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Aging, bombing, Children of The Troubles, Death and dying, Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley, IRA, Irish Diaspora, Martin McGuinness, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Peace, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, UVF
Remembering Ian Paisley & Dreams Deferred
I suppose if you live long enough, almost nine decades, all is eventually forgiven. At least that’s what the obituaries for Rev. Ian Paisley suggest. Like many of us, I was raised to observe the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” credo, to speak no ill of the dead, but in the days since Ian Paisley’s passing, I have grown increasingly vexed over the glowing online obituaries, the over-the-top eulogizing of a man, who from the year of my birth until the year I left Northern Ireland, railed against the Catholic church, spewing hate and bigotry – brilliantly – and inciting countless followers to violence. I did not know Ian Paisley as a father and…
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Abnormal Bleeding, After death of a spouse, Aging, Anxiety, Etta James, Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, Hot flashes, Irritability, Mad Men, Memoir, Memory Loss, Menopause, Only Women Bleed, Stress, Women and careers
with a menopausal woman in mind ~ stormy weather
Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes. George Bernard Shaw This past week began with rain in Phoenix, so much rain that for the first time since I emigrated here, the weather forced me to stay home from work and my daughter to miss school. Even my mother called from her sunny kitchen in rural Derry, where the weather is cooperating and will maybe stay dry for the On Home Ground Festival in honor of our Seamus Heaney this weekend. Transformed by flash-flood warnings, power outages, cars abandoned on lakes that were freeways the day before, the Valley of the Sun was in…
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9/11, Anything can Happen, Billy Collins, Healing Field Tempe, Memoir, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, Terrorism, Themes of childhood
naming names on 9.11
Flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms to touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001. The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. We first visited the memorial in 2012. I remember watching as my daughter walked away from me, a somber and solitary figure cutting a new path deep into the Healing Field of red, white, and blue. I was undone by the sheer enormity of the memorial and her diminished stature in it. I had to force myself to look away to…
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A Piece of Work, Awesome Women, Being a Widow, Coming of age, Documentaries, FInal wishes, Joan Rivers, Memoir, Michael Parkinson Show, television, Women and careers
you want to see fear? goodbye, joan rivers.
She was quick, controversial, and compelled to cross every line – out loud. And, she made me laugh even when it was against my better judgement. I think I first saw her on TV in the 1980s being interviewed by Bob Monkhouse or Michael Parkinson who would later call her “the world’s most hilarious and endearing bitch.” Watching in our living rooms, we willed her to say something irreverent, and she rarely let us down. Joan Rivers had nothing to hide. In her article in The Atlantic about Joan’s passing, Megan Barber acknowledges the comedienne’s trademark restlessness You could say a lot about those decisions Rivers made, in terms of age, in terms of beauty, in terms…
