Again, the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago.
In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved into the stone walls. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.
This year, out of over 30,000 applicants, only 50 were selected to experience the solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunatley, Irish weather was as you would expect with clouds and rain keeping the light out.
From the outside, my house glitters like a Christmas card with its tree twinkling in the window and a sign for Santa to please stop here. A little house, it is no different than any other year, except the two women inside it are different, each of us adjusted and adjusting to a life and to living without the constancy of a man for whom our happiness was his heart’s only desire. Each of us wondering what’s next for us – what will begin and what will end.
I remember reading something about a woman who described two distinct lives – the one she lived before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis – her turning point. When I close my eyes to recollect my own diagnosis, I can see myself get up and walk out the door, leaving behind the woman I used to be, offended by the nerve of that Breast Cancer Navigator telling my husband and me that I had cancer. Me?With cancer?
Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips and rendered me wordless. In conspiratorial whispers, she informed my husband of all the details I would forget. It reminded me of the way we quietly speculate about the cause of a death when all the evidence points to hard living. On and on she talked, as if trying to soothe us even as she filled our ears with fear. So many scary words. Not to worry. She stressed that what we were hearing that day in her dimly lit office was not a death sentence.
Nonetheless, I heard a crack, the sound of a life being altered that would have me pondering still and more how to handle poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
I think it might.
I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into our lives, interrupting our plans to celebrate our daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. But we celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a party for Sophie and invited friends over. We remembered to laugh. We went to a Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve. We scheduled the blood-work and the biopsies, the mammograms, and the mastectomy. The healing began. Sort of.
And then, another Christmas, the cancer contained, the promise of a better year. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents came to Arizona to help us bring in 2013. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion and for good luck, we designated my dark-haired husband “the first footer” after midnight. Such relief to shut the door against 2012, a year that had skulked in and scared us, each of us terrified by the cancer and what it might do.
For me – and the woman I used to be – cancer became The Scariest Thing in my life. Like every scary thing that comes to fruition, it had never previously crossed my mind. No. My mind was too consumed with all the things that most likely will never happen. All that worrying. Why? It is such a waste. But the cancer happened, and I wanted everyone to feel as sorry for me as I did for myself and howl about the unfairness of it all. I wanted sympathy – the kind delivered by an Irish mammy over endless cups of tea with reminders that there’s always someone worse off. Always.
I remember my mother cursing the cancer for the thief that it is but she’d temper her remarks with reminders that I was so lucky to be married to the best man in the world. “You could set your watch by him!” she’d say, and then she would jokingly ask him how in the name of God he had put up with me for over twenty years. Not known for my punctuality or having a place for everything and everything in its place, she regularly wondered aloud how I would ever manage without him since he waited on me hand and foot. Without him. In our house. Now that would be a scary thing. Me? A widow?
But in the wee hours of 2013 on a magical New Year’s Eve, I was still Ken’s wife, one half of an “us,” and I was looking ahead and happy. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one July 4th in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with cider that shone in one of the good Waterford crystal glasses, it was a magic time – life was sweet. I remember thinking, believing “All. Is. Well.”
When everyone went to bed on January 1st 2013, I stayed up, savoring the silence of our slumbering house and the opportunity to consider Ted Kooser’s assessment of life, that it 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 …”
It is just like that. And on the shortest day when the sun stops for a moment, I find myself in between two cars, aware that I still have some distance to travel. Forward. And I am ready for it.
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.
Laurie Anderson tells this story about the day she married her best friend, Lou Reed:
“It was spring in 2008 when I was walking down a road in California feeling sorry for myself and talking on my cell with Lou. “There are so many things I’ve never done that I wanted to do,” I said.
“Like what?”
“You know, I never learned German, I never studied physics, I never got married.”
“Why don’t we get married?” he asked. “I’ll meet you halfway. I’ll come to Colorado. How about tomorrow?”
“Um – don’t you think tomorrow is too soon?”
“No, I don’t.”
And so the next day, we met in Boulder, Colorado, and got married in a friend’s backyard on a Saturday, wearing our old Saturday clothes, and when I had to do a show right after the ceremony, it was OK with Lou.”
Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.
Photo: Annie Leibowitz
The day Ken married me was like any other. We were just watching TV when I suggested it. “OK,” he said, and he put on his boots.
I dug out the yellow pages, where I found a wedding chapel in an old west Phoenix neighborhood. The preacher there reminded me of the blue-eyed old man in Field of Dreams, who regaled Kevin Costner’s, Ray Kinsella, with a story about Moonlight (Doc) Graham and all the blue hats he never got around to giving his wife, Alicia.
In our everyday clothes and without a ring, 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. Easy to say and to mean to say. Madly in love, we had no reason to suspect that cancer (mine) or aneurysms (his) would move in and turn things upside down more than once and make us resent our own bodies and our selves. Oblivious to any hint of dark days ahead, we filled up that ordinary November morning with a time-honored stream of extraordinary promises. We couldn’t stop smiling, and we didn’t even tell anyone. Young and wild, it was as though we had eloped to Gretna Green. And with this secret, we even went to work afterwards. Along with all the other rituals we performed every day, the act of getting married was as casual as it was important. Without fanfare or hoopla, it was ours. Completely ours. Private.
For a long time, we were answerable only to each other and did as we wished without having to worry much about other people. One hot Friday afternoon, when I was desperate to smell the sea, Ken just told me to get in the car. Off we went. No map. No GPS. No bottles of water. No phone. No specific destination other than “ocean.” That night, we were in Los Angeles inhaling the salty 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 – would be our family’s vacation spot.
We created hundreds of lovely little rituals and routines over the years. It was easy because, as my mother still reminds me, I could set my watch by Ken. I always knew where he was, what he was doing, how much he loved me, how much I exasperated him, how proud he was of things I did in my professional life and how much he hated the bullshit I brought into our home from that same profession. He was my supporter, once telling 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 one day. Well, Ken, I need it now. I know you didn’t want me to harden; you wanted me to be tough. But it is tough some days to fully absorb the blow of your death, to anticipate your empty seat at our girl’s upcoming milestones – college, her first paycheck, perhaps her wedding – or to look up and expect you to walk in with another mug of coffee or a glass of wine for me, to inquire what I’m blogging about, to wonder aloud – with a wry and worried smile – if the woman I once was would be coming back any time soon.
No doubt – each of us wrestled with the truth that the 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 rarely 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. Did I do something wrong? Is it about me? (I mean, isn’t it always about me?) Can you at least tell me what it begins with? Just the first letter? Does it begin with a “Y”?
No baby. Just private thoughts. Private thoughts, my honey”.
Private thoughts.
An unsatisfactory response for someone who has to know the inner details, the finer points, the “how are you really feeling” liner notes. But he never told me. Growing up and old by his side, I suppose I figured out 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.
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 resented the notion of his name and address being placed on a list perhaps to be sold to someone who would profit from it. When he detected that she was annoyed because he was not cooperating the way a good customer should, 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.
That’s how it was, except when it wasn’t, when he would insist that I had somehow lost my sense of humor. My retort would be that he had lost his ability to be funny. It would maybe turn into an argument about some other thing, a trifling thing, or nothing at all. Then it would pass, like every other storm in a teacup. And we would be certain again. Fearless.
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
