Christmas Letter from Galway (on Grief)

County Galway, Ireland
November 2002

To a few friends:

In October two years ago, I wrote a letter trying to explain to Wayne’s friends and mine something that was inexplicable except in the broadest terms of circumstance.  It was my eighth wedding anniversary, and I had ridden a Lusitano mare, with a mane so long it tangled in my fingers when she galloped, to a Portuguese village in the heart of the Algarve. I struggled with words more than I ever had in a lifetime of riding with the willfulness and unpredictability of a horse.

At the advent of this holiday season, I struggle still with words. I want to be writing a Christmas letter about children and family, vacations, accomplishments—the milestones and quiet happenings of the life I used to imagine. Instead, I’m again in a foreign country and at the moment am grateful I can make the central heat work in this vault of a house. A load of turf, the chucks of peat Irishmen pry out of the ground in Connemara is stacked on the front porch and almost daily swept over with rain. It has taken me three months and about a hundred matches to figure out how to light it. Now at night when the wind wails like a trapped animal and the loch outside my window is thrashing with whitecaps, turf glows in silent licking flames.

I came to Ireland on an impulse—an offer to exchange houses for the fall, maybe the year, with a musician whose wife I’d met a few times. I didn’t look closely at the situation. If I had, I would be in Virginia this evening with my dog and a good book, not writing from a place so remote, I receive mail addressed simply “near Aughnanure Castle.” When I first arrived in the bleary-eyed stupor inflicted by overnight travel and exhausted from having committed every available minute of the previous eight weeks to frenzied cleaning, discarding, sorting, and painting in my own house, I opened the door to a domestic calamity that flooded me with unease over what might occur across the Atlantic in my absence. I recall breathing in a very deliberate way as I chipped layers of crusted food from the microwave oven with a metal scrapper, scrubbed splatters of black paint off the walls, and vacuumed hair from the oven. A professional house cleaner, hired at my expense, took a brief walk through and announced flatly, “I do not scrub.” But sympathizing with my plight and stirred, probably, by some sense of national pride, she relented and flew around red-faced for several days, flinging a fog of Ajax everywhere and muttering, “Bloody filthy… It’s just bloody filthy.” I felt oddly comforted.

Driving was a challenge I faced alone. Statistically, Ireland is second only to Greece in automobile fatalities. This is because the roads are about eight feet wide and flanked by walls and hedgerows lining a bog as pliable as the back of a worn sofa. People rocket around at appalling speeds, passing any presenting obstacles with casual disregard for the nuisance of oncoming traffic. I quickly realized that mental disposition when seated behind the wheel of an Irish car should be oriented toward self-preservation and any evasive maneuvering this entails, not an indignant understanding of lawful behavior. Recently, as I threaded the car through the clogged maze of Galway’s rush hour, I thought of spring two years ago, when I was so grief stricken, I panicked at the prospect of traveling in my own car. I’ve learned to mark time by reclamations and the questions I no longer ask.

Today I crossed Connemara to a coral beach where cattle graze near the water’s edge, and wild ponies trot along the road with heads tossing and eyes wary. As I knelt on a ledge of rock looking for shells in the tide pools, a bank of dark swollen clouds enveloped the sky. Rain spattered through sunlight, and waves driven by sudden wind clapped against the rocks. Beyond the storm, a rainbow stretched from deep in the bay to distant hills that rolled in a fretwork of stonewalls to the foot of the Twelve Bens. I thought how much of life, in its mercurial beauty and paradox is reflected in the character of this country. For the years that have passed since Wayne’s death, I’ve often felt my heart was like a live bird, gripped until the wings began to splinter. Being able once again to find the artistry and solace in nature is the restoration of a gift.

Grief can seem for a private eternity like the worst of storms, apocalyptic in force and borne without benefit of warmth or shelter. Eventually, it becomes more like an uninvited houseguest who lingers, flicking cigarette ash and piling dirty laundry in the corners, long after the martyred patience for such inconvenience has expired. Pulling through means a thousand small acts of perseverance, hinged on faith in a purposeful existence and the clichéd hope that time heals. Time does not stand still for the recovery, though. Before I had unpacked my suitcases in Ireland, my horse for more than a decade, a chestnut with a wide white blaze, who would nicker whenever he saw me, even through the windows of my house, broke his shoulder running in the field where I left him to stay while I was away. He had already been put down when the barn manager called to ask where I wanted him buried.

The message of Christmas is one of redemption for the brokenness of this life—that God is above, beneath, and beyond the comprehended world, within grief and all that is human.  I try to remember, when my sense of loss and longing for Wayne seems too deep for comfort, that a sparrow can’t fall to the ground without God’s knowing. Bouts of sorrow abate more quickly now, passing in and out of my consciousness like the storms that darken Ireland’s west coast and speak within the landscape of transience and change.

I hope the New Year brings happiness to you and yours.

With my love,

Mary