This winter Sunday, I woke to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel, my da sharpening my bread knife because “it wouldn’t cut butter.” I stayed in bed, allowing the long metallic strokes on each side of the blade to carry me back to the kitchen of my childhood, my father making sure the knife was sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast or the Christmas turkey. Like changing a tire or wiring a plug, it is something he has always thought I should know how to do.
Regarding the honing of the bread-knife, he says I need only exert the same pressure on each side of it and then carefully test its sharpness on the inside of my thumb. I have tried – admittedly driven more by nostalgia than necessity – but I have never been able to get the sound right. My mother can’t do it either, nor has she ever tried. Without my father, I suspect the knives in her kitchen would be as dull as mine.
Packing clothes for the journey from Belfast to Dublin and on to chilly Chicago and on to my little house all empty and shimmering in Arizona sunshine, I noticed my boots were still caked with mud, presumably from that walk at dusk through the wet leaves and muck of Heaney’s Broagh. I handed my boots to my father and asked would he take them outside to shake off the dirt. In that instant, I knew – and I was ashamed – that when those boots were back in my hands, they would be polished to a high shine.
Twenty-five days later, it is an indelible image in my mind – my father, formerly strong as an ox and stoic, is alone and crying, his head in his hands, overwhelmed and undone by feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. All he could do in that spot of time was polish my shoes, the way he had done so many times when I was a child.
My heart broke for him.
Sitting on the stairs in my parent’s house in Castledawson, the boots gleaming in my hands, lines long memorized from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” filled my head:
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
...
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
In these early, endless days of whichever stage of grief the experts have placed me, I hope I am not speaking indifferently – as I have done in the past – to these parents of mine as they fumble in vain for the right way to comfort their newly widowed daughter; for the right way to approach their only granddaughter’s 16th birthday and make it impossibly less sad as another “first” milestone without her dad. I can’t contemplate Christmas and New Year’s Eve. How can it be only a year since we set off fireworks at the end of Montebello Avenue, giddy and full of good cheer for 2013?
Today, I feel like a barn sparrow in a nest. In spite of years of practice and watching others do it so effortlessly, I cannot remember how to fly. The timing’s off. Twenty-five days ago, the clocks all stopped. Some of those days, it was impossible to speak. It was easier to set words down on a page even though none of them was right. I would type a word or a phrase. Then I would delete it.
Of all the millions of words available to me, not one is adequate.
For my birthday several years ago, my husband – my late husband – bought a beautiful fountain pen. I had told him I wanted to resume the practice of writing in a diary each evening, and I wanted a good pen that was up to the task. With a nod to my teachers at Antrim Grammar School who only accepted work written in ink, I would use a fountain pen. I remember he looked at me over the tops of his glasses and asked me if I thought I was Bridget Jones. Oh, Ken, you would love the irony. Mark Darcy is dead, and Bridget is a widow. And, she’s 51. Seriously.
While I did not use the pen as much as I had hoped, it is always within reach. When breast cancer barged in two Novembers ago, along with it came a compulsion to write – but not with the pen. Thanks to a night class taken at Antrim Tech in 1980, I am a speedy typist. I still find something magical about watching words appear as a result of whatever I tap on a keyboard.
Ken loved that I was writing again – typing on my computer – even though it meant I retreated into myself for hours at a time and half the time, I never found the right words anyway. I suppose I was trying to do what Seamus Heaney talks about in “Personal Helicon” – trying to “see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” To see myself; to turn inward and then outward again as a woman changed again.
If we knew when these changes were coming – the unwanted milestones in the middle of lives being lived – would we do things differently to help soften the blow? Would we remember to say thank you to a father for sharpening knives or polishing shoes or making sure there was enough air in the tires? To a husband for making sure his wife takes her cancer medicine at the same time every night? Would we?
I am the family photographer, the historian, the collector and curator of the documentation of our lives – love notes, scrapbooks, concert tickets, handmade birthday cards, photographs; letters to and from Zoe, a Tooth Fairy that lived in the mesquite tree in our back yard along with her pixie pals, “good” lists from Santa Claus, cards from the Easter Bunny, and other figures that feature prominently in a little girl’s life; postcards from far away places, my mother’s recipes, newspaper clippings about people we know in Antrim or Derry, and handwritten airmail letters from home.
In 2011, my daughter and I made a Father’s Day scrapbook for my husband. I chose the photographs, and she was in charge of the writing which included thirteen things she loved about him, one of which was this:
“Every year of my life, your steady hand has lit the candles on my birthday cake. Thirteen wishes … shhh.”
With his steady hand, he would light the candles on only two more birthday cakes. And our steady smiling girl, just fifteen Christmases of age, would make reasonable wishes.
It never occurred to me that anyone else would light the candles on her birthday cake, or teach her to drive, or pick her up after school the way he did every single day for ten years, or hold her hand when she got cold in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store, or tell her to bring only the stale bread to the park to feed the ducks and incur the ire of two angry geese they had christened “Fight and Bite.”
The empty chair at the table, the first Christmas card to my husband and me from someone who doesn’t know yet that he is dead, the first tree ornament we bought in 1990.
Yet still I move through the house hoping to find him. Every room is full of evidence of his life – his laundry still folded on top of the washing machine, bills opened with reminders on post-it notes to pay them, unread sections of the Sunday paper on the coffee table. I noticed that he had refilled the prescription for my cancer medication so I wouldn’t have to miss a day. He had recorded The Daily Show so I wouldn’t miss an episode. There was a note to remind the landscaper to plant my favorite annuals.
Oh, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
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 I would hate to have forgotten 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,” and the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Admittedly, I was a bit thrown when Ken told me one of his favorite songs was “All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. He didn’t think I’d remember, so it pleased me no end when I went with the other bartender to a wonderful warehouse packed with 45-inch singles. It was our job to replace some of the records in the jukebox. 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 their 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, 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 confessed. I always loved that he broke first. It was January 13, 1990, which I always consider 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 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 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.”
I got out the phone book (remember those?) and found a wedding chapel in an old neighborhood in west Phoenix. The preacher reminded me of one of those old men talking to Ray Kinsella about Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams, looking at us out of the bluest eyes. We asked a stranger to witness the ceremony, and we vowed to each other that we would stay together in sickness and health. 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 once 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.
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. 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 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 Irishness 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.
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.
I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with the ‘real’ one. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney mattered so much; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that made me; about breast cancer, its pain, its politics, and the shiver of fear it brings when it moves in; and, about clearing a path to things that matter most and things that need to be said.
I got lost in the blogosphere one evening last July and somehow landed at Lesley Richardson’s blog, where within minutes, I was completely at home, howling with laughter as we traded stories about surviving our teenage years in Northern Ireland long before curly-hair products had been invented. Both of us born in 1963 in neighboring counties, we have much in common – along with the curls, each of us has a cat, a husband, a 15 year old daughter, a love for Heaney and Belfast, and a need to write (Lesley does it for a living). And then there’s the cancer. Always the cancer. Before posting to her blog, An Unconventional Death, which should win Best Blog Post in the Blog Awards Ireland 2013 competition, Lesley emailed me and asked me not to read it, afraid that perhaps her searing account of her beloved dad’s death would upset or offend me, given my own diagnosis. I was so moved by her sensitivity to my situation, but of course I read it. And, it broke my heart. Everyone should read it and vote for it because it is unvarnished truth-telling.
Last year, on September 11th, Lesley and I talked here about the jolt to our psyches on that grotesque morning in 2001 when it seemed as though the entire world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. Our little girls were then just four years old, safe in their pre-schools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. When the news tumbled out of New York city, Lesley and I were stopped in our tracks, heartsick, the familiar terror we both knew as children of The Troubles, reawakened in us. Blindsided again.We had grown complacent, I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and talk of peace and renewal. How could we have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen.Anything. We should have known better.
“Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.” Seamus Heaney
Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? I don’t know. Growing up where we did, when we did, we were often confounded by the bombs and bullets, the brutality and barbarism on both sides, but at the same time, somehow – and sadly – resigned to it. We held tight to the ordinary rituals, the ones we thought we could control, and we tried not to be afraid that “it” might happen to us. We never fully gave into the fear as we went to our schools and our shops or out to the pub on a Friday night. Had we given into the fear, we would never have left our homes.
One such routine, for me, was writing in a diary. I did it every day. Unprompted, I could fill page after page with stories, some true, others embellished. Along with now embarrassing angst-filled poetry, bits of social commentary, newspaper clippings, dried red leaves from maples that lined country roads upstate New York on my first trip to America, concert tickets, letters never sent, and things I wished I’d said at the time, there was always plenty of evidence of a life being lived well in spite of the troubles that swirled around us and within us.
A young woman, just starting out on my own, I had time and space from which to carve out a tight hour each day to to set words down on a page. The world was my oyster. But the business of adult living eventually got in my way, the way it does, and writing in my diary, my once cherished ritual, gave way to more prosaic tasks and daily responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, far more costly, and often not even good for me.
Then, just when I thought I had my house in order, the breast cancer diagnosis caught me off-guard. A jolt. And I began to write again, the way I once had in my diary. For me. I kept it private at first, afraid to hit “publish.” Inexplicably, I felt like I was speaking out of turn or that I would get in trouble for expressing aloud my indignation and the sheer rage I felt towards the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence and make me make room in the next ten years for appointments with oncologists and radiologists.
As I encountered others like me in this online space, I grew bolder and started to set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer or women who “have it all.” Here, I could lean back rather than Lean In obediently just because all the other women are doing it. I can take stock and trade. I can light the match rather than not burn the bridge that served only to keep me down and in the dark. In this space, if a visitor leaves a comment that is unkind or untrue or defamatory, I can place it in the trashcan, where it belongs. But that has happened only once. This is my home away from home. And so I keep writing. For myself. I suppose cancer made a writer out of me.
For Lesley, it was the death of someone she never met, a Russian immigrant who worked on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center, that prompted her to start writing for herself. A jolt that helped her find her writer’s voice. Although she has been writing for years and makes a living writing for other people, it was not until she took a Creative Writing Class in September 2002 that she started to write the kind of writing that lays bare the things that matter. I am glad that she did, because it led me to her.
Her first homework assignment was to write a letter. To anyone. About anything. Just a letter. Stuck and not knowing what to write about or to whom, she turned on her TV on the second anniversary of 9.11 and began watching the memorial service. For over two and a half hours, she listened, as the names of almost 3,000 dead were read, and when they got to the last name on the list, Igor Zuckelman, she knew the letter she would write. Her letter to Igor became a tribute to all those who died:
I’ve been wondering, Igor, what you would have made of your death, of all the deaths, and the aftermath of that catastrophic and grotesquely historic couple of hours. I come from a place that has been tarnished by terrorism for over 30 years. My country has lived with death, hatred and evil for almost as long as I can remember, and many of the atrocities we have witnessed have left wounds that for some will never heal. Perhaps the saddest thing that I have learnt from living here is that hate breeds hate, ignorance breeds intolerance and, for those who are locked in their insular beliefs, forgiveness is not an option.
When I read Lesley’s letter to Igor, I knew what I had to do. I promised her I would print it out and deliver it to the Healing Field Memorial in Tempe, Arizona, where I would attach it to the flagpole erected there for Igor Zukelman, a flag flying for him along with 2,995 others.
This past Wednesday, September 11, 2013, before going to work, I went to the Healing Field. My best friend brought a plastic bag to protect Lesley’s letter from the impending rainstorm and some green ribbon to attach it to the pole. Unlike me, my best friend thinks of everything. As we made our way to the small hill upon which Igor’s flagpole stands, we could not help but look up, uncomfortably aware of the field’s proximity to Sky Harbor Airport and the roar of airplanes above ensuring we will not forget the sound of those planes before they hurtled into the Twin Towers twelve years ago.
Letters and paper flowers, candles aglow in the bright morning, tiny stuffed bears on the grass at the bottom of six flagpoles – I have been cleaved in two by such things before, things left to honor innocent lives snuffed out by terrorism. The tragic lesson learned growing up in Northern Ireland is that terrorism is a horrible equalizer. Babies, children, parents, grandparents, those without names or families or homes or good health – it matters not. In a terrorist attack, they are all “legitimate targets.”
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. There are shows of patriotism and silent prayers for the dead; a mournful “Taps” pierces the air every hour on the hour, and everyone falls silent and still; then bagpipes and then Amazing Grace. Yellow ribbons wrapped around and around those flagpoles encircling the field, represent the valor of those “first responders,” whose duty is to protect and serve those within. Ribbons as blue as that September morning sky wound around flagpoles in the heart of the Field, for the flight crew members who perished. On the grass, for veterans lost that day, pair after pair of combat boots.
In cities here and across the globe, wreaths are laid, bells ring out, and names are rubbed in pencil on cherished scraps of paper. We say their names. We remember them.
And so, I found Igor’s flag. I said his name out loud and tied Lesley’s letter to the pole and, before I walked away, I whispered “Godspeed.”
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name —
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner —
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds —
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
With his steady hand, he would light the candles on only two more birthday cakes. And our steady smiling girl, just fifteen Christmases of age, would make reasonable wishes.
And in this field of healing, flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms and touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001.
