Again, the sun will pause 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. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago.
In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved into the stone 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, out of over 30,000 applicants, only 50 were selected to experience the solstice at Newgrange. Unfortunatley, Irish weather was as you would expect with clouds and rain keeping the light out.
From the outside, my house glitters like a Christmas card with its tree twinkling in the window and a sign for Santa to please stop here. A little house, it is no different than any other year, except the two women inside it are different, each of us adjusted and adjusting to a life and to living without the constancy of a man for whom our happiness was his heart’s only desire. Each of us wondering what’s next for us – what will begin and what will end.
I remember reading something about a woman who described two distinct lives – the one she lived before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis – her turning point. When I close 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 that Breast Cancer Navigator telling my husband and 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 husband of all the details I would forget. It reminded me of the way we quietly speculate 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 with fear. So many scary words. Not to worry. She stressed that what we were hearing that day in her dimly lit office was not a death sentence.
Nonetheless, I heard a crack, the sound of a life being altered that would have me pondering still and more how to handle poet 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.
I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into our lives, interrupting our plans to celebrate our daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. But we celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a party for Sophie and invited friends over. We remembered to laugh. We went to a Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve. We scheduled the blood-work and the biopsies, the mammograms, and the mastectomy. The healing began. Sort of.
And then, another Christmas, the cancer contained, the promise of a better year. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents came to Arizona to help us bring in 2013. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion and for good luck, we designated my dark-haired husband “the first footer” after midnight. Such relief to 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.
For me – and the woman I used to be – cancer became The Scariest Thing in my life. Like every scary thing that comes to fruition, it had never previously crossed my mind. No. My mind was too consumed with all the things that most likely will never happen. All that worrying. Why? It is such a waste. But the cancer happened, and I wanted everyone to feel as sorry for me as I did for myself and howl about the unfairness of it all. I wanted sympathy – the kind delivered by an Irish mammy over endless cups of tea with reminders that there’s always someone worse off. Always.
I remember my mother cursing the cancer for the thief that it is but she’d temper her remarks with reminders that I was so lucky to be married to the best man in the world. “You could set your watch by him!” she’d say, and then she would jokingly ask him how in the name of God he had put up with me for over twenty years. Not known for my punctuality or having a place for everything and everything in its place, she regularly wondered aloud how I would ever manage without him since he waited on me hand and foot. Without him. In our house. Now that would be a scary thing. Me? A widow?
But in the wee hours of 2013 on a magical New Year’s Eve, I was still Ken’s wife, one half of an “us,” and I was looking ahead and happy. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one July 4th in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with cider that shone in one of the good Waterford crystal glasses, it was a magic time – life was sweet. I remember thinking, believing “All. Is. Well.”
When everyone went to bed on January 1st 2013, I stayed up, savoring the silence of our slumbering house and the opportunity to consider 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 …”
It is just like that. And on the shortest day when the sun stops for a moment, I find myself in between two cars, aware that I still have some distance to travel. Forward. And I am ready for 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.
Twelve days after Ken died, I wrote this post. I haven’t read it since, and I’m not going to read it tonight. Somewhere in the middle of the grief-stricken ramblings, I remember is a pure – and good – memory of this day twenty five years ago – January 13, 1990 – the day when Ken and I embarked on what we both knew was one hell of a love story.
So, I’ll raise a great big whiskey to you tonight, Ken, and tell you that I’d do it all again.
x
11/27/2013
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 if it’s written down, I’m less likely to forget 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,” the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” LA Woman by The Doors and, well, anything by The Moody Blues. Admittedly, I was a bit thrown when Ken told me one of his favorite songs was “All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. Now, it was easy for me to hijack the jukebox, because I had the flat-out awesome job of going with the other bartender to a wonderful warehouse, somewhere in Phoenix, that was loaded with row after row of 45-inch singles. It was my job – a job – every other week, to replace some of the records in the jukebox, to keep it somewhat “current.” 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 her 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 up, 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 folded. I always loved that he broke first. It was January 13, 1990, which thereafter we considered 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 – one month – 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 whole 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.” He said, “OK,” and put his boots on.
I remembering digging out a big fat phone book – the yellow pages – and found a wedding chapel in an old neighborhood in west Phoenix. The preacher there reminded me of a lovely blue-eyed old man in Field of Dreams, earnest and patient, as he told Kevin Costner’s, Ray Kinsella about Moonlight Graham and all the blue hats he never got around to giving his wife, Alicia.
We asked a stranger to officially witness the ceremony, and we vowed to each other that we would stay together in sickness and health, till death us do part. 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 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.
It was not a perfect marriage, but it was an honest marriage. We argued about little things but never about the big stuff. 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.
Looking back on it, 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 almost entirely 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 Irish-ness 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. And to make it truly my Thanksgiving, we would listen to the entire Last Waltz soundtrack.
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.
In the Fall of 2012, I enrolled in a college photography class, something I had been meaning to do for the previous three decades. I just never got around to it before, what with all my busy-ness and so much time spent bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher and waiting patiently for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep to ask if I would please be one of his Heartbreakers.
I loved the photography instructor. A Nikon gal like me, she also had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look competent. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and never to miss a class. Even as she bristled at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light” – it’s just light, and we just needed to find it. It was “writing with light.” I saw magic in it, and I wanted to be good at it, to take the kinds of photographs Amyn Nasser talks about:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that we would create such moments in our often pedestrian pictures, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” that required us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, and upon. And so it was that I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol on a Thanksgiving afternoon, eventually sitting below a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I don’t know how long I sat there, just thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl, mystifying us (the way he does when he forgets to be a grumpy old man) with Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended, a song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the spirit of today’s holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving had something to do with my moment of transcendence looking up at the shimmering leaves, but that would not have been true. Even after living in America for over twenty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. It amuses me still that some of my American friends are surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland. Christmas is the holiday that warms us, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I may even have found the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott describes in her Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers:
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit.
And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
“Bicycles: because love requires trust and balance.” NIKKI GIOVANNI
“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedalling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
Its back wheel preternaturally fast.”
Ah, Seamus, I sometimes think you could have scored my life with your bicycling and blackberry picking and your potato-peeling at the kitchen sink with your mother when “all the others were away at Mass.” Sitting at my kitchen table, in Phoenix, Arizona, a lifetime away from Anahorish, my mother recalled you as a young man with sandy hair, riding your bicycle around Castledawson. You might be pleased that her recollection of you is less as renowned Nobel Laureate and more “a son of Paddy Heaney’s” – one and the very same, I think. We talked about you losing your little brother, Christopher and your mother, and then how we all lost you.
A year ago, Ken left us. As is our way, I know I will mark the time – the official pronouncement of death at 1:10PM – and I will do so every year from this point forth. I will turn over the details again and again, holding on to what I imagine was the last moment. My Irish friend thinks we can attribute this to our cultural heritage, that it is most definitely “an Irish thing” sewn tidily into our very DNA. She’s right, I’m sure. Over a cup of tea with her, we realized we have no idea when we learned these rituals, or if they were explicitly taught to us. Somehow, we 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 cups of tea balanced on saucers bearing 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 details that unfolded, a year ago, the one that affects me most, because it left no doubt of who I am is that of the man named Frank, a stranger, who came into my parent’s house and waited in their living room until he could shake my hand and tell me he was very “sorry for my trouble.” Just like the neighbor in Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break.” I never imagined someone would say those words to me, but it seems right.
How could my American girl have understood these comings and goings, the way we deal with dying in Ireland? Her fervent and only wish was to get home, to speed quickly across three time-zones to see her dad’s dead body, to hold his hand one more time, to say goodbye, to make sure his ashes were scattered at the base of Black Mountain, his favorite spot in the desert southwest.
Discomfited by the unfamiliar rhythms and rituals of rural Derry, how could she know what to expect when trouble comes to your door or how to respond to big-hearted strangers overflowing with concern for her and her mammy? How could she know to not be afraid in the face of the journey ahead?
But my girl has a fearless heart – maybe she’s more Irish than she is American, my sweet sixteen year old girl. Maybe she’s more her mother’s daughter than her dad’s, but I won’t tell her so just yet.
A decade of Christmases ago, Santa brought a bicycle for that same girl, one who had just lost her two front teeth. She wanted a pink bike preferably with sparkles, making it very convenient for Santa and his elves. Lest you judge me, gentle reader, about reinforcing gender stereotypes, let me just say that our girl loved pink that year. In her note to Santa, she even asked that he bring “pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” (The next Christmas, she had moved on; she wanted a new bike to ride with daddy, and the color was irrelevant).
That pink bike had training wheels, or “stabilizers” as we called them in Northern Ireland. Stabilizers – I think it was my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, balance, a firm hold. Had I read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, I may not have been so adamant about getting a bike with stabilizers. The professor wholly dismissed training wheels, pointing out, obviously, that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal. Given that bicycling is the quintessential balancing act, it makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.” Is it any wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels. We have to learn how to balance, much like the way we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.
Ah, but if we get rid of the training wheels, then we say goodbye to a rite of passage. I remember well the day after Christmas when we took Sophie to the park to ride her bike – a Big Moment in our family’s story. The morning began with an Irish breakfast – sausages and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at Ireland’s Own in Phoenix. Next on the agenda was the removal of the training wheels. As expected, there was some cursing and fumbling with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers. Waiting impatiently, in a new Aran sweater, her pig-tails plaited, she was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. We knew better and therefore brought band-aids along with a video camera to record the moment. You know the one. Her daddy would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she would ride into the afternoon sunshine . . .
Naturally, she lost her balance, and she fell. But only the once. She cried, too. Still, our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And then she was riding a bike! Round and round the park she rode, sunbeams dancing on the silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and she, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum.” Equipped for bicycle riding. Forever.
Then in a twinkling, it was the Fall of 2013. Unbeknownst to me, her dad had taken her to a AAA workshop for teen drivers, and was helping her study the driver’s manual for her Learner’s Permit test. Twenty-one correct answers in a row meant she would pass the test on October 16th. Once accomplished, she tells me she gave him a thumbs-up that prompted the wink and proud-as-punch smile she knew so well. It was there on his face when I came home from work – “Look what we did today!” – and he beamed as our baby girl pressed her new Learner’s Permit into my hand. Another family milestone.
Only a month later, one day before our 22nd wedding anniversary, the clocks stopped.
Had someone told us this was going to happen, I wonder what we would have done differently or better or both with our remaining days together. Would an expiration date on our family have changed the way we lived those thirty days? Would we have crammed in the kinds of things typically found on bucket-lists or would we have made sure to say or unsay things otherwise forgotten.
Would we have focused on letting go or holding on?
I don’t know. I know only that the world in which my daughter and I now move is altered, albeit strangely familiar. Smaller. In the weeks following her father’s death, my father, far from his Derry home, taught her to drive on what he still considers the wrong side of the road. Every day, she drove around the quiet streets of our Phoenix neighborhood, hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, my father in the passenger seat telling her to “go easy.” With knots in her stomach, she practiced reversing and parallel parking, the latter making her anxious.
After our Christmas Dinner last year, my mother suggested that Sophie take me out for a drive. My baby girl. Driving. I almost burst with pride, looking on as she signaled and proceeded down the avenue, maintaining a slow, steady 25 mph and taking me from adolescence remembered into motherhood and now widowhood, unaware and unafraid. Behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me of where I started – with Seamus Heaney – and the symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher“
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain
