I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
He always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because it meant he wouldn’t have to miss me. Far better – for him. A private man, my husband also insisted that death was a private business. When the time came, he wanted to die alone, just to sleep on. There was to be no fuss, no funeral, no flurry of condolences, not even a goodbye if he could help it. Maybe he was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do or say; maybe he thought it would be easier if he just disappeared into nothingness without ceremony. He would have been wrong.
Like a catechism, I know what to do and say. Knowing is part of the culture that formed me – it is sewn tidily in our DNA – and I am bound to it. Where I’m from, we know to mark the time of death, to stop the clocks and cover the mirrors, to draw down the blinds and close the curtains; we know what to say and do when led silently into a bedroom where the deceased has been “laid out”; we know how to pay our respects in private and in public, how to offer condolences over tea in china cups balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits; we know when to shake hands, to whisper, to weep and when to throw our heads back in laughter over a bit of craic about a life lived in full.
Without these tiny rituals in the days following my husband’s death, I raged internally and selfishly. Only because he expected me to accept and respect his wishes – and because I had promised – I complied. Against my will, I privatized my mourning and got lost in the ever-widening distance between the Arizona desert and a blacksmith’s forge on the side of the road in rural South Derry. I wanted what I couldn’t have.I wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye and to fill the air with his favorite music, a traditional toe-tapping Irish reel. I wanted somewhere to go on his birthday, to bring flowers, perhaps a bunch of freesias because he loved their scent. He wanted none of it. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.
I was back home when he died. A few days before, I had visited the graveyard in Bellaghy where Seamus Heaney is buried. My recollection of that visit is fresh – the mound of Derry soil not yet settled under a sycamore tree, no marker other than a makeshift sign at the entrance to the car park, two plants, a bouquet, and a handwritten thank you note. The sycamore leaves scattered on the dirt and wet from the rain, the clouds hanging heavy and low, I remember thinking that when the time came, a naturalist like my husband would maybe consider it as a final resting place.
The local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to this particular task and moved by the number of people visiting to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
I don’t know what Seamus would have made of it but I think he might be pleased enough.
I think so too.
So when I returned to Bellaghy the following summer, I visited the grave again. This time, a simple wooden cross stood in the dirt. This time, I was a widow, changed and contemplative, convinced that cosmic strings keep us connected. This time, I wondered about the spiritual space in which both men might move. Where are they?
In Stepping Stones,Heaney tells Dennis O’Driscoll that he did not fear death the way he had done as a boy.
It’s more grief than fear, grief at having to leave ‘what thou lovest well’ and whom thou lovest well.
Unsure of what to say but saying it anyway, some people told me my husband had gone on to a better place. Then – and now – I rail against them. What place could be better than here among the living? What place could be better than at our kitchen table opening a hand-made birthday card from his daughter or at the Motor Vehicle Department when she nailed the parallel parking and got her license, or on the other end of the line to hear the news of her acceptance into a graduate program or that she’s madly in love with a boy who is kind and true? How could any place be better than a ring-side seat at the milestones yet to come?
Is there a more desolate space than the empty seat at the table?
For just a moment today, I’d like to hear him laugh again with my daughter. All these years later, it sometimes feels as though he just went missing.
Where is he?
The question that will remain unanswered, it is very different from the madness that accompanied the early urgent grip of grief, the all-consuming quest to fix the unfixable, stop time, close distance, find the right word, and do the right thing. Doing the right thing – as he had requested – felt wrong.
He did not want to be buried in the ground. He wanted to be cremated, and he wanted his ashes – all of them – strewn on a piece of ground in the desert, at the base of Black Mountain, where his childhood home had once stood – his first place.
We obliged. My parents, far from Heaney country, our daughter, and a close friend did as he asked, each of us taking turns to empty the bag that contained the cremated remains of this man we loved. That bag probably weighed no more than five pounds. I recall fixating on this detail, wondering about Ken’s soul and the weight of it and its whereabouts. Where was it? Where is it? Is it possible he knows we’re thinking of him today?
On his birthday, two years after he died, we returned to the spot where we had spread his ashes only to find “his” tree had been cut down and the area around it chained off for commercial development. For the time being, it was an empty space. I cried. Of course I cried, even though the rational part of me knew and knows that not for one second would he have expected his desert space to remain unspoiled. Coolly resigned to the price of urban progress, he would have been unfazed. Still, I was resentful again, angry that there was no grave for us to visit, no headstone to adorn with fresh flowers on milestone days – the anniversaries of the day we married, the day our girl was born, the day of his death, or a day like today – his birthday.
Then with the right words at the right time – again – came Seamus Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the new headstone in place for the second anniversary of his death. Lines he had explained once to the Harvard Crimson
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called ‘The Gravel Walks,’ which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like the in-betweenness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens. I think that’s where poetry should dwell, between the dream world and the given world, because you don’t just want photography, and you don’t want fantasy either.
The girl with her head in the clouds should never have doubted the man who kept her feet on the ground too. Not for a second.
All that’s left of him now is love – to give away. I am walking on air.
So walk on air against your better judgement Establishing yourself somewhere in between Those solid batches mixed with grey cement And a tune called The Gravel Walks that conjures green
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
The best year of my life was the one spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was mine – all mine – and I inhaled. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison – when I liked Van Morrison. I spent interminable hours just looking at her.
Just. Looking. At. Her.
I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, this was before she had a cache of words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.
Mostly, our darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let me know she was right there in front of me. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to her ‘cry it out.’ As soon as I heard the tiniest whimper, I bolted to her bedroom to pick her up and comfort her. My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. She was right. Of course she was. It has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.
When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – mostly mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and (this was pre-Starbucks) with mugs of coffee brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot. I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and hair on the verge of sensible. As a school administrator, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – most likely myself – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would attempt placating me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . .
Although she had to say it more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie to spend hours staring, like the Madonna – mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes – at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when she did something – anything – for the first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
It’s true. I was madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve that would charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then remain in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying. At the same time, all the other mother’s children were crying. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?
Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup that I had wept away, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no hint of guilt-stricken working mother, off I went – to work for other people’s children.
Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Like me, Appelt knew this anguish of leaving her child, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.
Every night, I read aloud the story of Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love – a little red heart – would still be with him. Magically, this love would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. They never seemed to get it, that I was sending them the very best child I have. So by the time she was in the third grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.
On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – now a high school Senior, a young woman – and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do. Watching as she strode to the car her daddy used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.
But I pulled myself together and gave into the day – the way I had to do – knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, that it would unfold, providing delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.
Some days still, in an unguarded moment, between emails and zoom meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she is doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.
And I will remind myself – as I will again today – that the love is all around.
Clouds over Lake Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico – December 31, 2020
Dangerous pavements.
But I face the ice this year
With my father’s stick.
~ Seamus Heaney
On New Year’s Eve, a year ago, Chinese health officials confirmed an outbreak of a new virus causing pneumonia-like clusters in Wuhan city. Since then – as we all now know – the virus has spread to nearly every country, killing over 1.8 million people and decimating the world’s economies. How do we bid farewell to all of that? I’m not sure we can. Not really. Not as over 1.8 million ghosts step into 2021 with us, reminding us as we turn the calendar page, of what we have lost and the hard road ahead.
In taking what it took from us, COVID-19 also revealed the best and worst in our hearts and minds. It brought seismic changes, our routines and rituals no longer relevant or at times even allowable in a world in quarantine. Changing the rules for gathering, how we say goodbye and hello, it altered the way we go to school and church and the way we show up at the office or the polling booth. Those of us privileged to do so were afforded the luxury of virtual living in the realm of the internet, our days and months slipping by without shape and structure, online the lines blurred between work and play. Up close and personal in-person contact all but disappeared – no clammy handshakes sealing deals – no deals – no high-fives and hugs, no weddings or wakes, no graduations, no funerals, no way to do them the way we always did. If we were fortunate enough to do so, from our living rooms we ordered our groceries and meals from restaurants desperate to stay afloat. We binge-watched Netflix originals and rediscovered classics. From the best seats in the house, we saw The Rolling Stones deliver perhaps their best performance of “You Can’t Always Get What you Want.” We came up with ways for the show to go on. And, in many ways, it did. Meanwhile many of us didn’t get what we needed.
Amid the disruption, so many of us were lucky, spared the pain that continues to batter millions of lives and livelihoods. So many of us weren’t and many more won’t be. Along with our good fortune, we might also have discovered a resilience, a way to approach our altered circumstances that we otherwise wouldn’t have known was in us. Whatever it was that brought us unscathed to the end of 2020, here we are. We made it. We’re older now. We’re wiser. We know better, or we should, on the brink of a new year:
Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
It’s as good a day as any to contemplate what we might accomplish with all we have learned. New Year‘s Eve, a day designated for reminiscing and resolving; for holding on and letting go; for Auld Lang Syne and cups of kindness. COVID loves a crowd, so the traditional celebrations in places that know how to party have been curtailed by curfews and lockdowns and strict social distancing measures. On Broadway, the crystal ball will drop to a small audience of essential workers and front-line responders, their families kept six feet away in socially distanced areas. And, if we got them in on time, our wishes for 2021 will be added to thousands of bits of confetti that flutters down in the heart of Times Square at midnight. We can watch on TV, the way we always do. Across the Atlantic, instead of fireworks lighting up the sky over the River Thames, Big Ben will ring out 12 times at midnight.
Without the rowdy revelers and strangers kissing at midnight in cities all over the world, this will be a New Year’s Eve like no other, like so many “. . . like no others” of this passing year.
Alone, missing your own ones or maybe even feeling a little lost, you might find yourself in the final essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser. It’s a lovely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us:
Life 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.
There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.
So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.
But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.
And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?
The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.
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.”
Ready to step into the club car, I am hopeful. There you are, waiting for me, glasses raised. We know what matters in the year ahead, don’t we?
Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round I feel numb – born with a weak heart I guess I must be having fun The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground Head in the sky It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . . nothing
Lyrics: David Byrne
I am supposed to be in Phoenix, but like many of you, I am not going anywhere. This Mother’s Day weekend coincides with what has been projected as the peak of coronavirus contagion here in Mexico, and we are being urged to stay at home. There have been social distancing measures in place since mid-March, but they have intensified this week, in an attempt to keep crowds from gathering to celebrate Día de las Madre in the traditional ways. This year, health officials are urging the people of Mexico to reimagine those time-honored tributes that define Día de las Madre and to cherish mothers and grandmothers from a distance. To that end, most restaurants, flower markets, and plazas will be closed on Sunday. To prevent people from visiting their mother’s graves, even cemeteries will be closed. Hopes are for a quiet Sunday, more likely now with a ban on in-person serenades of “Las Mañanitas” in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Zacateas, and here, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, the heartland of the mariachi.
Where we can no longer reach out with our hands, we must now reach out with our hearts.
I understand all of this, having availed myself of technology-enabled engagement to remain connected while physically distant. The only journeys I have planned for the foreseeable future are virtual, daily Brady-Bunch style Zoom meetings with my colleagues at 9:30AM, WhatsApp calls with my parents, still isolated at home in Northern Ireland, and the celebration of my only child’s college graduation on Monday. The right thing to do, her university has announced that due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus and its attendant public health recommendations, Arizona State University will move its 2020 Spring commencement to a virtual, online ceremony temporarily turning upside down my plans to be there to cheer wildly with her tribe as my darling girl strides across the stage to receive her diploma and to reflect quietly on this accomplishment in our Phoenix home, the place where she learned to walk and talk and read – the place where she first knew love. In addition to the online ceremony, graduates like Sophie can also participate in an in-person ceremony in December. She has opted for the latter, preferring to postpone rather than participate in what might feel like just another Zoom meeting. I know she is doing this for me. After so many months of social distancing, I will be ready for an in-person and personal party on the patio to celebrate all she has accomplished. There will be handshakes and hugs and high-fives, won’t there? Or maybe there won’t. I remind myself we are only four months into a global pandemic, and my fifty days in a house in Mexico may be but a drop in the bucket.
The President of ASU is saying the right things, encouraging graduates like Sophie to deal with the disappointment and this departure from tradition by tapping into “the same resourcefulness” that has guided their journey to earn a degree at ASU. He tells them they have “demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.” This is also what makes Sophie.
Home is were I want to be.
Overly sentimental today, I am remembering her high school graduation ceremony, the small Senior class filing into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). An appropriately hip processional at an artsy school, it was one of her dad’s favorite songs, five fabulous minutes of toe-tapping polyphony. (He liked a tune that would inspire ‘happy feet,’ a fact that prompted me, one St. Patrick’s Day, to take him to see The Chieftains perform a particularly joyous show in Scottsdale). I had never been so utterly happy to hear the Talking Heads, or so utterly lost. By the time Sophie reached her seat on the stage, I had brushed away memories of David Byrne dancing in his big white suit, and instead was back where she started, asleep and swaddled, six pounds of potential, snug in the space between the crook of her daddy’s arm and the tips of his fingers, safe and secure. Certain sure.
Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.
I stayed home with my daughter for a year after she was born. For twelve idyllic months, with her father off at work, it was the best year of my life. Our baby girl was all mine. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, there were mornings when I danced just like the sign says – like nobody’s watching – around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but that was only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. Other days, I might even have showered, but mostly, I was a bit like the imaginative little girl I once was, the one who had to be reminded to wash her face or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending. How I loved playing with my very own baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with a soft toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink.
I spent interminable hours just looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature, every furrow, every flicker across her face, for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Maybe my hovering bothered her the way it would later in her life. I’m not sure. This was before she had found words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today, a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, those slender fingers in constant motion. I remember we called it hand ballet. Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would too soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears.
Mostly, Sophie bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or perhaps just to let us know she was there. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who were convinced they knew better, I refused to let her “cry it out.” I picked her up the instant I heard her begin to cry at night. From afar, my mother encouraged me, reminding me the way Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. It has indeed been in such desperate times that I have found myself wishing that we mothers could somehow bank all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children in a rainy day fund to help us help them weather whatever storms await them.
When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their cargo pants and Birkenstocks with big mugs of coffee brought from home – this was pre-Starbucks – they were usually still chatting in the parking lot as I left for work. I like to think I left them with a vague impression of adulthood, in my boring Anne Klein suits and my hair on the verge of sensible. I pretended (mostly to myself) that I had evolved into “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all – impossible, I know now, to achieve at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job and my navy suit, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl. Coolly, she placated me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. Although she had to say it more than once, she showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes in response to my wild-eyed fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I know, but the unspoken truth was that I wanted the unflappable Bonnie to lavish on Sophie her undivided attention. I wanted her to spend hours staring, like the Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing the moment Sophie did anything for the very first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew a bubble and the ceremony that followed when I would immediately notify her dad, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as monumental as when she uttered her first word – daddy – or clapped her hands for the first time – just in time for daddy’s birthday – or let go of my hand to stand erect, like a little warrior, to our doting ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
I was madly jealous that it was this magnanimous pre-school teacher – not me – with the right kind of magic up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. The daily choice to walk away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then sit in my car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the sound of my child’s crying distinct from the simultaneous crying of all the other mother’s children. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?
Every day, I waited in the parking lot until those wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had cried away, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remaining, off I went to work – for other people’s children.
Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Like me, Appelt knew this anguish, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he left for college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would eventually find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a physical bookstore where I could also get the print edition of The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday. Every night for a long time, I read to Sophie the story of Appelt’s Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically, it would slip inside his lunch box or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.
Every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were our secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
This refrain would become the salve that soothed those morning goodbyes for both of us, when I left her with Bonnie and other teachers who never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I was sending them the very best child I have. Dissatisfied, I switched schools so much that by the time she finished high school, Sophie had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for the one teacher who might change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.
You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.
The President of ASU has never met Sophie, but if I could sit down with him, I would share with him examples of her Sun Devil spirit. I would tell him about the time before her fourteenth birthday when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I would invite him to stand in a hospital hallway outside the ICU, where she, impersonating “strong and stoic,” is leaning on her beloved daddy and he on her as they wait for surgeons bearing good tidings. Neither of them feels safe nor secure. Squaring up with a false bravado, she is at once confronting the wild fear that I might die yet balking at the notion of wearing the “kid with the sick mom” mantel. She did not want her teachers to know all she did to help during my recovery, in case they felt sorry for her and awarded good grades out of sympathy.
Remember fourteen? A time for rebellion, for rolling your eyes at your mother’s taste in clothes or music because she was your mother for God’s sake and therefore “so embarrassing.” Fourteen was for pushing boundaries and buttons; for experimenting with make-up; for discovering myriad ways to style your hair or sign your name – with hearts instead of dots above “i’s”. For my Sun Devil, this rite of passage was marred by my breast cancer diagnosis, before which she didn’t have to feel as guilty about perfectly acceptable and anticipated acts of rebellion. It was unforgivably unfair. But that’s the nature of the disease, isn’t it? Unfair.
You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.
And then, like a Dickensian ghost, I would take the university president to another time, two years later, just before her sixteenth birthday. Sophie is with me in my mother’s kitchen, far away in rural Derry. She is concentrating on a sketch, and I am on the phone, trying to reach her dad in Phoenix. He does not answer, and the silence from the other side of America on the other side of the Atlantic troubles me so much that I text my best friend to please drive from Chandler to our house in Central Phoenix just to make sure all is well. Sophie is still drawing when my friend calls to tell me that both our cars are in the driveway, that our little dog, Edgar, is sitting on the couch, staring out the window at her. Sophie is still drawing when I hear my friend call out my husband’s name once, twice, and then a third time to no response. He is gone. We stop the clocks.
When we return to our home in Arizona, it is to a space we no longer recognize. The trees her dad planted especially for her no longer make any sense, casting elegant shadows on blades of grass that will never again flatten under his footsteps. The mailman continues to deliver letters bearing his name. We don’t know what to do with them? The hummingbirds flit about the honeysuckle waiting for him to feed them. Disoriented and uncertain, we get lost in our own home, no longer confident about what might happen at three o’clock or seven o’clock. Before, there was no doubt. Now we have to adapt. We persevere. We are becoming Sun Devils.
Today, my daughter is 22. Named after my mother, who has unhelpfully responded to so many of my predicaments with the same question, “What would the wise woman do?” Sophie Elizabeth has earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Family And Human Development, with an emphasis on child psychology, her goal ultimately to work in counseling, to help children who have lost parents or been frightened by the prospect of losing a sick parent to cancer. She has adapted to life without the man who was her first word and who took her for ice cream to a local Dairy Queen, since demolished, every Friday after school, the man who loved the Talking Heads and who would have loved being surprised by that high school graduation processional. He would have tapped his feet and by the end of it would have brushed away a tear, because by then he would have grown sentimental, contemplating the significance of the milestone and the prospect of so many more on the horizon. I like to think he knows somehow that she has navigated every one of them, with an independence and vulnerability that takes my breath away.
He would be so proud of her. He always was, from the first time she spoke right up to about a month before his death, when, unbeknownst to me, he had taken her to a workshop for teen drivers, designed to help her pass her Learner’s Permit test. She needed twenty-one correct answers in a row. Once accomplished, she looked out to where he was waiting and gave him a thumbs-up that prompted the wink and proud-as-punch smile she knew so well. It was still there on his face when I came home from work that day – “Look what we did today!” – and he beamed as our baby girl pressed her new Learner’s Permit into my hand. That was the last milestone our family shared – ordinary yet momentous.
I would also tell the university president that, on one of the six anniversaries of her father’s death, this Sun Devil told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store – to keep her warm. I would emphasize that she is no longer undone by this fact. It is not a sadness that envelops her on these red-letter days. In fact, she sometimes faces the reality of these fatherless moments with a humor that others may find irreverent. The daily reminder that he is not here, that the saddest thing that could ever have happened has already happened reminds her that whatever happens today or on any day could not be worse. No fender-bender or unfair grade or postponed commencement ceremony could be any worse. This is how my Sun Devil rolls, going about her days, working, drawing, laughing, loving, singing, studying, seeking out and finding joy and hope, pausing during our texting the other day to don a pair of oven gloves to help catch and gently usher out the frightened woodpecker that had flown into the kitchen.
Unlike so many of us, who are in this very moment and the next and for who knows how long, struggling to find their way within an extraordinarily altered world, and seeing in front of us only what’s missing, my Sun Devil is focused on the present and the opportunities it presents – “keeping going.”
Raised by a mother who invoked Seamus Heaney to deliver all the most important life lessons – because there really is nothing better than a Heaney poem to explain us to ourselves – Sophie would expect nothing less than advice from our poet on the occasion of her graduation from university. I am here to deliver it. The year before she was born, and coincidentally on Mother’s Day, Seamus Heaney gave to the graduating class of 1996 at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, a commencement speech in which he shared what he described as the essential rhythm of not only survival but achievement: “getting started, keeping going, getting started again.” Our history – collectively and individually – depends on this rhythm, starting and starting over. Now more than ever perhaps we all need to be reminded of this. I know I do . This pandemic is a stepping stone, a place to pause and contemplate the distance covered and – this is important – to find another one. As Heaney told those graduates, it is the next move that is the test for all of us.
Here’s to your next move, Sophie. I am immeasurably proud to be your mother. Congratulations, graduate.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. But there is a pride and joy also, a pride and joy that is surging through this crowd today, through the emotions of your parents and your mothers particularly on Mothers Day, your families and your assembled friends. And through you yourselves especially. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
The local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to this particular task and moved by the number of people visiting to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
