Ironing shirts, folding sheets, the mundane tasks that Seamus Heaney transformed into magical spots of time that make me think of my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. And I’ll hear Seamus Heaney remembering his own mother. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but before the fog rolled in on the end of a windy afternoon on the sandy edges of California. Folding a blue beach blanket, edge to edge, while unbeknownst to us, my husband took photographs and wrote our names in the sand . . .
“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.”
This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but before the fog rolled in on the end of a windy afternoon on the sandy edges of California. Folding our beach blanket, edge to edge, while unbeknownst to us, my husband took photographs and wrote our names in the sand . . .
“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.”
I find writing neither quick nor easy. So elusive are the ideas and then the words to attach to them, I may as well be divining for water. Although I signed up for this 30 day Writer’s Challenge voluntarily, it feels a bit like cruel and unusual punishment some days. Like today. It is Day 13 of the Health Activist Writers Monthly Challenge, ten o’clock on a Saturday night when I should be watching a movie or reading a blog by someone else who can come up with a first sentence. I have produced nothing. I’m supposed to be writing a haiku or an acrostic or some other collection of lines about the condition I’m in. It is the kind of assignment with which I used to torture recalcitrant students in English class. Therefore, and because I’m feeling a little rebellious, being fifty and a day, I’m going to write about writing.
On days like today, writing is my least favorite thing to do. Bear in mind, I don’t do it for a living. I’m not under any contractual obligation to do it. Nobody even asks me to do it. All I know is the compulsion to do it every day. To write something, even if it means staring at a computer screen for long periods of time, thinking. About nothing. Laughably, some people have suggested I write a book, a memoir perhaps. I wonder when I would ever get that done? On top of that, what good would it do other than to provide two covers between which I could contain rambling thoughts about growing up in Northern Ireland, my hair, the cancer, what I wish I’d worn or said on certain occasions best forgotten, the nature of friendship and marriage (mine, no one else’s), motherhood, getting older, and the occasional dip into the always treacherous waters of politics and religion.
Sometimes, when I’m fatigued or maybe just delusional, I’ll sit down at the computer with a “playlist conducive to writing” on my Ipod. Usually, some random collection of bootlegged Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, John Lee Hooker, Joan Armatrading, J.J. Cale, Warren Zevon, Lou Reed, Tom Petty and, for good measure, Frank Sinatra. There’s always a place for Sinatra. Roy Orbison, too. Before long, I’ll be singing along to “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” with the heart of a young Linda Ronstadt and much to the consternation of my adolescent daughter. Inevitably, I will mosey on over to The Official Van Morrison website to see what my favorite curmudgeon is up to these days. Turns out Mr. Morrison will be doing a turn at the Solstice at Dunluce Castle in June.
It’s well for Van. All he has to do is sit down and tap into the mystic; whereas, I must resort to begging my brother – a writer by trade – for a sentence or two to get me going. That’s all I need, I tell him. He has yet to oblige, but the same fella has no problem sending me a random text in the wee hours of the morning, to confirm that James Taylor is, in fact, a genius. My brother may not be up for handing me an opening sentence for a blog post, or a memoir, but as he says himself:
When it comes to quoting the Czars of the early 70s bittersweet folk-rock phenomenon, my dear, I am always up.
The first sentence is always elusive. I can spend hours and hours just waiting for an idea worth exploring to come my way. Invariably, I will hesitate to commit it to the blank screen in front of me, because its potential might be diminished by an ill-chosen word or a clumsy sentence. Caught in this very hesitation on Thursday evening, I noticed file after file being added to my Dropbox folder. A gift from my brother, and when I clicked on the little blue “Happy Birthday” folder, I found Seamus Heaney’s entire collection, each poem read by the poet himself along with a copy of In Step with What Escaped Me: The Poetry of Seamus Heaneyby Peter Sirr. A wondrous gift, indeed.
I love Seamus Heaney and have turned to his poetry on countless occasions throughout my life, when I knew that a poem was the only thing that would lift me up, take me home, or tell me the truth. I have always believed in the power of a poem to change things or make sure they stay the same.
In an interview for The Toronto Star, Heaney discusses The Human Chain, his first volume of poetry since suffering a stroke in 2006. As the interview progresses, he reveals that over the past fifty years, his approach to writing has remained the same:
I don’t think much has changed. I’ve always relied on that little quickening that comes from wakening up to something I’ve known all along. Call it by the grand name of inspiration. Without some inner beeper going off, I can’t get started.
But it is what he says about the relationship between writing poetry and memory that intrigues me. The interviewer asks if Heaney’s process is to tease out memories and shape them into a poem or is it the act of writing poetry that is the memory process, an end unto itself. Heaney responds:
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. At the best times, something wakens, there’s an almost physical quickening. So yes, the business of writing a poem is indeed a process of finding and shaping and keeping — gleeful when all is going well, gradual when you’re doing something longer — but there’s no knowing where a remembered image will lead you. It tends to be a case of what William Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’ that retain ‘a vivifying influence.’
I remember Wordsworth. Very well. At Antrim Grammar School, we had to learn by heartThe Solitary Reaper, The Lucy Poems, and Composed Upon Westminster Bridge. To this day, when I see a tiny flower defy a crack in a California sidewalk, I think of Lucy. When I stand on the summt of Piestewa Peak and look over Phoenix, a desert city so far away from Wordsworth’s England, I can hear myself recite, “Dear God, the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!” I can also hear Mr. Jones, my English teacher add, with a soft thump on his desk, “Great stuff!”
Those of you who visit here often know that my brother (whom I adore) pointed out recently that I am not the owner of a phenomenal memory. As you know, this came as a shock, because I had been operating – for years – under the misguided assumption that my memory was practically photographic. Hell-bent on making his point, my brother explained:
No, your memory and recall of specific events, places and things has always been appalling. You have good emotional recall; you’ll remember how you felt about a thing, but damn all about what actually went down
Then, in a failed attempt to soften the blow, he half-apologized, saying “I’m probably overstating it now. But your memory was never, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘amazing’. In any way, shape or form.”
That may be true, but the poetry I learned by heart, I will own forever in my heart. And, remembering how I felt about a thing almost puts me in the same league as Wordsworth! When asked in March 2013 what he thought of children being “forced” to memorize poetry, Heaney argues:
I believe in people learning poetry by heart, definitely. It’s the beginning of a cultural ear. Without it. it’s difficult.
He went on to say that poetry would later play a critical role for people in times of crisis as a source of comfort, offering a way to “stand up” to difficulties.
I cannot argue with him, and now I have his poetry at my fingertips. Any time I need it.
The third annual Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge begins today, and I’m in. As a disclaimer of sorts, lest I falter on the challenge to write thirty posts in thirty days, let’s consider this the April Fool’s Day post. That way, I’ll always have an out.
So why do I write about my health online? What was it that got me started? I suppose it was the cancer. But it was also growing up in Northern Ireland. Ironic, when I stop to consider the teenage version of myself, slouched over a desk at Antrim Grammar School, twirling her hair and whining with unparalleled ennui to her teachers that there’s simply nothing to write about. Be careful what you wish for. Out came the writing prompts, as they still do, provoking in adolescent students already bored with, well, everything, a reaction like this from my daughter during a recent practice run for the AIMS (Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards) Writing test: “Has technology improved life? Write a persuasive essay as to why or why not.”
Admittedly, the rebellious part of me that lives in my daughter, half-hoped that she would turn it in for credit, reminiscent of the impervious student in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, who, when asked to write an essay discussing how to resolve the staging difficulties inherent in a production of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” writes one sentence, “Do it on the radio.”
When I was my daughter’s age, I too rolled my eyes to the heavens when I opened the examination booklet to find some of these writing prompts. Beyond “What I did for my summer holidays,” I rediscovered hese gems in Section A of my 1979 O Level English exam. As I recall, I chose (b) and the detestable occasion most likely involved some skill I had not mastered in Domestic Science. I have to wonder who in her right mind would have picked (d) “The nearest I have come to committing a crime.”
Perhaps (i) should be. “A woman approaching 50 years of age still has her O-level English exam questions.” Write a persuasive letter to her in which you explain the merits of recycling.
Bear in mind, we were taking our O-level exams during turbulent times in Northern Ireland, just a few years after the end of Internment and two years before Bobby Sands refused food, thus beginning the Hunger Strike. Hardly a time of nuanced questions and circumspect diplomacy. I remember always being afraid of what went on behind the walls of Belfast’s Castlereagh Interrogation Centre. Eventually, police officers would admit that prisoners held there had been subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation, burned with cigarettes, systematically tortured into giving confessions. As my old friend, Roberto Reveles, once told me, “if you live long enough, eventually, you’ll see everything twice.” When those pictures emerged of a young and grinning United States Army Reserve specialist posing with a pyramid of naked Iraqui prisoners behind her in Abu Ghraib, my mind went back to the Castlereagh Road.
As a young woman, I never had any trouble thinking of things to write in my diary. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some of them true, some embellished. Along with angst-filled poems, bits of social commentary, dried red leaves from maple trees that lined the roads upstate New York on my first trip to America, letters I never sent, and all those things I wished I’d said at the time, there was always plenty of material. A college student, just starting out away from home, I had all the time in the world to carve out an hour to to set down words on a page. But the business of adult living got in my way, and my cherished daily ritual gave way to other routines and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, costly, and simply not good for me.
Even with a cancer diagnosis, the thing that everyone dreads, I have had to stop and remind myself that my career is but a thin sliver of my life, that my family matters most, that my well-being is my priority. Such words roll easily off the tongue, but unless reflected in daily practice, they ring hollow.
I was diagnosed on 11.11.11. At once, everything changed and nothing changed. I could be contemplating my mortality one minute and paying bills the next, shifting in an instant and imperceptibly, from the philosophical to the pedestrian. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. I am more awake to the fact that all these moments that make up a life, are not of equal weight. Some I want to freeze forever, others I want to forget immediately. But for too long, my priorities were askew.
In a 1992 interview, the late Senator Paul Tsongas reveals, “Pre-cancer, I was one of the pettiest people you’ve ever run into … I would get angry at my wife for leaving the top off the toothpaste. I’d get angry at my kids for the dumbest things. Looking back on it I feel mortified. I was a fool.” Taking stock, in Heading Home, Tsongas explains that it was a letter from an old friend, Arnold Zack, that helped put in perspective the senator’s promising political career:
No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business.
In this same year, he also regretted choosing not to disclose the recurrence of lymphoma five years earlier, and he made a pledge to submit his medical records for review by independent experts should he ever run for office again.
At first, I disclosed my diagnosis to family, friends, and people who turned out to be anything but friends. All I knew about breast cancer was that it got me. It made no sense, because there was no family history, and three clear mammograms. Breast cancer was the thing that happened to other women. Too quickly, among my friends, I was that other woman, “the one who had cancer.” Apparently striking dumb those people who would ordinarily talk the legs off a stool, I ventured online to find the resources I needed to decipher a lexicon that grew only larger as I journeyed along a well-worn path taken by too many before me – detection, diagnosis, surgery, treatment, fatigue, depression, and fear of recurrence. A quick study, the politicization of breast cancer soon dawned on me. Duped, I had fallen for the mythology of breast cancer, with its attendant pink ribbons and platitudes, and I felt angry, sad, and stupid. April’s fool indeed. So I began to write about it, the way I might have done in my secret diary years ago.
If ever you doubt the power of writing to salve your soul, Dr. Cheryl Dellasega at Why Writing is Good For Your Health, suggests asking yourself the following questions:
What other form of communication allows me to edit until I get it right?
What other legacy can I create that’s as permanent as the written word?
Is there anything more soothing than the feel of my fingers flying over the computer keys as if playing a piano concerto with ease?
Is there any other non-chemical experience that allows me to enter another world as completely as literature?
In this space that writing affords, I have control. I can set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer or women who “have it all.” I can lean back rather than Lean In. I can light the match rather than not burn the bridge that served only to keep me down and in the dark. In this space, if a visitor leaves a comment that is unkind or untrue or defamatory, I can place it in the trashcan, where it belongs.
At the beginning, I was neither brave nor bold. I felt like I was speaking out of turn if I expressed out loud the indignation and rage I felt towards the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence. Did I not know my place? After all, even in the face of estimates such as those of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, that by 2030 – when my little girl will be 31 years old – 747,802 women worldwide will die each year from breast cancer, NBCC’s deadline for The End of Cancer is January 1, 2020. Who am I to argue? But it is just seven years away, so I am nervous. Forty years ago, Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, which has been around since the civilizations of Ancient Greece. Still, we seem stuck on the treatment of it. The same regimen of some combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation is still at work, and cancer is still winning. Just ask those who are dying from it, those who have lost loved ones to it. Dare I ask out loud if it is realistic to set a deadline for ending cancer? I am not so sure as I once was, back when I did not pay as much attention to words unsaid. Those are the words that matter, and to remain silent is just not an option for any of us.
In Seamus Heaney’s ”Punishment,” harrowing and haunting, he evokes a young woman who has been shorn, stripped, and killed in a primitive, barbaric act which he juxtaposes with the ‘tarring and feathering’ in the Northern Ireland of his day. In this poem, lies a lesson I apply to myriad aspects of my life, including my health and why I write about it – like those other onlookers, he confesses he would not have spoken out against her punishment. With heartbreaking honesty, he tells the dead woman
Photo: Belfast Telegraph. Young woman tarred and feathered for getting engaged to a British soldier.
My poor scapegoat, I almost love you, but would have cast, I know the stones of silence.
