Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996
Eleven years since you left us, your poems are still here, old friends that show up like Facebook memories to catch the heart off-guard and blow it open. I never had the chance to thank you in person for the words that scored so many episodes of my life, but in a recurring daydream, the two of us are standing at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge. It’s started to rain, and the 110 bus is late. I’m glad. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our Laureate – remark on the drizzle. Colloquial, your voice reminds me of my father’s. I say something about the rain too and, before the bus comes, I find inadequate words to thank you . . .
. . . for all the times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written; for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy, the bluebells and blueberries in the heart of the forest, the sound of the Moyola rushing under the bridge; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of things; and, for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.“
Ma’s Bookshelf – By Sophie
In the very worst of times, wrecked by grief, only your words worked – certain and sure.
But when you died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only you would have been capable of producing the words that might assuage the country’s sorrow over your passing. I remember somebody saying that your death left a breach in the language itself.
Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – like Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold.
If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.
Today, I am pulled back again to “The Underground.” It’s one of my favorites, even more so since finding out it was a favorite of yours too and that once —when you were asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry—,The Underground” was one of them.
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson As the coat flapped wild and button after button Sprang off and fell in a trail Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms, Our echoes die in that corridor and now I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back.
You never looked back.
When I heard that your final words were in Latin, in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I thought of your Orpheus in the Underworld:
Noli Timere.
Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”
No longer the shy and fretting young poet who signed his first poems Incertus, you left what was needed – simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance. As you told us once before, “it is important to be reassured.”
Thanks, Seamus. I am reassured and looking forward. I am walking on air.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996
Eleven years since you left us, your poems are still here, old friends that show up like Facebook memories to catch the heart off-guard and blow it open. I never had the chance to thank you in person for the words that scored so many episodes of my life, but in a recurring daydream, the two of us are standing at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge. It’s started to rain, and the 110 bus is late. I’m glad. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our Laureate – remark on the drizzle. Colloquial, your voice reminds me of my father’s. I say something about the rain too and, before the bus comes, I find inadequate words to thank you . . .
. . . for all the times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written; for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy, the bluebells and blueberries in the heart of the forest, the sound of the Moyola rushing under the bridge; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of things; and, for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.“
Ma’s Bookshelf – By Sophie
In the very worst of times, wrecked by grief, only your words worked – certain and sure.
But when you died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only you would have been capable of producing the words that might assuage the country’s sorrow over your passing. I remember somebody saying that your death left a breach in the language itself.
Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – like Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold.
If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.
Today, I am pulled back again to “The Underground.” It’s one of my favorites, even more so since finding out it was a favorite of yours too and that once —when you were asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry—,The Underground” was one of them.
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson As the coat flapped wild and button after button Sprang off and fell in a trail Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms, Our echoes die in that corridor and now I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back.
You never looked back.
When I heard that your final words were in Latin, in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I thought of your Orpheus in the Underworld:
Noli Timere.
Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”
No longer the shy and fretting young poet who signed his first poems Incertus, you left what was needed – simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance. As you told us once before, “it is important to be reassured.”
Thanks, Seamus. I am reassured and looking forward. I am walking on air.
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
I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
He always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because it meant he wouldn’t have to miss me. Far better – for him. A private man, my 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 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 do when led silently into a bedroom where the deceased has been “laid out”; 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, to whisper, to weep and when to throw our heads back in laughter over a bit of craic about a life lived in full.
Without these tiny rituals in the days following my husband’s 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 what I couldn’t have.I wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye and to fill the air with his favorite music, a traditional toe-tapping Irish reel. I wanted somewhere to go on his birthday, to bring flowers, perhaps a bunch of freesias because he loved their scent. He wanted none of it. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.
I was back home 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 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 it 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.
So when I returned to Bellaghy the following summer, I visited the grave again. This time, a simple wooden cross stood in 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 told me my husband had gone on to a better place. Then – and now – I rail against them. 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?
Is there a more desolate space than the empty seat at the table?
For just a moment today, I’d like to hear him laugh again with my daughter. All these years later, it sometimes feels as though he just went missing.
Where is he?
The question that will remain unanswered, it is very 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. I recall fixating on this detail, wondering about Ken’s 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 to the spot where we had spread his ashes only to find “his” tree had been cut down and the area around it chained off for commercial development. For the time being, it was an empty space. I cried. Of course I cried, 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 grave 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.
Then with the right words at the right time – again – came Seamus Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the new 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. I am walking on air.
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
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:
