pissed off because I’ve been so good at doing the Couch to 5K thing. I was beginning to think I would run in the Belfast Marathon.  

And … I got great tickets to the Bob Seger concert. And … even my hair looks better than average these days. 
Well, at
 least I’m in America and have good insurance. Saw my doctor the day after I found lump. Had mammogram next day and the biopsy two days after that.
Hello??? Are you still there???
   Sorry, I’m still here. Boss just stopped by for “a chat.”

  Oops. Sorry. i forgot you were at work. I’ll let you go. will keep you posted. Please, please do not breathe a word. Oh God. Now I have visions of you trapped in a cubicle with a demon boss and our Facebook chat minimized on the screen.

   I will not say anything, Yvonne. You have my word, and my prayers. Drop me a line on FB when you know, please, and I’ll see it when I get up. I’m all confused. 1.30 is what time?? Oh god. Hold on, and I’ll work it out…
   i think  9:30 at night with you. Oh, Keith, I just want to hear benign, benign, benign. Three benig
   Drop me a line if you get a chance, and I’ll give you a call. Please try not to get too distraught until you know. Only knowledge will give you any real power in this situation. And there are all sorts of possibilities. And don’t forget what Thomas Wolfe wrote:
“America — it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”
  P.S. – I’m not an avid reader of the great Mr Wolfe, but I came across that passage recently when searching for something else, and I just recalled it. Saying prayers for you now, so go do something to take your mind off things for a while. Go for a walk in your favorite place, and focus on something beautiful, instead of being locked into that horrible mental waiting room.
  Alright, grand. On old Tom’s very high note, I’ll sign off. Thank you Keith. XXXXXX

  Love you and take care and good luck xxx

BTW – I don’t know if it was the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Man-In-The-White-Suit Tom Wolfe or n the late great early 20th century novelist, Thomas Wolfe. I suspect the latter, but it is a good one nonetheless.
P.S. A couple of really fun things to focus on for right now include 1. your lustrous hair, and 2. the enviable prospect of seeing the man known as Seger rocking the house with his Silver Bullet ensemble this Yuletide.
Oh, Yvonne you poor ‘oul divil. What a horrendous day for you, but hopefully, this dark corridor will lead to a better, brighter day. Love you. Talk later. K xxx
   Okay — I’m off now to get my bus home, so I won’t be talking to you or be in touch for a while. I don’t want to say anything at home either, because you know how sensitive kids can be to that sort of talk. I’ll say nothing at home until I know more. Fingers, thumbs, legs, toes, all limbs are crossed, and I hope to hear good news from you later. Take care Yvonne. Love to Ken & Sophie. xxx xxx xxx
  Thank you!!! So hard to keep it from Sophie … Amanda is taking her out under a babysitting ruse …

  

Talked to ma.

I have breast cancer.

MRI next, then surgery.

Game On.

November 12, 2011

   Spoke to mam this morning. She’s shocked, but she and dad are fine. Just want you better. I don’t think I’ll be back until late tonight so hopefully talk to you tomorrow. Hope Sophie and ken are okay. Love you xxx ooo
November 14, 2011

   Hi Yvonne — how are you doing today? xox

   Just got up … can’t find specs so don’t know what I’m writing!! Oh … it ranges from being wildly indignant to feeling just plain sorry for myself. Sophie and I have been making irreverent jokes about it, but then Ken got mad at us. So we have to watch what we say, otherwise there will be a sharp outburst of ‘Goddammit-your- mom’s-sick-it’s-not-funny.’  I need to look for my glasses … will chat later

.  Oh Jesus — even with your vision fettered by the lack of spectacles, that’s a pretty clear picture of what’s going on!!! I’m sure you’re on a rollercoaster. Mam said you were going to go to work today. Maybe that’s for the best. Hope Sophie is okay too. Drop me a line later if you’re in work and want to skive. Hope that the work environment is not too stressful. That would be the last thing you need … Talk to you later xxxx

   Hey you … I am waiting for Sophie to get out of school. Work was a fabulous distraction. I keep thinking I must be making it all up, so I can’t help being very irreverent about it when I am around people who seem to care about me. Ken is scared and doesn’t understand that I’m not really making a joke about it. I am just coping. Seriously, he might explode with a “Give my daughter the shot!!” a la Shirley McClaine in “Terms of Endearment.” Sophie, on the other hand, is darkly funny. Just today, she raised a haughty eyebrow and gave me a knowing look when the lady at the drugstore asked if we would be at all interested in donating a dollar to cancer research. BTW Where the hell did all those pink ribbons come from? Seems I have seen more pink ribbons since last Friday than in my entire life.

 Oh God, I’d say you must be seeing them everywhere you look. I’m sure Ken will be fine, but he’s probably just scared shitless and feeling helpless as there is nothing he can do. I know how I felt last year when Ita was lying in a high dependency unit surrounded by a team of specialists who threw me out of the ward for getting in the way. Not very nice really, especially when it left me at the mercy of nuns loitering in the public waiting area, waiting for their chance to do their good deed for the day!
P.S. Speaking of nuns, I was walloped by a four foot nun in the bus station this morning, because she walked into the umbrella  I was carrying under my arm. Silly me. Of all the things  I think about on my way to work, I hadn’t considered the etiquette of umbrella transportation, and the inherent dangers to undersized elderly members of the religious orders who don’t look where they are going. She really thumped me too. Drop me a line later.
 November 15, 2011

  Accosted by a nun!?!  Oh God, that is so funny – I have a great mental image of you being attacked by a little nun. I never see nuns. Where are they kept in Phoenix, I wonder? As for the pink ribbons. Did I tell you about what Sophie calls “the cancer goodie bag?” After the kindly but somewhat annoying nurse (breast care navigation specialist) gives you the worst news of your life along with just a touch of how prayer might help, she sends you off with the kind of tote bag you get at conferences, filled with brochures, a 10 yr planner, books with pithy titles like ‘Finding the Can in Cancer’ 

I wonder should I start a blog … with a clever title along the lines of staying abreast of a life that used to be scheduled by me.

  Oh God… truth is stranger than fiction. Your encounter with the ‘breast care navigation specialist’ (are you serious with that title, or being sarcastic??) is straight from the surgery of Dr Julius Hibbert from The Simpsons. Sounds like young Sophie has the right attitude about all of that (what mam calls) ‘trumpery’. it’s just bloody trinkets, isn’t it, and a bit of a growth industry. The Can In Cancer is right up there with ‘There Is No “I” In Team’… or, again, are you being acerbic again. ‘Tis hard to tell… But even if you are, you’re absolutely right. Whoops, better go, will write later…
  Acerbic … and I kid you not.
   I’ll bet… God I’d forgotten how hairy it is trying to have a conversation on Facebook in an open-plan office. But definitely not as difficult or full of Esperanto and code words as a telephone conversation, though, eh?
November 16, 2011
  Hey Yvonne — just a quick note to wish you well for later today. Will be thinking of you, Big Sis. Really wish there was something I could do to help. xxx
  You already are helping. Thank you for just staying in touch. It is a wonderful byproduct of an otherwise screwed up situation. 
  I know. Anyway, I’m rooting for you. Are you not terrified?  Ken and Sophie must be out of their minds, but you’re in great hands there, and, that, even more than the medical intervention, is what counts. Okey doke, am in work, so I’d better get back to it, but keep in touch as soon as you know anything, and hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk on the phone again soon. Work usually turns everything upside down during the week, because of the commute to and from Cork, so sorry I can’t talk, but will have a chat this weekend? That’s it for now. Fingers crossed, and deep breaths, now… xxx
  yeah …Ken cracked a bit last night. It made me feel very sad. It’s our 20th anniversary today. Twist the knife some more, right? surgeon already wants to see me on Monday morning and hasn’t even seen the MRI yet so that makes me scared. I will send you a note later. 

  Ah Jeez… happy anniversary. 

Talk to you later. Am going to catch bus soon, so drop me a line if you get around to it later, or if not, don’t worry about it, just do so sometime in the next 24 hours, cos I don’t want to be hassling you on the phone like a big galumphing lummox. Love you x
 November 16, 2011
  Hey … my Breast Care Navigation Specialist will have the results of MRI tomorrow. Had a large G&T earlier following minor breakdown when I had to check the YES box on the form ‘Have you ever had a cancer diagnosis?’ 
  Oh Jesus. Mind the gin, otherwise it’ll lead to more tears, if I know my gin.   Oh good God, the official form ‘leveler’ as well. There’s nothing like that to lay you low. Keep on top of things, Big Sister. It will all come out in the wash. I know that patience is not something you’ve EVER had much time for, but try to hang in there, because you’ll tie yourself up in a knot.

In other news, well, it’s not really news, but just to let you know I was thinking of you in a much more positive context earlier on. On the bus. I was looking out at the pissing rain streaming down the window, pleasantly surprised when ‘Main Street’ came up on a shuffled playlist on my iPod. God bless Bob Seger. Do you know what I love about that song? The way he manages to take a multi-syllabic line like “I remember standing on the corner at midnight trying to get my courage up”, and render it thusly: ‘Imema’stannin’thecawnnat’midnite (death-defying pause)T

ryn’ta get mah courage up.’ 

Fantastic. That’s like a cross between Sinatra and Ernest Hemingway. Genius delivery. Sorry for the diversion. Just reminded me of your old turntable on the floor of your bedroom on the Dublin Road (and our Penny the poodle growing dizzy as she watched the LP revolve to its conclusion). Anyway, “laters”, as ‘the youth’ would say these days. Love xxx

   i dont’ care what state I’m in, but I am bound and determined to see Bob Seger on December 23rd and to have some sort of Christmas. Admittedly, I may have to play the cancer card with a bit of guilt to get Sophie to come along, but whatever it takes . . . surely, one day, she will tell her friends that her mother was very hip and cool with great taste in music?

Oh, the forms are laughable …. today I had to fill out one which asked if I’d ever had cancer (other than present) on the same page as “What is your chief complaint/reason for coming to our office today?”

Anyway …. have you ever read anything by Sherman Alexie?? I met him at a book-signing recently after he gave a very funny talk during which he read from War Dances.  Anyway, he talks about how cool it was to watch the screening of his Smoke Signals, a very cool little indie film, sitting next to Bruce Springsteen. Can you imagine sitting at the screening of a film based on a book you wrote with The Boss beside you?? Anyway, he wrote a poem about how, like me, he used to make a great mix tape, the way we have done so many times. Here it is:

Ode to Mix Tapes By Sherman Alexie

These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old school mix tapes– the mid air

Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade

Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”
Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”
or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn’t take back.

November 18, 2011

  Have never heard of him, Yvonne. But will check him out. He sounds intriguing. No more intriguing than the forms you’re having to fill in. It’s worse than The Office.
You have cancer. Do you (a) strongly agree; (b) agree); (c) disagree; (d) strongly disagree; or (e) Don’t know. Grrrr.
  BTW Limerick is not the place to see cool little indie movies.  The recession has wiped out the home DVD rental stores, and at the two omniplexes (omniplexi?) they only put on the kinds of things that are guaranteed to fill seats. Was just looking at the link on Wikipedia though. Sounds good, so I’ll have to see if I can get my hands on it. How you feeling today?
  Much better. Not quite a Woo Hoo, but so happy that chemotherapy is not in my immediate future. I just don’t know if I could have handled it. Keith, you must, must read Sherman Alexie’s work. He is a fab writer. “White people gave us Custer, but they also gave us Bruce Springsteen!” 
November 21, 2011
  Well … they cannot save the breast. Had genetic testing, result of which will determine whether to take left breast and ovaries as well. Just like that!!! One stop shopping. Didn’t cry all day until I called ma, and then I lost it.
  Oh Christ Jesus. You poor thing, Yvonne. When will you know the results of the test? What an awful thing to have to deal with. I just don’t know what to say. Drop me a line later if you’re up to it. xxx
**************

In retrospect and in response to the question posed by Rendezvous, it was this Facebook chat with my brother over the course of ten days that kept much of the fear at bay. During the scariest time of my life, I was fed by these tiny snippets of humor and nostalgia and sorrow and fear traveling at lightening speed from one continent to another. Connected in an ephemeral, electric silence but with nothing to hold on to,  grown children far away from their mother, vulnerable once more, seeking shelter from the storm and long distance love.

images

 . . which takes me back to the summer of 1988 when my

brother came to see me in Phoenix.

That visit coincided with one of the many reunions of my favorite band, Little Feat, then riding a comeback wave, unimaginably without the growl of the late Lowell George and his mean slide guitar, but still with the inimitable Bill Payne on keyboard.

At the time, I had all Little Feat’s albums. I loved the cover art which was as funky as their music.

In the same way that it was important for me to stand on the actual corner of Winslow, Arizona – not necessarily a fine sight to see – I have also driven from Tucson to Tucumcare and Tehachape to Tonopah – because Little Feat sang about these places in Willin’.  While they turned out not to be dream holiday destinations, nor did I see Dallas Alice in every headlight,  I heard Billy Payne’s grace notes on the piano and Lowell George singing about her every mile that we covered. In this vein, what was I thinking when I visited Memphis? Inexplicably, I visited Graceland and was down in the jungle room, but I forgot to make it to the lobby of the Commodore Hotel where I like to think I would indeed have asked the bartender for a light, even though I don’t smoke, immediately cueing everyone at the bar to start humming, “If you’ll be my Dixie Chicken.”

Anyway, that summer night in Phoenix, twenty-five years ago, t

he lead singer of the Pure Prairie League, Craig Fuller, would take the place of Lowell George. I remember sitting in the Celebrity Theater with my brother, wondering if Fuller could possibly pull it off, and when the band opened with “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” the crowd rose to its feet, and we knew we were in for a funky musical feast that I think would have made Lowell George happy.

 From a long distance.