This weekend marks another Mother’s Day without the man who made a mother out of me, the man who loved me so well and for so long. Our girl plans to take time off work to spend the day with me, and we know – but we keep it to ourselves – that looking forward to a special Sunday together will lead to looking back to the way it used to be, to once upon a time when she, her father in tow, set out on the annual quest for a gift for me. Every antique store in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area was their stomping ground as they searched for something bijou, something that would bring whimsy to our backyard – the kind of thing I would never need but would more than make my day. There are reminders still – napping cats wrought of stone and metal, painted birdhouses, fading windsocks, and wind chimes of bamboo that would toil less were they hung from a Cypress tree on the Monterey coast. Always – because I would have been annoyed otherwise – that man of mine would commision for me a piece of original art by our daughter. We both knew my odds of acquiring such a piece were significantly better when he asked her to do it. We all knew our dance steps.
At the same time, every year on Mother’s Day in America, I am drawn back to another world, another time with my mother. The miles between us fall away, and there she is standing in our garden; in her arms a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next, there is the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
Our daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen on the Dublin Road, but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August evening before fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she stepped forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers.
In the middle we met, and there we paused to make the final fold, while unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs of us and wrote our names in the sand, and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.“
First there was Molly, a retired racer who loved me. We had rescued her in the Christmas of 2008, on the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, and she lifted my heart. Molly adored me, and the feeling was mutual. Elegant and affectionate, she knew how to be retired, but the separation anxiety was too much for her, and because I was unable to spend every minute of the day with her, I had to surrender her to the Greyhound Adoption Agency. Heartbroken, I promised myself – and my husband – that we would just stick to cats.
Then one early October morning a few years later, Edgar came into our lives, the moment we met indelible in my memory. My daughter and I had just left the gym, and there he was, standing in the center lane of a street already busy with the rush of early Monday morning traffic. Sophie spotted him first, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the car. She jumped out and – flailing wildly at oncoming traffic – she successfully brought it to a momentary standstill that allowed her to scoop up the tiny Chihuahua that trembled in the widening beam of the headlights before him, name him Edgar, and announce that he would be moving in with us.
In spite of having just completed several miles on a treadmill, I had not yet had my coffee. I was neither happy nor ready for a Monday or the prospect of a Chihuahua. Rather than argue or rise to the bait, I told myself we would post a few “Found Dog” signs around the neighborhood, and by the end of the day “Edgar” would be back where he belonged, answering to whatever name someone else had given him.
Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school that day, so she could be with “her” new dog. He was shaking and scared, submissive and sweet, and Sophie was vexed that she could see his little ribs so plainly. Without saying it, I knew she knew that based on our experience with the beautiful Molly, a new dog was probably not in the cards. Her dad and I had established an unspoken rule – we were always good at that. One cat. No more dogs. No way.
But there were tell-tale signs that the unlikely Chihuahua was making his way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone’s missing this little guy,” he’d ask. Repeatedly. Rhetorically. He bought dog food. He drove around the neighborhood, looking for “Lost Dog” signs, hoping to make some family’s day by returning their dog. Daily, he checked the newspaper and Craigslist to see if someone in Phoenix had lost a cute little Chihuahua. He took him to the Humane Society where he was informed that they didn’t take lost dogs. Still, they checked for a microchip. There wasn’t one. They estimated his age at about five years old, determined that “Edgar” hadn’t been neutered or cared for. He had bad breath and worse teeth. Malnourished and dirty, he weighed three pounds. Barely.
Within three weeks, it was clear that nobody was looking for this little dog, who in spite of having four perfectly good legs, expected to be carried everywhere. He was like a bag of sugar, so dutifully, we all obliged. He gained weight. He stopped trembling. He slept in our daughter’s arms every night. He came running when we called “Edgar,” and soon we were all in love with him, because, as poet Mary Oliver reminds us,
. . of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
A month later, my daughter and I were far away in Northern Ireland, leaving Edgar and the cat at home with my husband. It was dusk when we were with my parents and the blacksmith’s son in The Forge in South Derry, in Seamus Heaney country. We were there because I had given up waiting for a friend to come through with tickets for the free concert Van Morrison was giving at the Waterfront Hall after being granted the Freedom of the City of Belfast. With Van out of my mind and Barney Devlin’s son regaling us with the story behind the the midnight anvil – the one with the sweeter sound – I was in my element and couldn’t wait to tell Ken about it, knowing only he knew my affection for all things Heaney. When I called him, there was no answer.
There was no answer.
The unexpected sound of my own voice as my phone-calls continued to go straight to voice mail, transported me into a panic. A certain and unshakeable foreboding had me in a vice. It was not to be ignored.
Next, a flurry of texts between my best friend and me, in different time zones, on different continents. I was on the phone with her when she arrived at my house and looked through the bay window to see Edgar looking back at her, still and silent, knowing what she would find after she found the keys under the doormat and called my husband’s name three times over before finding his lifeless body, hoping he was just resting but knowing – as Edgar did – that he was dead.
I don’t know and will never know his final thoughts, but I must believe that when he died in our Phoenix home, my Ken’s last interaction on this earth was tender, with three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest.
Late in the first summer following Ken’s death, Sophie told me that her day begins not with sorrow over the loss of her beloved daddy but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile. He is ready – always – to help her get ready to walk out into the world. “What about Edgar?” she pondered over pancakes one morning. “What if he spends every day just waiting by the door for me to come home? Doesn’t he need a friend to keep him company?”
Yes. He does. Don’t we all?
So I did a little research. I found out that dogs like Edgar are indeed in need of friends. According to the Arizona Humane Society, dogs like him have replaced pit bulls as the most abandoned breed. From January to March of this year, 821 Chihuahuas have been surrendered or brought into the shelter for a variety of reasons. In 2013, the Arizona Humane Society and the Maricopa County Animal Care and Control, the two largest shelters in Phoenix, received 10,535 Chihuahuas and euthanized 2,100. Knowing this, how could I not find a friend for Edgar?
After work one day, I took a detour home via the Arizona Small Dog Rescue. Having spent my lunch hour perusing their website – picture after picture of tiny dogs who needed a home – I was more than curious about a little black and tan Miniature Pinscher Chihuahua mix, just two years old. Rather than give her a number, they had assigned a temporary name – “Lupita.” The volunteer told me little Lupita had come from a “hoarding situation,” that she had been caged for most of her two years, that she was “as sweet as can be, quiet, mild mannered and gets along with all dogs and people who are nice to her.”
With that, I knew she would be coming home with me, that Edgar would have a new companion, that we would change her name to “Gloria” – with a nod to the most requested encore at a Van Morrison concert and, of course, to Ms. Steinem – and that my 16-year old daughter’s tender heart would expand once more.
The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point.
~ Leontia Flynn
My parents were raised in rural County Derry, in Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed us. Consulted only after it was determined that they had flummoxed the medical doctor, the folk healer meted out charms in all forms – plasters, poultices, and in brown bottles. It was to such a man my father once turned after the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her bout with jaundice. Dissatisfied with this from a man with formal medical training and a string of letters after his name, my father went deep into the Derry countryside to visit the man with “the charm.”
Observant and eager to help, my father accompanied him into the fields, but he was of no use at all in discerning which wild herbs held the curing powers. Thus, he watched and then waited in a tiny kitchen as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm. With a stone, he beat the juices from the herbs then mixed in two bottles of Guinness stout. He poured it into a Cantrell and Cochranelemonade bottle and sent da on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. No payment. Just faith that it would work a healing magic.
I used to be skeptical of the faith healer but not of the faith at work in the transaction. In crisis, when all else fails, we might try anything. When conventional wisdom seems foolish, and the right words are in hiding, where can we go?
Not Google, I wish I could say, but after being diagnosed with cancer, I spent as much time on the Internet researching all the worst case scenarios as I did staring down a cursor that blinked on a blank Word document. A conspiracy began. Between us, the winking cursor and me, we would maybe find some words to help me adjust to my altered life. Everywhere else I found only no sense – nonsense. The words that fell from the lips of physicians and friends and people who love me, sent me scrambling into a frightening encounter with my mortality. It began with the fast and furious flurry of euphemisms about my inner fortitude. There was also silence, from those who were frustrated by not having the “right” words and crippled by fear of saying the wrong thing. There were friends and family who, unafraid and angry on my behalf, jumped in, took charge, and said the “wrong” thing anyway, made worse because I lacked the right words to explain why. I suppose it was around this time that I understood how Van Morrison’s “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart” speaks volumes. Thus,in protest,I began talking to myself, struggling to catch the best words to present my altered life, hoping to save them in a jam-jar with holes poked in the lid, knowing I would need them down the road.
The cancer had invaded my lexicon, and I could no longer count on my words. “Staging” would never again conjure only the theater and the cheap seats in the ‘gods’ at the Grand Opera House in Belfast; “fog” I would now attach to a state of cognitive loss rather than a misty morning in a Van Morrison song or the cloud that often obscures parts of Pacific Coast Highway as we head north in the summertime; “cure” no more the idiomatic “hair of the dog that bit you” but a confounding and elusive thing all wrapped up in a pink ribbon; “Mets” was not just the other New York baseball team but a tragic abbreviation for metastatic breast cancer from which no one survives yet of all the millions of dollars raised for breast cancer research in this country, only 2% of it is directed to metastatic breast cancer. Even “sentinel,” which had been reserved, until cancer came calling, for a lonely cormorant perched on a post in the sleepy edges of Morro Bay was transformed, now the first node to which cancer cells are most likely to spread from a primary tumor. “Infusion” was something done to olive oil to transform it into a gourmet gift, but because I had turned left instead of right upon leaving my oncologist’s office one day, I found myself on the threshold of the infusion suite, a room I didn’t even know was there. Feeling as though I had intruded, I fled. But not before I had registered a row of faces of people who were sicker than I. In one microscopic moment, I made eye contact with a woman and wondered if perhaps she was cold because, as I turned away, I noted a quilt on her lap. I turned away.
Enter fleeing.
Inarticulate and stunned by what the cancer was doing to the efficacy of words – in need of a charm – I rediscovered County Down poet Damian Gorman. Trapped in cancer land, I found myself remembering the bombs, bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” that were part of 1980s Northern Ireland as far less deadly than the “devices of detachment” my people used to distance ourselves from it –
“I’ve come to point the finger
I’m rounding on my own
The decent cagey people
I count myself among …
We are like rows of idle hands
We are like lost or mislaid plans
We’re working under cover
We’re making in our homes
Devices of detachment
As dangerous as bombs.”
When people ask me what it was like growing up in that place at that time – hoping to understand “The Troubles” – I direct them not to some digital archive that chronicles what has happened in Northern Ireland since August 1969, but to “Devices of Detachment.” And in October, when I am pummeled by pink, it is to this charm that I turn. And when people die, and I don’t know what to say to bring any comfort to their loved ones, my condolences will come wrapped up in a Seamus Heaney poem – the right words at the right time.
When Heaney died, I remember wondering which living poet would have the right words, knowing that only Heaney himself would be capable of composing the condolences to assuage Ireland’s collective sorrow over his passing. I could not imagine the landscape of my lovely, tragic homeland without him. Heaney had scored my life with poems about hanging clothes on the line and ironing, about biycyle riding or blackberry picking and of potato-peeling at the kitchen sink with his mother when “all the others were away at Mass.” Sitting at my kitchen table, in Phoenix, Arizona, a lifetime away from Anahorish, my mother once recalled him as a young man with sandy hair, riding his bicycle around Castledawson. He would probably be pleased that her recollection of him is less as renowned Nobel Laureate and more “a son of Paddy Heaney’s.”
When I open a picture book to see the complete and smiling family of which I once was a part, I break my own heart – again – and then I turn to Heaney. I start remembering. The process confounds me. I don’t know when my husband died. I only know he was pronounced dead at 1:10PM on November 15th. Posing for a photograph with Barry Devlin at the forge on the other side of The Door into The Dark, holding in my hands the anvil that made the sweeter sound, then striking it, I imagine a shower of sparks and wonder if it was at that very moment on November 15th that Ken died, alone and in our Phoenix home.
There is something soothing – and right-seeming – in believing I was maybe within Seamus Heaney’s spiritual field for just that moment and in knowing I would return to the desert with my daughter to do what we were fit for – to “take up the strain of the long tailed pull of grief.”
I have marked that time only twice, enough for it to be considered an annual ritual in the ‘un-learning’ of November. Every year, forever, on the anniversary of his death, I know I will turn over the details and hold on to what I imagine was Ken’s last moment on earth. A friend from back home tells me this is “an Irish thing,” that this kind of thinking is sewn tidily into my DNA. Once, over a cup of tea with her, we realized we do not know when we learned these rituals, or if they were explicitly taught to us.
Somehow, we just know to mark the time of death; we know to stop our clocks and wrist-watches at that hour. We know to cover the mirrors, draw the blinds, and close the curtains. We know that we know what to do when led silently up into the room where the deceased has been “laid out”; how to pay our respects in private and in public; how to offer sympathies over china cups of tea balanced on saucers that bear digestive biscuits; when to bring plates of sandwiches cut in triangles, all manner of cakes, and tray-bakes; we know to shake hands and when the time is right to whisper or cry or even to laugh as we enjoy a bit of craic about lives lived in full.
Of the stories I tell about the days after Ken died, the one that affects me most, because it left no doubt of who I am is the one about Frank, the tall neighbor who came into my parent’s Castledawson house and waited in their living room until he could shake my hand and tell me he was very “sorry for my trouble.” A man like Big Jim Evans in Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break.” After all these years so far away, I never imagined someone would say those words to me. In retrospect, they were the only words that mattered.
A reporter once asked me if I thought you had to be Irish to appreciate Seamus Heaney’s poetry. The way she asked it suggested she was unfamiliar with his work. Still, I responded inadequately. I meant to tell her that in the crucible of Heaney’s poetry, she would no doubt find herself represented along with everyone else; she would find “the music of what happens” then and now; she would find not what it means to be Irish, but all that it means to be human and searching, always searching – digging. She would find the charm.
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown, headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And find the heart unlatched and blow it open.
My breast cancer is not just about me as I discovered when my then fourteen year old daughter decided to break her silence about it. In her own way, on her Facebook wall, and on World Cancer Day 2012.
Thus, on this day designated for speaking up and out, from 2016 -2018 focusing on how everyone – as a collective or individually – can do their part to reduce the global burden of cancer – I share with you her words and mine from February 4, 2012 . . .
I didn’t know about a World Cancer Day. Until today, I’d known only about Breast Cancer Awareness October when the world turns pink for an entire month, so when I detected the lump on my breast on October 30, I should have been grateful for having made it until the end of the pinkest month, blithely unaware that cancer had come calling. Since then, I have encountered more metaphors of war in breast cancer’s literature than I ever found in my collection of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and I am uncomfortable. Within the context of breast cancer, I show up – albeit reluctantly – for every appointment, procedure, and surgery. As a cancer patient, I am doing what is expected. I am being treated. At best, I am obedient. Not battling. Not a warrior in pink.
I cannot say the same for my darling girl. Just a heart-beat ago, she was so tiny, asleep and swaddled, snug in the space between the crook of her daddy’s arm and the tips of his fingers. Safe and secure.
Then, too soon, fourteen and tall, impersonating “strong and stoic,” leaning on her beloved dad and he on her as they wait together for surgeons bearing good tidings. Neither feels safe nor secure. She fights to keep the tears from falling, squares up with false bravado to keep the fear at bay, to confront the wild fear that her mother might die. She balks at the notion of carrying the mantel of “kid with the sick mom.” She wants her teachers to know nothing about it in case they might feel sorry for her and give her a good grade out of sympathy. Mostly, she doesn’t want her friends to feel awkward around her, to tiptoe as if on egg-shells, afraid to say “cancer.” A quick study, she has grown keenly aware of the pink stuff of breast cancer, and she is confounded by it and by “I love boobie bracelets” casually wrapped around teenage wrists when her instinct is to defend me because I was unable, technically, to “keep a breast.“
Remember fourteen? It was that time reserved for rebelling a bit, for rolling your eyes at your mother’s taste in clothes or music because she was your mother and therefore “so embarrassing.” Fourteen was for pushing boundaries and buttons and for experimenting with make-up and myriad ways to sign your name (with hearts instead of dots above “i’s”) or style your hair.
For my girl, this rite of passage is forever marred by her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, before which she didn’t have to feel quite so guilty about perfectly acceptable and anticipated acts of rebellion. It is unforgivably unfair. But that’s the nature of breast cancer, isn’t it? Unfair. Lest I forget how it has interrupted her life, I am considering again today the first time my daughter spoke of the cancer that came to our house like a thief in the night.
I didn’t know – and I’m sure I still don’t – the extent to which my cancer has shaken my beautiful daughter, stirred a fear that others dear to her may be at risk. So when I read the note she posted on her Facebook page on February 4, 2012, World Cancer Day, I realized she needed to tell – to share with anyone who would listen, in one fell swoop, that cancer had come calling and that her mom was sick, to tell them that being aware means you have to actually do something.
She is the only warrior here.
She’s my hero.
Here’s her note:
In honor of World Cancer Day and my mom, I’m telling the truth …
Each and every one of you reading this note, know this: you are important to me. And I don’t ever want to lose you. Please be aware. Do not think that just because you’re you, breast cancer won’t harm you. Infect you. Frighten your whole family. Breast cancer doesn’t discriminate. You can’t escape from it. And my mom, my dad, and I had to face up to that harsh reality. On November 11th of 2011, my mother was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer. She told me everything her doctor had told her. About how she had three tumors, and how they had been probably hiding there for five to seven years. Three tumors. Three of them, just sitting in there for all that time, never to be found by her mammograms because they were hidden so well in her tissue. Fortunately, two of the three were benign, meaning they would not hurt her. They were not cancerous. However, one of them was a cancer. Malignant. My mother’s right breast had a cancerous tumor. But my mom had cancer. My mom had cancer. Mymomhadcancer. I didn’t hear much more of what she said. After she said “tumor” and that only “two out of three” were benign, it was hard to hear anything else. All I could say was, “But you’re going to be okay…. right?” I asked that question maybe four times in a row. I remember later on she and my dad told me about the next doctor’s appointment, during which she would find out which surgery was best for her. A lumpectomy or a mastectomy. It sounded like she was hoping for a lumpectomy, which would only remove the tumor. It sounded simpler, but it also meant radiation. Radiation is nasty. A mastectomy means removal of a whole breast. Soon I found out my mom’s treatment required a mastectomy. I would be out of school for a week.
That week, I stayed with my mom’s best friend, Amanda. Amanda is like our own family; she has known me ever since I was little. I stayed at her house once before, when my dad had major heart surgery. Now again, I stayed with her while my mom was going through surgery. Seven and a half hours. An entire school day of waiting. Then my dad – who waited the whole seven and a half hours in the hospital – called to tell me the news.My mom was okay. The surgeons were very happy with the results of not only the removal of the tumor, but the reconstruction of her entire breast.
I remember seeing her in the ICU, when she woke up from the surgery. Her skin was so white, as pale as Boo Radley‘s. Her normally inky blue eyes now reminded me of a colorless sky. I cried at the sight of her. She looked like my mom, only dead. She had been given lots of morphine and so much other medicine, so she was way beyond groggy. Out of it. And then she was able to smile. She squeezed my hand, and she asked me what day it was . . . four times. Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. I cried. My dad cried. He wiped his eyes on his shirt. We just stood there crying, rejoicing that my mom was going to be alright.
After removing her original breast and the cancer, her surgeons used skin and tissue and fat from her abdomen and molded it into the shape of a new breast. It was amazing! Today, her reconstructed breast looks almost identical to the other one. Made from her own skin, it looks fine. Just a bit bruised. But those bruises will fade, and this cancer will become just a bad memory. Unfortunately, we still have some healing to do. There’s a large scar across her abdomen, and it hurts her to stand up straight. If she lifts her right arm too high, it hurts. Then there are the tubes and the three surgical drains. Attached to my mom were three long tubes which then attached to what looked like little plastic grenades. Every day, I’d help drain the bloody fluid from them and record how much on a chart. Two have been removed, now there’s only one drain left, attached to a tube from a hole under her right arm. And then there’s always the fear that the cancer may return. Yes, her cancer was removed, but maybe there was some that the doctors couldn’t find and it could scare us again. It could invade my mother’s body once more. It could invade anybody. Which is why I’m begging: get yourself checked out. Find out your breast density. Do self-exams. Please. And it’s not just women. Men can get it too. SO if you’re a guy and you’re wondering why I tagged you in this, there’s your reason.So please. My mom discovered her cancer before it had spread into her lymph nodes. She got lucky, because she found the lump by accident and because her doctor made her get an ultrasound. She learned just in time that her negative mammograms had missed the cancer.
Many women, just like my mom, never even check their own breasts, even though they have been told over and over. It is so important to know what our breasts normally feel like, so we can notice when they change. So please take the steps to know your breasts. Know your body!
After work one day, I took a detour home via the 
