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When all that’s left is love: the healing has begun
Epitaph By Merrit Malloy When I dieGive what’s left of me awayTo childrenAnd old men that wait to die. And if you need to cry,Cry for your brotherWalking the street beside you.And when you need me,Put your armsAround anyoneAnd give themWhat you need to give to me. I want to leave you something,Something betterThan wordsOr sounds. Look for meIn the people I’ve knownOr loved,And if you cannot give me away,At least let me live on in your eyesAnd not your mind. You can love me mostBy lettingHands touch hands,By letting bodies touch bodies,And by letting goOf childrenThat need to be free. Love doesn’t die,People do.So, when all that’s left of…
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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…
