In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day. In Arizona, it is just another Sunday that finds me thinking about my mother – ma – in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, and my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in late on an August afternoon.
Facing each other, a blanket stretched between us, she stepped towards me, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we met to make the final fold, while unbeknownst to us, her father took our pictures and wrote our names in the sand, knowing the tide would wash them away. Forever.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.“
Twelve days after Ken died, I wrote this post. I haven’t read it since, and I’m not going to read it tonight. Somewhere in the middle of the grief-stricken ramblings, I remember is a pure – and good – memory of this day twenty five years ago – January 13, 1990 – the day when Ken and I embarked on what we both knew was one hell of a love story.
So, I’ll raise a great big whiskey to you tonight, Ken, and tell you that I’d do it all again.
x
11/27/2013
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 if it’s written down, I’m less likely to forget 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,” the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” LA Woman by The Doors and, well, anything by The Moody Blues. Admittedly, I was a bit thrown when Ken told me one of his favorite songs was “All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. Now, it was easy for me to hijack the jukebox, because I had the flat-out awesome job of going with the other bartender to a wonderful warehouse, somewhere in Phoenix, that was loaded with row after row of 45-inch singles. It was my job – a job – every other week, to replace some of the records in the jukebox, to keep it somewhat “current.” 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 her 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 up, 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 folded. I always loved that he broke first. It was January 13, 1990, which thereafter we considered 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 – one month – 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 whole 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.” He said, “OK,” and put his boots on.
I remembering digging out a big fat phone book – the yellow pages – and found a wedding chapel in an old neighborhood in west Phoenix. The preacher there reminded me of a lovely blue-eyed old man in Field of Dreams, earnest and patient, as he told Kevin Costner’s, Ray Kinsella about Moonlight Graham and all the blue hats he never got around to giving his wife, Alicia.
We asked a stranger to officially witness the ceremony, and we vowed to each other that we would stay together in sickness and health, till death us do part. 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 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.
It was not a perfect marriage, but it was an honest marriage. We argued about little things but never about the big stuff. 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.
Looking back on it, 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 almost entirely 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 Irish-ness 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. And to make it truly my Thanksgiving, we would listen to the entire Last Waltz soundtrack.
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.
The immigrant’s heart marches to the beat of two quite different drums, one from the old homeland and the other from the new. The immigrant has to bridge these two worlds, living comfortably in the new and bringing the best of his or her ancient identity and heritage to bear on life in an adopted homeland.
— FORMER IRISH PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE
Continuing to pay tribute to the Irish Diaspora, President of Ireland, Mary McAleese visited Phoenix, Arizona in December 2008. Moving through the crowd gathered at the Irish Cultural Center, she greeted many of us personally, even obliging me with a photograph when I told her where I was from. “Martin” she said to her husband, “Come you here for a photo with this girl so she can send it to her mother.” The three of us, all graduates of Queen’s University of Belfast, smiled for the camera on that chilly morning in the desert southwest, proud of the narrative we shared.
Yvonne Watterson with President of Ireland, Dr. Mary McAleese, Dr. Martin McAleese ~ Phoenix, Arizona 2008
Later, addressing a a crowd of about 400, Dr. McAleese acknowledged the Irish Diaspora as well as the return to Ireland of over 100,000 émigrés in the previous five years. I don’t think any of us – including her – would have predicted that in the remaining years of her presidency, we would see so many of those young people return from Australia, America, Canada, and New Zealand, only to find themselves once again forced to leave. For us, it seems emigration is the default response to hardship. Soon, the Celtic Tiger would be licking its wounds, and the President’s aspirational vision of a “golden age of affluence,” a dream deferred with devastating impact.
Like me, Mary McAleese was the first in her family to attend college, to learn an alternative way to move through treacherous waters.
Our faith in winning by enduring most
they made anathema, intelligences
brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.
from THE CANON OF EXPECTATION, SEAMUS HEANEY
As a scholar, with the “crowbar” of an educated mind, McAleese was well equipped to respond differently to the challenges placed before her, particularly those that for decades has poisoned the minds of young people in Northern Ireland. Fitting, then, that she declared the theme of her presidency – Building Bridges. In her Inaugural address, she thanked the countless immigrants who make up the Irish Diaspora, scattered far and wide across the globe,
. . . whose letters home with dollars and pound notes, earned in grinding loneliness thousands of miles from home, bridged the gap between the Ireland they left and the Ireland which greets them today when they return as tourists or return to stay. They are a crucial part of our global Irish family. In every continent they have put their ingenuity and hard work at the service of new homelands.
Like many of them, I felt I had no choice but to leave because of possibilities diminished and promises broken in Northern Ireland over the course of my first twenty-seven years. At the same time, I can barely remember a time when I did not feel the lure of America. I was always eager to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls that “spectacular risk,” but 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 viceral longing for “back home,” for the very things that sent me away in the first place, the rain, the low-hanging clouds, the lack of anonymity.
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
It is only a door.
It is only a door.
The rare cloudy days in Phoenix remind me of Irish weather. Today, I find myself recalling a rainy afternoon in a classroom in Antrim Grammar School. I am sixteen years old, having a bad hair day, reading and underlining in red, bits of George Moore’s short story, “Home Sickness.” It is the tale of an Irish emigrant, James Bryden, who works in the Bowery in early twentieth century New York. He falls ill and on his doctor’s recommendation to take a sea voyage, decided to see Ireland again, an Ireland he has since romanticized. When he returns to his village, he is forced to confront again the harsh realities facing the peasants and the disillusionment with Ireland gives way to a yearning for the America he has left behind. The slum in the Bowery now transformed in his memory, he wholly rejects the prospect of spending his life in Ireland with Margaret, a woman whose memory will return to him many years later when he is old, back in the Bowery, with a wife and family:
There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself and his unchanging silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills.
Ostensibly, Bryden’s story is that of a malcontent for whom the grass is invariably greener on the other side. But I suspect a similar tension lurks in the heart of every Irish immigrant, and with age, grows a desire to hold on to home or some pleasant version of it – from a distance – bringing to mind the tension Joseph O’Connor describes in his introduction to Ireland in Exile: Irish writers abroad.
You might be coming home for Christmas, or a family celebration, or a funeral, or to see a friend. Or you might just be coming back to Ireland because you’re so lonely and freaked-out where you are that you can’t stick it any more, and you need a break, and you’d sell your Granny to be back in the pub at home by nine o’clock on a Friday night, having fun and telling stories.
And there it is, this IDA poster, illuminated at the end of the corridoor that leads from the airbridge gates to the arrivals terminal; the ghostly faces of those beautiful Young Europeans. It always seems poignant as any ancient Ulster saga to me, this pantheon of departed heroes, so hopeful and innocent, frozen in their brief moment of optimism.
And you meet your friends the night you get home, the people who stayed behind . . . about half an hour before closing time, you find yourself looking around the pub and becoming frantically uptight. You’re feeling completely out of place, you don’t know why. It’s weird. You don’t get it. But somehow, despite the ceol and the caint and the craic, something is wrong. You’re home in Ireland, but you’re not home really. London is still in your head, on New York, or Paris. But you’re in Ireland. How did this happen? It’s not that you’re unhappy exactly. But it’s just not right. You take a swig of your drink, and the music seems louder. You close your eyes and try to fight back the almost overwhelming urge to be somewhere – anywhere – else. And you realize in that moment that you really are an emigrant now. And that being an emigrant isn’t just an address. You realise that it’s actually a way of thinking about Ireland.
~ JOSEPH O’CONNOR
Perhaps that is why I write in this space that has no borders other than those I build around it. It is a blog about being homeor maybe finding home. And, there’s no place like home – its books and music, its warm fire, the sound of it settling, belonging in it . . .
It didn’t start out that way. It began with my hoping I would catch the very best words about breast cancer and save them in a jam-jar with holes poked in the lid, ready to release them whenever they were needed. And then it was the place to which I turned when Ken died, when the grief balled up in my chest like a sharp stone. The fast and furious flurry of euphemisms that followed the cancer diagnosis and then Ken’s death ten months ago were replaced at first with something more closely resembling the routine of someone forced into a kind of exile. For a time, I felt as though I had been banished to a new country that required me to be bolder and braver than ever before, an immigrant once more, even a bit like Rip Van Winkle, no longer as sure of what awaits when I wander down once-familiar roads.
But who wants to spend a happy hour talking about fear and uncertainty? Nobody. I don’t. So we don’t. It’s awkward. I don’t look afraid and uncertain. (But then you aren’t there in the morning when no-one but me is looking in the mirror). So I write about it, but only when I forget that life is for the living, and it is brief.
If you have visited this blog, you know I consider it a home away from home, a safe place to fall where I can put my feet up, have a beer or a hot Powers, and listen to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers all day long if I feel like it. I don’t have to keep it clean. I don’t have to check the mail – I don’t even have to open the mail. If I don’t feel like company, I don’t have to answer the door. If I want to throw a party, I can invite people from all over the world. If I want to be alone with my angst the way I did a million years ago, rambling into my diary in the wee hours, I can do that too
Mind you, the best part about this virtual world might be when, every once in a while, it collides with the real one. Magically, these known strangers are in real time – Lesley Richardson sitting across the table from me in a snug at The Crown Bar and later with Fiona McLaughhin at Home in Belfast. The Blarney Crone and her sister at a restaurant in my Phoenix neighborhood, Nick McClelland and his wife and children filling my house with laughter and Northern Ireland colloquialisms over pizza and beer.
Surreal and real, it is as if we have known each other a lifetime, our worlds at once expanding and narrowing right in front of us, reminding me again of what Mary McAleese said about the Diaspora:
. . . something palpable in the Irish psyche nudges us to be and keep on being community to one another. A deep appreciation of the emigrant experience and an affinity with a sense of Irishness – however that is interpreted – are defining characteristics of the global Irish family. Our culture and heritage are powerful instruments of connection.
Why all this talk of Diaspora today? First, the blog has made it to the final round of the 2014 Blog Awards Ireland competition in the Best Blog of the Irish Diaspora category sponsored by the Irish Dairy Board. It is a lovely thing to know that there are readers for whom this corner of the blogosphere represents the Irish abroad, and I am delighted with the recognition.
But more than that, today would be Ken’s birthday. It is the first without him, and it is surreal. Since she could hold a pencil, my daughter drew pictures for her daddy. She’d scour antique shops with me trying to find the perfect gift for the man who told her to tell her mother not to get him anything.
Ken understood – perhaps better than anyone – that the cancer altered our life together; it altered me. He understood that when I retreated to this timeless space, that it was to reconnect with the girl I used to be and the country I left behind. Even though the blogging often excluded him as I spent so much time in my own head, he made coffee for me on Sunday mornings and left a glass of Old Vine Zinfandel on my desk, just to get the juices flowing. When I finished a post, I would always read it to Ken first. God love him, he sat through thousands and thousands of words about breast cancer, bad hair days, and Belfast, long rants about menopause and motherhood and having it all or not having it all, about Seamus Heaney and back home, about brown paper packages tied up with string the way my mother still does.
Sometimes he’d get misty eyed, but mostly he’d find something to laugh about and tell me to keep on keeping on. So it is the laughter I remember most, and for that Sophie and I are grateful.
This one’s for him.
xo
one of the things Sophie loved about her beloved daddy
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 a state of emergency, even making it into the record books as the 100 Year Flood. As for the rain, it was bucketing down for most of the day – a solid 10 on The 11 Levels of Irish Rain.
Typically, Phoenicians welcome the rain, as you would if you only get five inches of the wet stuff each year. Myself, I can’t stand it. It reminds me of why I left Northern Ireland and its grey skies that weighed heavily on me at twenty-one – unemployed, restless, and always praying for the sun to shine.
But on Monday, I was grateful for the rain, especially when an e-mail came from work, informing me that I could work from home. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy my job and my co-workers, many of whom have held me up on the darkest days over the past year and a half – and there have been dark days indeed since the death of my husband last November. Of course there have. After all, “death of a spouse” is at the top of the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory. Still, I find myself making irreverent jokes about it, playing “the widow card” (when I’m not playing “the cancer card”). Laughter is much more acceptable in the workplace than crying.
But I have felt like crying.
A week before the Monday Monsoon action, a familiar fear moved in again. Since January 2012, I have tried not to worry that the cancer that first showed up in my right breast will reintroduce itself in my bones or my brain or my liver. I have tried not to think that it will sneakily take up residence in a vital organ, but the truth is that every little headache has been a warning bell, every little twinge in my left hip, a harbinger of disease (Number 6 on the Holmes Rahe Stress Inventory). I know I should know that living in fear is no way to live. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, I learned early on that you can’t not go outside for fear of being blown up by terrorists. If you succumb to that fear, you’ll never go out.
Mostly, I have told myself I’m fine. I have even permitted people to cajole me and tell me – with authority – that the cancer “is cured” or “in remission,” even though I know it has not even been three years since the diagnosis and that my oncologist would not use the word remission. (I am holding out for five years and a pronouncement of NED – No Evidence of Disease). I have allowed people to tell me that God would never give me more than I can handle, and I refrained from biting her head off when a woman I barely know admonished me to put “my big girl pants on.”
But when the blood appeared a week before the storm, I was angry at God for giving me more to handle, because I’m not sure I can. Surely God knows that stress, by definition, is when “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.”
My personal resources are maxed out.
It didn’t help – and I knew it wouldn’t – that even before calling the doctor, I consulted Google, and after an interminable trek through the Internet, I convinced myself that I must have endometrial cancer. I’m realizing that in spite of the shock in November 2011 when I heard, “You have cancer,” and the shock in November 2013 when I heard my best friend tell me on the phone, as she stood over my husband’s lifeless body, “Ken is gone,” I have reserved a little space inside to be shocked again.
Naturally, the bleeding began on a weekend, Labor Day weekend. Who wants to go the Emergency Room on a holiday weekend? So I didn’t. I waited until the Tuesday to make an appointment with the best gynecologist in the world, the one who had cared for me 17 years ago, when I was pregnant with Sophie. Of course I couldn’t remember when I had last been to see her. (Menopausal women are not known for their ability to recall details). As it turns out, I have been a bit negligent, so much so that I had to complete all the paperwork of a new patient. Still, she saw me as soon as she could and before examining me told me we would be keeping our fingers crossed for a little polyp that she could just pluck off, but no. That would have been too convenient.
Because she knew I would spend the entire weekend Googling, she tried to schedule a hysterosonogram for that afternoon. No such luck. It would be another week before that happened with another doctor and another three days before she would tell me that yes, the uterine lining is abnormally thick, there are polyps in the uterus, and we need to do a “mega biospy” next week.
. . . followed by more waiting. More bleeding.
(Meanwhile, what if I bleed to death?) Oh, and by the way, does this have anything to do with the Tamoxifen I took? Possibly. Possibly. Was I wrong to have said no to chemo? Plenty of strangers thought I was and – in front of my daughter -scolded me for not partaking of the treatment and its side-effects. So did I bring this on myself? Did I?
Yes. I am stressed. And even though menopause is not explicitly called out on the Holmes Rahe Stress Inventory, I still score over 300 points which has stressed me out even more this morning.
Come to think of it, why isn’t menopause on the list? It bloody well should be. Looking at items 34 – 40. I could check every one because of menopause, but I don’t want to score even more points thereby increasing my odds of developing a stress-induced health breakdown. It’s not quite a “major personal injury or illness,” but menopause is definitely a major change, and we don’t do a very good job talking about it or supporting women through it. Surely the time has come for us to address this given the numbers of women over fifty who are now in the workplace.
“The rate for workers 55 and older . . . in 2013 was 40.3 percent. Although female workers still trail men in sheer numbers, look how far they’ve come. In 1975, the proportion of women 55 and older in the workforce stood at 23 percent, while the rate for men was more than double, at 49.4 percent. Last year, the labor force participation rate was 35.1 percent for older women.”
Yes. We’ve come a long way, baby. So much so that in its Job Tips for 50+ Workers article, the nice folks at AARP used a Getty image of a man in a suit with the obligatory briefcase. He’s not quite Don Draper – he looks a tad too nervous. Still, he doesn’t have to worry about bleeding all over that nice white couch, does he? Dealing with the symptoms of menopause while holding down a full-time job makes it difficult to appear poised, professional, confident, and competent all at the same time. So we who suffer try to conceal it, and those who don’t might dismiss it as a “normal” part of the aging process. Thus the symptoms of menopause are often “under-recognized as a disruptive health condition” (Kleinman et al). Were these same symptoms associated with male menopause, I think things might be a little different.
So what should we do? For a start, we should talk about it. When we design our workspaces, we should consider them from the perspective of a menopausal woman – a hot one – drenched in sweat, with boiling hot flashes, unpredictable heavy bleeding, pain, bone-crushing fatigue, memory loss, and mood swings. We should think about temperature and ventilation, and the availability of feminine hygiene products – like a tampon machine in the restroom.
I’m ashamed to admit that until it happened to me, I relegated all the complexities of menopause – blithely unaware of chemical menopause brought on by breast cancer treatment – to a vague category of “female problems.” It never even occurred to me to consider whether menopause “counted” or was covered by the law that requires employees to protect the health, safety, and welfare of all employees.
Raising awareness of menopause in an occupational setting through health promotion programs and awareness training for managers.
Organizing social support within the work place. This could include information packs, mentoring schemes and lunch time support.
Offer flexible working hours, job sharing, and opportunities to work from home. Many women experience tiredness.
The temperature of the work environment can be an issue, especially in refined spaces. Fans and temperature controls could be implemented.
A “rest” room where women can relax, just to have some space.
Cold drinking water – many organizations do not provide this.
Prioritize work life balance and maintain firm boundaries in working life and non-working life. Adopt buffer zones so that women feel in control more effectively. Many menopausal women experience feelings of ‘not coping’. If work becomes an issue encourage a specific time each day so that worries can be written down and then discarded.
Remain hopeful and optimistic – women experiencing the menopause often go through different types of emotions such as anxiety and depression. Remember these feelings do subside. Encourage women to discuss how they feel as these feelings are very normal.
Become a supportive manager – women are more likely to discuss menopausal issues with somebody they feel able to talk to. This also encourages organizational loyalty and less absenteeism which can only be a good thing for all companies.
Until then, this menopausal woman will “stay strong.” And, while I may not remember exactly what you have said or done over the past couple of years, I will never forget how you made me feel – mostly loved.
A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t
you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why
aren’t you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.
Dealing with the symptoms of menopause while holding down a full-time job makes it difficult to appear poised, professional, confident, and competent all at the same time. So we who suffer try to conceal it, and those who don’t might dismiss it as a “normal” part of the aging process. Thus the symptoms of menopause are often “under-recognized as a disruptive health condition” (
I’m ashamed to admit that until it happened to me, I relegated all the complexities of menopause – blithely unaware of 
