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Breast Cancer Treatment, Cancer Language, Depression, Language matters, Memoir, Mental Health, Northern Ireland, Ordinary Things, World Mental Health Day 2013
after
You. Have. Cancer. Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips. I cried as though I had just found out that someone dear to me had died. Inconsolable at first, I assumed those great fat tears flowed from the sheer fright of a disease that has no cure. A decade later, I know my sorrow was more about wondering how to proceed toward the half-century mark without the woman I used to be. Oddly, nobody else seemed to notice she had vanished. Not even the person who delivered the news to me in much the same way as my mother might give me a ring to tell me…
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for Enniskillen and all . . .
My grandfather died a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on November 8, 1987, he would have been wearing his pressed dark suit with his medals and a poppy attached to the lapels – not for show or to make a political statement – but as a way to honor his dead pals. My grandfather, who fought in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, would have been proud to join the old men gathered at the Cenotaph in County Fermanagh in 1987, where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. A 12th victim, local school principal, Ronnie Hill,…
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Halloween Ghosts
Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves. ~ Roger Shattuck 1958 (Source: Listening to Van Morrison, Neill Marcus). It’s Halloween. Where I’m from, the holiday derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain, that time of year when, on the cusp of winter, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, the souls of our long-dead ancestors emerging through it, seeking warmth and communion with us. Trick or treating has…
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Belfast Peace Lines, Borders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights Movement, Human Rights, Ireland, Justice, Marriage Equality Referendum, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Politics, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood
Domestic Affairs – Northern Ireland style.
It was the morning after Thanksgiving, uncharacteristically rainy and gray in the desert southwest. Relishing my solitude and a second cup of coffee, I settled in to read the Irish Times and when I spotted this headline, I put down my cup. Writer, Louise Kennedy, was about to make my Thanksgiving complete. Even though we only know each other the way you know people on Twitter, Louise knows something about me, something I had until that very morning discarded as trivial. Indulge me while I tell you about the Hamlyn All Colour CookBook as remembered by Louise Kennedy: The book seems hideously kitsch now, but there was something heartbreakingly earnest…
