For as long as I can remember, I have known that Holly came from Miami, FLA and hitch-hiked her way across the USA; that little Joe never gave it away; and, that Jackie thought she was James Dean for a day. As young as I was when I first heard Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” I cannot possibly have known what the hustle here and the hustle there was all about. Had I known, I probably wouldn’t have been singing it within earshot of my parents – after all, this was the early 1970s in provincial Northern Ireland.
Remembering Lou Reed reminds me of a story Neil Gaiman tells about how he braced himself for almost twenty years for the inevitable conversation with his daughter about the story behind her name. Holly. When the day arrived, here’s how it went:
You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Reed started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “Shaved her legs and then he was a she …? He?
That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation.”You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.” She grinned like a light going on. “Oh dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it.
I’m not sure that I’d ever expected The Conversation to go quite like that.
If I’m honest, I have always been a tiny bit afraid of whatever truths awaited me on the wild side with Lou Reed, but I always took that walk with him anyway. And, I have never regretted it, because there was always a book of magic in the garbage can to take me away. And then came the loss . . . just to even things out.
Two years on, it feels odd to say out loud that Lou Reed is dead, that there have been no more new tales from the dirty boulevard. I remember Ken wouldn’t say it out loud either, and I sometimes wonder if it is because he had an inkling that just 18 days later, he would fly away too.
Lou Reed was right about lots of things. He was right about the magic and the loss. I understand that now, and I’m the better for it. So thank you Lou Reed. For all of it. For being combative and contrary and infinitely cool. For my black leather jacket. For my rock and roll heart. For the bit of magic.
It is your birthday, and for the second time since we met, you are not with me on your day. How should we mark the occasion? Without any fuss, I can hear you say, and maybe you can hear me ignore you as I plan a fuss of some kind, the way I did for each of the 23 birthdays you celebrated with me. Anyway, my love, weren’t you the one who always told me not to throw away old photographs because they were proof that we were here? Proof of life. Proof of having lived. These markers matter, don’t they?
There are people who don’t know you lived, people who come to our house and knock on our door who remain unaware that you used to be here. Almost every day, the new mailman leaves in our mailbox at least one piece of mail addressed to you. He would not know that those envelopes bearing your name remain unopened before I discard them in the recycling bin. Should I tell him? How should I tell him that you don’t live here anymore? Is there some protocol in place for informing the mailman or the other “known” strangers who people my life? Maybe I can fill out a form at the Post Office so everyone will know that you don’t live here anymore. You don’t live.
But that’s not the way it used to be.
You used to do the last-minute grocery shopping, and I suppose I should tell you that we just have not been able to go back to ‘your’ store. What of Lisa, the cashier? She liked you and doted on Sophie. Does she ever wonder about you, I wonder? Does she know you died or, if you cross her mind, does she just assume you started buying our groceries somewhere cheaper? Then, there’s the old mechanic, whose old ways appealed to you. Unfairly, he is older than you. Last week, we had to take your car to his shop, because the damn driver’s side window got stuck again, and I don’t know how to fix it, even temporarily. Standing there waiting for him to tell me how expensive it was going to be, I noticed his assistant had already written your name on the work order, so I thought I should tell him you had died. Oh, honey, I had to look away. A cliche, but his jaw dropped, and he stopped what he was doing to remember you, to tell me he didn’t know and that he was so very sorry. “Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn.” You made an impression on him. You made a mark.
No, I still don’t know how to fix things, and it seems as though things are breaking all the time. Yesterday, before the storm moved in, I called someone a friend of a friend knows to repair our patio roof. He climbed up your ladder, and when I heard his footsteps above me, I pretended – for a minute – that it was you. I almost waited for you to come back down and tell me it was no big deal. I wonder did he notice the clues you left behind, the proof that you were here. Your tools still lean against the shed; your lighter – empty now – remains surreptitiously upon one of the beams. I think you thought I believed you when you said you had quit smoking. Your pictures still hang on the wall, reminding me of the complete and smiling family of which we were once a part, and if he were to look in the laundry room, he would see your favorite blue chambray shirt hanging there. Maybe he thought you were at work or that you just weren’t “handy.” He didn’t ask, but I wonder if he wondered why I called him instead of you to fix our roof. I wanted to explain, to tell him all about you, but instead I looked at pictures on his phone of the patio he had remodeled for his outdoor wedding.
It is your birthday, and I am annoyed that the men who mow the yard and trim the trees have shown up the way they do each Monday, as if it is an ordinary Monday. They make too much noise, but none of it is about you. They know you used to live here, but they never mention you. They never acknowledge that you were here even when I remind them that since you died, I need them to pay closer attention to the sprinkler system and to the branches that trail on our roof and the Mesquite seed pods that drop in the pool. You are not here anymore to pick up their slack, and they don’t appear to miss you.
To them and other familiar faces at the grocery store or the gas station, I look the same as I always did. Mostly. My hair is longer again, the way you preferred it, and I have been going to the gym again. My wedding rings now sparkle from the fourth finger of my right hand. It makes no difference. Ostensibly, nothing has changed. If you were to ask the people who know me as the woman who leaves the trashcans out on a Monday night, so the man who drives the City of Phoenix garbage truck can empty them on Tuesday morning, they would have no reason to believe anything has changed in our house.
But everything has changed in your absence, and after twenty-two months, I have not figured out how to turn away from a life with you to one without you. Some people who didn’t know you presumed I was ready to “move on.” There was the bank clerk, gently impatient as she pressed me – just weeks after you died – for a certified copy of your death certificate so she could erase your name from the checking account and the mortgage, and transform things that used to be “ours” into mine. All mine.
Until I had to do them myself, I underestimated the work you did just to keep our house – my house – functioning, and I somehow missed so many of the countless little things that now loom large in front of me. You always knew when to change the oil and rotate the tires, but you cared more about keeping the hummingbird feeder full and doing the laundry. All second nature, I thought at the time, but I know now you reminded yourself on yellow post-it notes that accumulated in the basket where you always kept your keys. Do you know I have been putting my keys in your basket every day? Sophie reminds me.
You always put things back where they belonged. You played a steady tune that I can barely hear any more. Yes, there were things you didn’t do and wouldn’t do and things you weren’t good at, but that’s where I came in. Between us and for us, we made it all work, didn’t we? Sitting here with you on your birthday, I want to scream to anyone who will listen that I can’t make it work the way it used to, because “it” is finished. Yes. I am feeling sorry for myself and I know I shouldn’t. There are so many memories to mine on your birthday, but it is no good. This grief has me in its grip, a kind of delayed reaction. I am adrift with no idea where this altered life will lead. I know you would tell me not to worry, but I wouldn’t be able to hear you above the noise of my own fears.
Do you remember the last time we were grateful? It was New Year’s Day 2013, almost a year after I was diagnosed with cancer. We were certain sure, standing there on the street outside our house in the wee hours of the first day of a new year. I was still your wife, one half of an “us,” giddy with the promise of a clean slate. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents were here too, their faces illuminated by cheap sparklers we bought one Fourth of July in San Luis Obispo, smiling at our smiling girl in her pajamas and one of my heavy jackets. Our lovely girl – just fourteen – do you remember she toasted us with cider that sparkled amber in a Tyrone crystal glass from back home.All was well. Life was sweet.
I remember staying up after you went to bed, just to savor the silence of our slumbering house. This was before I resented the silence. Curled up on the couch, I remember reading Ted Kooser’s End of Year Reflections, and today, I am drawn back to what he said of this 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, isn’t it? On your birthday, I find myself still in between two cars. I still have some distance to travel.Forward. Ready or not. A slow turning. From the inside out.
Do you remember that song? Of course you do. I remember adding it to a playlist I made for one of your birthdays. If it began to play right as you pulled into the driveway, you would turn it up and stay in the car until it was over. I can see you right now, on your birthday, a September sun setting in the rear-view mirror and you tapping your feet and singing your favorite line:
I’m yelling at the kids in the back, ‘cause they’re banging like Charlie Watts.
How could I not make a fuss on your birthday? I will never forget you.
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.
My husband always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because it meant that he wouldn’t have to miss me. A private man, he 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. It is part of the culture that formed me, and I am bound to it. Friends from back home agree that it is sewn tidily in our DNA – 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 china cups of tea balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits; we know when to shake hands, when to whisper and weep or 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 Ken’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 desert southwest of these United States and a blacksmith’s forge on the side of the road in rural South Derry. I wanted what I couldn’t have. I wanted to visit a grave and bring flowers, perhaps freesias because he loved their scent. I wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye. I wanted to fill the air with his favorite music. I knew he wanted none of it. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.
In November 2013, a few days before he died, I visited the graveyard in Bellaghy where Seamus Heaney is buried. And today, on the second anniversary of our poet’s death, 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 as a final resting place, a naturalist like my husband would maybe consider it.
Unsure what Heaney would think of it, local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to the job and moved by the number of people who visit 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 this 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? Are they afraid?
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.
So when people tell me my husband is in a better place now, I can’t help but rail against them. What place could be better than here with his daughter, the girl he loved so much and so well? What place could be better than in our dining room to light eighteen candles on her birthday cake or at the Motor Vehicle Department when she nailed the parallel parking and got her license, or in the audience to cheer her on and whistle as she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma, or when she earned her first paycheck? How could any place be better than a ring-side seat at the milestones yet to come? Is there a more desolate space than his empty seat at the table?
It has been one year, nine months, and fourteen days since Ken died, and my growing preoccupation is with wanting to know where he is. Where is he? Some days, it feels as though he just went missing. Where is he? It is a confounding, gnawing question. It is unrelenting, 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 Ken 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. It represented his beginning. It was his first place.
We obliged. My parents, far from their Castledawson home, our daughter, and a close friend did as Ken asked, each of us taking turns to empty the bag that contained the cremated remains of this man who had loved me? That bag probably weighed no more than five pounds. I recall fixating on this detail and wondering about Ken’s soul and the weight of it and its whereabouts. Where was it? Where was Ken? Where is Ken?
About a month ago, my daughter and I returned to the spot where we had spread his ashes, assuming it would be unchanged, frozen in time. Instead, “his” tree had been cut down and the area around it chained off for commercial development. An empty space – for now. Heartsick, I wept for him, for my naturalist, even though the rational part of me knew and knows that not for one moment would he have expected his desert space to remain unspoiled. He had grown resigned to the price of urban progress. Still, I was resentful again, angry that there was no grave for us to visit, no headstone to adorn with fresh flowers on his birthday, or on the anniversaries of the day we met or the day we married, the day our girl was born, or the day of his death.
Another blow.
Then with the right words at the right time – again – came Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the new headstone in place for today, the second anniversary of his death. 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.
Ken, you are neither here nor there. You are everywhere, and that is reason enough for “keeping going.”
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.
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
In November 2013, a few days before he died, I visited the 
Unsure what Heaney would think of it, local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to the job and moved by the number of people who visit to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
