“We live in direct relation to the heroes and sheroes we have. The men and women who without knowing our names or recognizing our faces, risked and sometimes gave their lives to support our country and our way of living. We must say thank you.”
… a reminder this Memorial Day to say thank you to the strangers who made so much possible for so many of us.
I first encountered Maya Angelou’s writing as a young teacher in America. In the English textbook provided to me by the school district was an excerpt from “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and even though it was the story of a Black woman’s childhood in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, it resonated with me, then a young woman from another generation and from a tiny country on the other side of the world. The humanity in Angelou’s story reaches out into the universe where it will take up permanent residence in millions of hearts.
I remember reading aloud to teenagers from affluent white families, Angelou’s lyrical and clear-eyed account of a harrowing world in which she had been abused, raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend, abandoned by her parents, left homeless, poor, and, for almost five years, unable to speak. But in this tumultuous life, she also fell in love with William Shakespeare and Dickens, with the written and spoken word. We are all the better for that, and I suppose the lesson for my students and for me was, as Anne Frank wrote in her diary,
I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.
Such beauty. At 86, the indomitable Maya Angelou was active on Twitter, sending out to almost half a million followers, soul-stirring messages in 140 characters or less. Miniature poems. The day before she died, she took to social media again:
Over the years, I have collected bits and pieces of wisdom and encouragement that I turn to when the going gets tough, as it invariably does. Growing up, I was often told, “show me who your friends are, and I’ll show you who you are.” I was unconvinced of that, but with age comes experience and discernment and a willingness to listen again to advice I may not always have heeded:
As my daughter made her way into to adulthood, I hoped she would learn that the very first time a person lies to her or about her would be the first of all the other times; that the very first time someone wounds her with indifference or arrogance, manipulation or meanness, acts merely as precedent. The same might be said for integrity and loyalty which I suppose is why betrayal hurts so much, or as Arthur Miller once put it, why it is “the only truth that sticks.”
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Believe them – the first time, not the millionth time, so you know sooner rather than later, whether to walk this road with them or without them, dignity intact either way.
And for that perspective, Maya Angelou, I am forever in your debt.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
When I die Give what’s left of me away To children And old men that wait to die. And if you need to cry, Cry for your brother Walking the street beside you. And when you need me, Put your arms Around anyone And give them What you need to give to me.
I want to leave you something, Something better Than words Or sounds.
Look for me In the people I’ve known Or loved, And if you cannot give me away, At least let me live on in your eyes And not on your mind.
You can love me most By letting Hands touch hands, By letting Bodies touch bodies, And by letting go Of children That need to be free.
Love doesn’t die, People do. So, when all that’s left of me Is love, Give me away.
I’ll see you at home In the earth.
He always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because then he wouldn’t have to miss me. Far better – for him. A private man, my late 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 Northern Ireland 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 what to do at the wake when led silently into a small bedroom where the deceased has been “laid out” in an open coffin; 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, when to whisper, when to weep and when to throw our heads back in laughter over the craic about a life lived in full.
There would be no funeral, the likes of which I remember from my childhood, the women staying behind and staying busy, making sandwiches cut into tidy 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 and maybe a half-un of whiskey. After my grandfather’s funeral, my mother reminds me the men came back to the house 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. 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 – “I’m sorry for your trouble” that conjures Big Jim Evans and the old men in Heaney’s Mid-Term Break – parochial and intimate.
There was none of that for Ken, and without these rituals in the days following his 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 the bits and pieces of a public goodbye and to fill the air with his favorite music, a bit of trad, a toe-tapping Irish reel. I wanted a place to go on his birthday, to bring flowers, maybe some freesias because he loved their scent. He wanted none of that. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.
I was far away 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 struggling 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 such a spot 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.
When I returned to Bellaghy the following summer, I visited the grave again. This time, a simple wooden cross leaned into 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 in those early days told me my husband had gone on to a better place. 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?
There is no more desolate space than the empty seat at the table.
For just a minute today, I’d like to hear the two of them laugh over a comic strip in the Sunday paper. The truth is that all these years later, it still sometimes feels as though he just went missing.
Where is he?
The lingering wonderings are 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. Fixating on that detail, I wondered about his 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 there to find “his” tree had been cut down and the surrounding area chained off for commercial development. For the time being, an empty space that brought me to tears 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 place 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.
With the right words at the right time – again – came Seamus Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the 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.
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
Not you, Nelson Mandela. Over one hundred years ago, you came into this world with boldness and made your mark on it – Madiba will ring out forever. On this day in 2018, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, went to Johannesburg, to commemorate the anniversary of your birth, and did so with an eloquence and a rallying cry that many Americas had been missing – a reminder to cleave to your values of democracy and diversity, of equity, of kindness:
I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision. I believe in a vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln. I believe in a vision of equality, justice, freedom and multi-racial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal.
Madiba, I am drawn back to June of 2013, to when we heard news that you were gravely ill. As reports poured out of Pretoria, South Africa that you were on life support, we held our breath, not wanting to accept that you were frail at 94, ill, and nearing the end of your life. Then – and today – in my mind’s eye, you are still at the beginning of your life as Mandela, the free man, who stepped onto the world’s stage in 1990 after spending 27 years behind bars.
In the darkest days of Apartheid, no one – other than you – could have imagined the man in that tiny cell as the future President of your country, that you would one day stand among rock stars and royalty and popes and presidents to advocate for democracy and justice, to inspire a vision of peace that transcended race and creed, that you would matter to so many people and that he would make so many people matter. People like me. As Obama is reminding us today:
Through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and perhaps, most of all, through his moral example, Mandela and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world.
Mandela mattered to me because he embodied what could be. Like Martin Luther King‘s dream of what America could be and like the dream of peace envisioned for Northern Ireland by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, his vision of South Africa as a democratic rainbow-nation inspired the first all-race democratic election. Mandela moved more than 17 million black South Africans – 17 million – to vote for the first time. What a sight to behold, even on a tiny television screen in a tiny country on the other side of the world. Before our eyes, proof that anything can happen, that Seamus Heaney‘s hope and history can rhyme. Before our eyes, “madiba magic.”
Over 30 years ago, not long before I emigrated to the United States, a boyfriend surprised me with a ticket to Paul Simon’sGraceland concert in Dublin for my birthday. Boisterous and beautiful, the performance sparkles in my memory as one that transcended the ugliness of apartheid. Paul Simon had been and still is widely criticized for performing in South Africa, but how could we fault him for accepting an invitation from black South African musicians to collaborate on some of the most hopeful and uplifting music ever created? This was glorious music that represented the “days of miracle and wonder” that were possible in the heart of Mandela, music that represented the universal dream of Martin Luther King.
In accepting a Grammy award for the album, Simon said of his fellow musicians and friends:
They live under one of the most oppressive regimes on earth today, and still they are able to produce music of great power, nuance and joy, and they have my respect for that.
I remember Paul Simon was one of the first people Mandela invited to South Africa as a free man – not just because the bars had been removed, but because he had left bitterness and rancor behind. Not everyone could or would. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called Mandela a terrorist, speaking for most of her party. When the Iron Lady took office, I recall her strident refusal to enforce sanctions on apartheid while much of the world was doing so. Her policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government polarized her such that following her death, there were reports of only a few tears shed in South Africa.
As young university students in Belfast in 1984, we sang along with The Specials urging those who could to “Free Nelson Mandela.” How could we not? His release was a moral imperative; it was the right thing to do against a racist regime. We were so young and full of hope for a better future, and it was through that lens that Thatcher and others in her party appeared resolute in their support of white rule which seemed only to prolong Mandela’s time in that tiny cell. On the other side of the argument, there were those, including De Klerk, who felt that “Thatcher correctly believed that more could be achieved through constructive engagement with his government than international sanctions and isolation of the South African government.”
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. It always does.
When Mandela walked out of jail, the world cracked open. Enormous challenges lay ahead with even more bloodshed, but apartheid would eventually come to an end. Together, De Klerk and Mandela would rise up to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace for their shared vision of a South Africa without apartheid, of a democratic nation. Perhaps this would be the example for other countries beleaguered by bigotry and bitterness, proof positive that it is possible to sustain humanity in a world defined by brutal divisiveness.
Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award inspired by fellow Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney’s “From the Republic of Conscience,” was presented to Mandela in 2006. Perfect then that Heaney would be the first to congratulate Mandela thus:
To have written a line about “hope and history rhyming for Mr. Mandela in 1990 is one thing . . . to have the man who made them rhyme accept the Award inspired by my poem is something else again.
At the beginning of the summer of 2013, I imagine Seamus Heaney was vexed over the thought of a world without Mandela. I think we all were. I remember a Sunday morning conversation with my late husband about Mandela’s charisma and fortitude, his inestimable influence – the “Madiba magic” that changed the world. Drinking our coffee, aware of our smallness in the world, we were sad that Mandela’s time was coming to an end. I didn’t want to believe it – the world still needed him, and so I turned to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the way I still do in the in-between times.
And then, just six months later, Madiba was gone. Seamus Heaney was gone. My husband was gone too. Gone. Like three shooting stars in the night sky above me – startling and beautiful and gone forever. For a time, it felt like my world might end. But only for a time.
Addressing the United Nations back in 1990 Mandela reminded those listening:
We must work for the day when we, as South Africans, see one another and interact with one another as equal human beings and as part of one nation united, rather than torn asunder, by its diversity,
He knew that many of those who had fought against apartheid had been made refugees by it. He would surely be alarmed today by the growing levels of xenophobia and nationalism in Africa – and beyond. The 2022 Africa Youth Survey reveals intolerance for refugees and immigrants among young people surveyed in 15 African nations; two new political parties, ActionSA and Patriotic Alliance, made significant gains in municipal elections in 2021 by running on divisive, anti-immigrant platforms. This we know – freedom untended runs the risk of slipping away from us.
South Africa – the world – could use Mandela’s inspiration and his example, as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminded us just yesterday, “Our world today is marred by war; overwhelmed by emergencies; blighted by racism, discrimination, poverty, and inequalities; and threatened by climate disaster.” South Africa is among the world’s most unequal countries, the gap between rich and poor ever widening, the poor being told to wash their hands – with little access to water – as the pandemic overwhelmed the country; unemployment is at its highest in the country’s history and among the highest globally; over 65% of the population struggling to afford food. The inequality in South Africa has increased since apartheid ended in 1994, according to the World Bank. The country is unraveling without Mandela, the man whose greatest miracle perhaps was that he made people in every corner of the world believe that the way things should be can overcome the way things are, that the world can change.
Time to change the world. No time to play small. No time to settle for smallness in hearts and minds and governments.
“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
Many relationships in my life, I conduct almost entirely by telephone, including those with the people dearest to me. With so many miles of ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it has been easier to carry on conversations from the comfort of our own homes. I suppose in that regard, it has been business as usual during the pandemic. Always, there is something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Once upon a time, before WhatsApp and Facetime, there were long-distance phone calls with my mother scheduled at odd hours during weekends when we could be less circumspect with the time difference and the cost per minute. Before Facebook, there were also sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar, we fell softly into conversation and picked up where we left off years before.
By telephone, we delivered and received the most important news of our lives, from that which cannot be shared quickly enough: “I got the job!” “She said yes!” “We’re having a baby!” “It’s a girl!” to the kind that startles the silence too early in the morning or too late at night to be anything good. From a tiny village in Wales, news from an old friend that her husband had been killed outright in a car accident: “My darling is gone! My darling is gone! Gone!” From me in a parking lot outside a Scottsdale hospital, to my best friend, who, fingers crossed waiting for “benign,” answers before the end of the first ring, only to hear, “I have cancer.” Two years later, it is my turn to wait on the other end of the line on another continent while she, parked outside my Phoenix home, tells me on a bad connection that, yes, both my car and his are were parked in the driveway, that, yes, our little dog, Edgar, is inside sitting on the couch, silently staring back at her. My ear pressed hard to the phone, I can hear her open the front door and tentatively call my husband’s name once, twice, and then after a third time, the words traveling over the wires “He’s passed away! He’s passed away! Oh, he’s so cold. I’m so sorry.” And then the hanging up so she could make another call to 9.1.1 and then I’m back on the line again to listen to the sounds of my sunny little house on the other side of the world fill up with strangers, kind and efficient, from the police and fire departments, the crisis management team, and finally the people from the one mortuary that agreed to take my husband’s body even though there was some as yet unresolved fuss over who would sign the death certificate.
If nobody would sign it, perhaps he wasn’t dead.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” I breathed into the phone.
Thus, two best friends are connected in an ephemeral silence with nothing to hold on to.
Nothing.
In a different time, I would have received a telegram, or a hand-written letter. Words on paper deal the blow differently – better, I think, than the phone’s surreal real-time. Sitting down to write a letter brings more time to shape our tidings with the very best words we have. Even though we know they are inadequate.
I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by e-mails and texts that, regardless of font and typeface, emoji and GIF, are just not the same. I miss what Simon Garfield says has been lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers,” I miss walking out to a red brick mailbox, to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, Par Avion. I used to imagine its journey, all the hands it passed through on its way to me from a red pillar box in a village in Northern Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to me in the desert southwest of the United States. I miss the creases and ink-smudges; the tea-stained ring of my mother’s cup; and, the barely there fragrance of her soap.
I saved so many of them. Along with faded picture postcards, they are in a cardboard box, waiting to be reread, immortal reminders of people I treasure and who treasure me. I cannot say the same of my textual exchanges.
I have been living in Mexico since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no mailman here – if there is, I have yet to see him – but I still check the letterbox in our front door every day. To send or receive a letter, I drive about a mile to a shop between here and the lovely little village which is returning to a kind of normal after on-again-off-again lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing protocols, new vaccines, new variants, and never-ending social media debates about all of these. It’s not officially over, and the virus itself will always be around, but it appears to be “socially over,” people exhausted and drained as they resume a kind of normalcy, no longer fearing perhaps – or no longer caring about – the virus which has upended life as we knew it, keeping us apart yet also bringing us together.
In 2020, the United States Postal Service reported that letter writing increased, perhaps gaining more interest because unlike digital and disposable exchanges, letters require a little more labor, a little more intention. After all, you have to find your best pen, write the letter, place it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and send it. You have to slow down – even as the world around you spins at breakneck speed.
In part, these are the sentiments behind the Letters of Note website, a homage to the craft of letter-writing. Editor, Shaun Usher, has painstakingly collected and transcribed letters, memos, and telegrams that deserve a wider audience. Among my favorite books is this beautiful book of letters. Because I am of a time when telegrams came from America and other places, to be read by the Best Man at wedding receptions, I opted for the collectible first edition, accompanied by an old-fashioned telegram.
Anyway, considering telegrams and old letters, and the heart laid bare on stationery this Valentine’s Day, I am reading again the letter of marriage advice from then future President Ronald Reagan to his son, Michael.
Regardless of what I may think of Reagan as a President, there is both heart and craft in this love letter, originally published in Reagan – A Life in Letters.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Michael Reagan
Manhattan Beach, California June 1971
Dear Mike:
Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.
You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the ‘unhappy marrieds’ and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.
Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was ’til three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it.
The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.
Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Love,
Dad
P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’ at least once a day.
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:
Over 30 years ago, not long before I emigrated to the United States, a boyfriend surprised me with a ticket to 
I remember Paul Simon was one of the first people Mandela invited to South Africa as a free man – not just because the bars had been removed, but because he had left bitterness and rancor behind. Not everyone could or would. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called Mandela a terrorist, speaking for most of her party. When the Iron Lady took office, I recall her strident refusal to enforce sanctions on apartheid while much of the world was doing so. Her policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government polarized her such that following her death, there were reports of only a few tears shed in South Africa.
I saved so many of them. Along with faded picture postcards, they are in a cardboard box, waiting to be reread, immortal reminders of people I treasure and who treasure me. I cannot say the same of my textual exchanges.
In part, these are the sentiments behind the 
