Dawn light began stealing
Through the cold universe to County Meath,Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,
Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones
Millennia deep in their own unmovingAnd unmoved alignment.
(from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney)
This morning, once again, the sun paused for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely reminder that the light is coming. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, in the Boyne valley outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will experience the solstice the way it was intended by the Stone Age farmers who built it over 5,000 years ago.
In its roof is a little opening aligned to the ascending sun. When that single sunbeam shoots through the roof-box at around 9AM, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the burial chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved in the ancient walls. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.
This year, only 16 out of 30,000 applicants from as far away as the United States, were selected to experience the solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunately, Irish weather provides no guarantee of sunlight, and clouds this morning once again kept the light out.
Photograph: Cyril Byrne
From the outside, my little house glitters like a Christmas card, a tree twinkling in its window and a sign for Santa to please stop here. No different than any other year, the woman inside reminded that it is time again to turn. I am reminded of something I once read about a woman who described two distinct lives – the one she lived before a cancer diagnosis and the one forever changed by it – her turning point. Closing my eyes to recollect my own diagnosis, I can see myself get up and walk out the door, leaving behind the woman I used to be, offended by the nerve of the Breast Cancer Navigator telling me that I had cancer. Me? With cancer?
Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips and rendered me wordless. In conspiratorial whispers, she informed my late husband of all the details I would immediately forget, not unlike the way we speculate in private about the cause of a death when all the evidence points to hard living. On and on she talked, as if trying to soothe us even as she filled our ears in an unfamiliar lexicon of fear. Not to worry, she stressed. What we were hearing in her dimly lit office, she assured us, was not a death sentence.
Nonetheless, I heard a crack, the sound of a life being altered that would leave me pondering how to handle Muriel Rukeyser’s question:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
I think it might.
At first I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into my home, impinging upon my daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. We celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a birthday party, and friends over. We reminded ourselves to laugh. In between scheduling blood-work and biopsies, more mammograms, and a mastectomy, we went to a Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve.
The healing began.
The next Christmas, the cancer contained, we basked in the promise of a better year, of light on the horizon. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents flew from Belfast to Newark and on to Phoenix to help us usher in a new year. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion, and for good luck we made sure to designate a dark-haired “first footer” after midnight. Relieved, we shut the door against 2012, a year that had skulked in and scared us, each of us terrified by the cancer and what it might do.
I recall those early hours of a new year, looking ahead with a renewed sense of certainty. Like mischievous kids, we set off those illegal fireworks at the end of our street. It was a magic time, my parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one Fourth of July in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with apple cider that sparkled in a crystal glass from County Tyrone. All was well.
When everyone went to bed, I stayed up to savor the silence my slumbering house and to consider again Ted Kooser’s assessment of life, that it is
. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …
Life is exactly like that, isn’t it? And on the shortest day when the sun stops for a moment, I find myself in between two cars, aware that there is still some distance to travel. Forward. The light is coming. May our days be filled with it.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.
