en cuarentena & the rare ould times

29 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

Having now spent most of every day for sixty days in a beautiful house that is not yet home, this quarantine has me in its grip, a relentless barrage of questions about Coronavirus keeping me apart from and a part of a world that feels adrift and different. How do I escape it? When will it end? Will I ever see my own ones again? What if they get sick? What if I get sick? What if I die here? What if they die there? Did the avuncular technician who installed our new wifi router last week wash his hands? Do I really need to wear the mandatory face mask on a too-hot but solitary walk down and up an unforgiving cobbled hill a mile above a village a mile above sea-level?

How will it end? What if it never ends? Morbid, maudlin, mundane, the questions keep coming. Realizing that sixty days and nights have passed since we last spent time singing songs and rubbing shoulders with strangers in busy bars – and that more shall pass before we do so again – my anxiety deepens about this quarantine – cuarentena – the state of it, the word and where it came from, the world and where it may go.

Quarantine first appeared in my lexicon in the 1970s when the bubonic plague showed up in my history textbook. Before that, as the child of a church going family, I had known about plagues only in the context of those Old Testament disasters God had sent to the Egyptians when hard hearted Pharaoh refused to let His people go. Nightmarish, there were ten of them, plagues of blood and boils, hail and locusts, frogs and flies, livestock and lice, and of darkness and ultimately of the killing of first-born children. And, I knew all about them. An attentive child, always afraid of getting in trouble, I took notice at Sunday School and at the Good News and Five Day Clubs that featured prominently in the summers of my early childhood, when the missionary man and his assistant set up shop to bring the “Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ” on the same corner where Mr. Softee parked. A strategic move, in retrospect. Carefully, they spread a clear plastic sheet on the grass in front of our row of council houses on the Dublin Road and there the children sat in crooked rows, obedient, singing along and doing the actions to blue-grass gospel hymns like “Deep and Wide (There’s a Fountain Flowing).” Even though they served up fire and brimstone, these evangelical ministries also brought prizes and stickers and therefore were in the same league as rounders and hide-and-go-seek or hopscotch. Once I remember asking my mother what it meant to ‘”get saved” and if was something I needed to do. Instead of giving me a satisfactory answer, she told me to give her head peace. Still, I remember going to a place – some variety of ‘hall’ – more than once where other people most certainly ‘got saved’ and immediately thereafter began speaking in tongues. It was all very exciting. And, from some of these places, some of the stories stuck, like the story about the plague to kill first-born babies, re-written for children like me in an illustrated book Baptists had given me for memorizing so well my Bible verses, like the story about baby Moses nestled in a basket in the bulrushes on the banks of the Nile River. Moses was safe.

And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.

So when the subject of Black Death came up in our History class, I wondered why I hadn’t already read about it in the Old Testament. It was certainly of Biblical proportions, a ghastly disease that struck Europe and Asia in the middle of the 14th century. We learned how King Edward III tried to curb the contagion when it reached England. To keep people safe, a lockdown was in effect – a quarantine – modeled after the Italian practice of requiring ships arriving in Venice from infected ports to sit at anchor for forty days – quaranta giorni – before landing. Although it was no match for this plague which wiped out entire families and communities and claimed half of the population in England, the quarantine measures would become contingency plans for future outbreaks. The plague indeed returned, and with a vengeance, resurfacing as many as forty times from 1348 to 1665, the last of those killing over 100,000 Londoners during The Great Plague. When the plague appeared in a household, the house was sealed, ensuring that all inside would die. Such houses – and I remember this clearly from a Medieval illustration in my textbook – were distinguished by a crude red cross painted on the door and the words, “Lord have mercy on us.” And, in response to the nightly cry “Bring out your dead!” bodies of the dead were hauled away on carts to mass graves, where they were dumped without ceremony.

How does it end? That is the question.

From Mexico, I scour daily the ever-expanding online spaces for information about the 2020 pandemic, for clues about how it might end. The devastation reported in a Los Angeles Times article does not reflect the official numbers from the government. From all across Mexico, there are stories of full funeral homes, morgues with no more refrigerator space for corpses, and hospitals unable to accept more patients. Nobody seems to know for sure how many people are dying from this pandemic which will keep me ‘en casa’ until at least June 1.

Dispatches from back home arrive via Twitter or Facebook or from Ryan Tubridy seated at least 2m away from in-studio guests without his regular live audience on The Late Late. And, they come from RTE’s Department of Health Covid-19 daily briefings, during which, without politics or politicians, the kindly Dr Tony Holohan delivers sobering data about the dead and the dying in Ireland, with a decency and decorum that is longed for in other places. In other places, people appear to have forgotten that behind every statistic there once lived a person – a real person – loved and missed. Gone.

Covid-19 has brought seismic changes, our routines and rituals no longer relevant or, in some places, allowable in a world in quarantine. From the classroom to the boardroom, those of us who are fortunate and privileged to do so have moved into the realm of the Internet, our days meandering without shape and structure, online the lines blurred between work and recreation. In-person contact has all but disappeared – no handshakes sealing deals – no deals – no kisses hello, no hugs goodbye, no wakes, no funerals as we used to know them. From our living rooms, we can order our groceries and our meals from restaurants desperate to stay afloat; we can binge-watch Ozark and, from the best seats in the house, we can watch The Rolling Stones deliver perhaps their best performance of “You Can’t Always Get What you Want.”

We can see up-close our faraway aging parents on WhatsApp and FaceTime, and when we get bored with the sight of each other, we can virtually tour virtually any museum in the world. Alone at home, we have all that we need in another online world. Part of it, apart from it, we remain digitally connected to the people and places we need, yet terribly distant.

I could have participated via Zoom in my daughter’s graduation from university last week, but decided instead to postpone the pomp and circumstance for an in-person party in December. There will be handshakes and proper 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 sixty days in the house may be but a drop in the bucket.

From where I sit in paradise, the truth is that I miss who we used to be, and I fear these online versions of ourselves are no match for a post-Corona-world that will look very different when we go out in it again, from the one we used to know.

Ring a ring a rosie, as the light declines
I remember Dublin city in the rare ould times

the day eavan boland died . . .

27 Monday Apr 2020

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Covid-19, eavan boland, Quarantine

Where I have been living since the beginning of the pandemic, there is no mailman, no mailbox at the end of the driveway, no letterbox in the front door. To send or receive a letter, we have to drive about a mile to a shop on the carraterra between here and the lovely little village which has been deadly quiet of late. While the package that was mailed to me from Arizona three months ago and then disappeared after spending most of these three months in Mexico city, the postcards I have sent to Phoenix and Derry and Limerick and Belfast have all been received. It gladdens me to think of my mother, isolated with my dad in their Castledawson home until this time of Corona passes, turning over a postcard from an impossibly far away Tlaquepaque and seeing my handwriting for the first time in years.

It was because of Eavan Boland that I began sending picture postcards. Thinking about her lately, the way I think about Seamus Heaney, whose words have scored so much of my life, it comes to me that she had – past tense – that way of knowing the things that matter most to people, those routines and rituals that shape our ways of being in the world. She knew how to make personal the political and the public.

THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING

The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.
The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers

Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,
Always performing—even when a shadow
Fell across the page and they knew the answer
Was not forthcoming—the same action:

First the leaning down, the pen becoming
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory. Then the letting up,

The lighter stroke, which brought back
Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel
Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass

Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn
Again just in time for the May Novenas
Recited in sweet air on a road leading

To another road, then another one, widening
To a motorway with four lanes, ending in
A new town on the edge of a city

They will never see. And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see

The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became

Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew

By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?

Eavan Boland

On the desk in the room that I should use as a writing room, sits a little plastic bag of scenic postcards, bought in a grocery store in nearby Chapala before we were ordered to stay home. I plan to send them all, these ‘wish-you-were-heres’ to the ones who know me best – to my own ones. I am hoping the letter writer I used to be will return and take advantage of the hours now available to shape various tidings with the very best words I can find – there is only so much room on a post card, even less than on that red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail – par avion.

I sent two postcards this morning and when I returned to sit and stare out from the beautiful kitchen of a home that is not yet home, I read online that Eavan Boland died today after suffering a major stroke.

With the passing of Eavan Boland Ireland has lost not only an internationally acclaimed poet, distinguished academic and author, but one of the most insightful inner sources of Irish life, not only in life as expressed but as sensed and experienced.
President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins

Boland had been teaching at Stanford University in California, only returning to Ireland a month ago to be close to her family in light of the covid-19 pandemic and its attendant stay-at-home orders. Absorbing the news of her death, my mind wanders to her poem, “Quarantine.” In just twenty spare lines, she tells the story of an unnamed husband and wife during the Irish Famine, that catastrophic period described by former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, as the event ‘which more than any other shaped us as a people. It defined our will to survive. It defined our sense of human vulnerability.“

Honoring the dead couple in the poem, Boland honors forever over a million people, many of them nameless, who lost their lives to starvation and disease. Sitting in my house, far from home, reading online daily updates of thousands more Covid-19 deaths all over the world, I am reminded of this, and of why, in Boland’s own words, she wrote Quarantine, the poem that would eventually be one of ten shortlisted for RTÉ’s selection of Ireland’s favorite poems of the last 100 years in 2015 – “to bring together so much of the public agony and private experience of the Ireland of that time. Just a terrible parable of people on the dark side of history, who somehow amend it for a moment by the grace of their actions.”

Amazing grace.

Quarantine
Eavan Boland – 1944-2020

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

in spite of himself

08 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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John Prine

Right around the time that big old pink supermoon arrived in the sky last night, John Prine left us. I like to think he would have liked to pen a song about that, capturing it in lines that rhyme. Within the confines of four verses, it would be full of mischief and marvel, working us over the way a Prine song does, making us laugh and cry at the same time.

I was sixteen years old the first time I heard one of his songs, and for that lyrical moment – and so many others – I am indebted to my English teacher, Mr. Jones. Every day, Mr. Jones wore the same tweed jacket – it had leather patches on the elbows and on its lapel, a “Save the Otter” button. Naturally, he was well-read, but in retrospect – and more importantly – he was as accessible as a John Prine song. Always the best reader in the room, be brought vividly to life Chaucer’s Pardoner and other questionable characters, knowing the bawdy exchanges that would most appeal to our adolescent sensibilities. With impeccable timing, he knew when we’d had our fill of something like as hefty as the Great Expectations of Charles Dickens. And, at such times, he would pause to wax philosophical or tell us to underscore in red great chunks of text we should learn by heart:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

For emphasis, he would add “Great stuff!”

Mr. Jones didn’t realize he introduced me to John Prine just as he had changed my life by bringing to it the words and music of Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. He even let me borrow his records. I remember like it was yesterday, a day when we were discussing one of Wilfred Owen’s war poems – which led to me learning about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and subsequently wearing a CND badge on the lapel of my school blazer – Mr. Jones told me about No Nukes, a live album featuring many of the artists that would contribute to the soundtrack of my life. Because I wanted to impress him, I spent my lunch-money at Ronnie Millar’s Pop-in record shop and came home with my the first triple album. It remains part of my collection – part of me. On Side 1 of Record 1 were two songs performed by Bonnie Raitt, one of them the John Prine song that began flooding the airwaves last night, the song that has followed me like a shadow for forty odd years – “Angel from Montgomery.” How the hell does a twenty-something mailman write a song from the vantage point of a middle aged Southern woman trapped in her own self-made prison? How did John Prine know that a 16 year old girl in Northern Ireland was afraid that she too might one day be trapped in a hot kitchen, the silence around her disturbed only by the sounds of ’em buzzin’?

I could have asked him when I met him after a sold-out show in Phoenix. The roadies had packed it all up, and he was the only person left backstage. I couldn’t believe my luck – a brief but private audience with John Prine. If he was in a hurry to leave, he didn’t show it. As if we were old friends striking up a conversation that had begun years ago, he told me he loved Ireland and had a house there. His wife was Irish. I told him I loved his songs and . . . I told him to write some more. With a croaky chuckle and laughing eyes, he didn’t say he wouldn’t. He thanked us for coming to the show and gave me a big hug. I will forever be grateful for that opportunity. I had won the big door prize.

Ireland, I’m sorry for your trouble . . .

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by Editor in Covid-19, Death and dying, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Funeral, Rituals, saying goodbye, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney

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Covid-19, Grief, Irish Wake and Funeral, Seamus Heaney

. . .feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.
From A Kite for Michael and Christopher by Seamus Heaney

My mother tells me she and my dad were able to attend Palm Sunday services on Sunday,virtually, on the iPad I gave her a few years ago. It took a wee while to get the hang of it, she says, but it was lovely, the Minister and his wife reaching the faithful with Bible readings and music from an empty village church, one of thousands of empty churches across the island of Ireland as Holy Week, the highpoint of the Christian calendar unfolds. In this time of Coronavirus, my mother’s iPad, dismissed once upon a time by my father as an unnecessary new fangled contraption that he would never use, is now a cherished lifeline for my parents, unwitting poster-children of physical distancing and social connecting.

The full impact of church closures in Ireland struck me last week, when I read on Facebook about the untimely death of a woman I remember as a laughing girl playing hopscotch around the corner. In the middle of the online Funeral Notice of her death, under the heading Funeral and Wake Arrangements, sat a sentence in its own paragraph, a sentence copied and pasted in every subsequent notice:

In keeping with Government Regulations at this time, the wake, funeral and burial will be strictly private and for family members only.

Strictly private.

Such a request – strictly private – used to be a choice for grieving families. To be fair, it was also a choice that was sometimes ignored, the custom of visiting the wake or the house over two days so deeply ingrained in our culture, especially in rural communities. As this pandemic tightens its grip, it is no longer a choice nor can it be ignored. Public worship, private prayer, and all other meetings and activities except for vital community services are cancelled, with “strictly private” among the new protocols for funerals issued by the HSE to the Irish Association of Funeral Directors. For the foreseeable future, there will be no traditional funerals and wakes, no slow and sombre procession behind a hearse down country lanes, no turn-taking with the ‘lifting.’ Everywhere the Coronavirus has struck, regardless of religion, north or south of the border, there are new rites for closeness and closure. The traditions that have for so long allowed us to pay our respects in known ways have been abandoned. Those known ways in Ireland, I once read, were the right ways.

“It’s definitely an Irish thing,” a friend of mine once surmised, musing that the way we deal with dying and death is stitched tidily in our DNA. She may have a point. While no one explicitly taught us these rituals, we have learned by heart to mark time, stop the clocks, cover mirrors, and close the curtains. We do not falter when led silently into a darkened bedroom where the deceased has been ‘laid out’ in an open coffin. We know how to express condolences over strong tea in china cups balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits. We know when to shake hands and say like a catechism the thing that only we say, “I’m sorry for your trouble.” We know when to whisper, when to weep, and when to throw our heads back in laughter over a bit of craic about a life lived in full. We know the songs to sing. We are the people in the Seamus Heaney poems. We know our place. Denied it, we are lost.

My first remembered experience of an Irish funeral was when my grandfather died in 1977. Scores of men in dark suits came out to pay their respects and to say goodbye to Granda. I wasn’t allowed to go – in those days in rural County Derry, women and girls did not attend funerals. Only the men representing the neighboring townlands of Broagh, Lemnaroy, and Drumlamph, participated in the walking cortège along the Hillhead road. Warm in the sunshine that splashed intermittently through woody rhododendrons and alder trees, walked sons and brothers, grandsons, nephews, distant male relatives, and neighboring farmers, some of them, including my father, taking turns with “the lifting” of the coffin. Denied the opportunity to walk with the men who filled the road my grandfather had revealed to me on our walks, I hid most of the day. My road, I knew where the foxgloves and bluebells hid, where the travelers camped their ponies and colorful caravans, where to find big, broad docken leaves that would instantly soothe the sting of a nettle, and where Granda would stop for a minute to retrieve a Barley Sugar from his pocket.

While the men were at the funeral, the women stayed behind and stayed busy, making sandwiches that were neatly cut into little triangles and placed with shortbread and buns on three-tiered china cake stands. After the burial, the men returned to the house followed by a steady stream of mourners, to pay their respects over cups of tea or perhaps “a half-un” of whiskey. After my grandfather’s funeral, the men returned, my mother reminds me not for a cup of tea in your hand, in the parlance, but instead to sit down at a tea-table, on which a white linen tablecloth bore plates of salad, meats, chutneys, and homemade damson plum jam to spread on just baked wheaten bread. And, after them, well into the wee hours, callers came and went with hugs and home-baked Victoria sponges and songs and stoic handshakes punctuated with that simple salve – “sorry for your trouble” that conjures Big Jim Evans and the old men in Heaney’s Mid-Term Break – parochial, intimate, and for the foreseeable future, taboo.

Today, the Irish Hospice Foundation launched a Care and Inform online hub to provide accurate information around funerals and grieving during the Covid-19 crisis. It includes new ways, new norms to replace the traditions that have carried us for hundreds of years, and the Irish must and will find new ways and words to rise to the occasion, to show the kind of sympathy and solidarity that is needed now more than before. At one funeral service, the congregation was made up of floral tributes on each seat with families attending via Zoom or Google Hangouts. A photograph circulating on Twitter shows neighbors lining the road to the graveyard, silent sentinels maintaining social distancing as they bid a poignant and final farewell.

In the weeks to come, the Irish will continue to discover different ways to reach out to the dying, the dead, and the bereaved. There will be new rituals for burial and bereavement – virtual and surreal as this very time – to connect the living and the dead. When it comes to grieving, Heaney once wrote, we are born ‘fit for it’ – we are well suited to ‘take the strain.’