“And some time make the time to drive out west . . .
where the wind and the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter,
and inland . . . the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans . . .
through which known and strange things pass . . .
and catch the heart off guard.”
(“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney)
My father and I always believed in magic. We did not subscribe to the abracadabra variety: trick spells and rabbits that emerged from hats, but rather the kind of magic that appears beneath starlight.
Fact and fiction tumbled seamlessly in our stories. After mom died, our conversations read like myths.
Dad and I sought solace in the comforting cadence of the bullfrog and the rush of wind as mute swans took flight over the still green waters of Crooked Lake. We wanted to make sense of loss and the quick passing of time, so we turned to the magic of nature. Dad and I knew that my mother flew with broad wings and laughed in the guise of a pileated woodpecker. Dad and I believed that energy simply changes form.
I would often ask him, “What do you think happens to our personalities after we die? Our laughter, our cravings for lemon and fennel, olives and marinated artichoke hearts?”
After all this contemplation, we decided that it was best to eat our last supper, a feast of Italian charcuterie and pasta while we still had the chance. After devouring our favorite meal, we turned to our love of words for evening entertainment. In the darkness of late winter, we took turns reading our favorite parts from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Dad and I both loved Puck’s apology, “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended.” Little did we know that midsummer would find us all on a new journey.
Dad and I were naturalists, philosophers, seekers, and innocents whose interests flitted about like dandelion seeds in late spring. To us, it was comforting to think that our innocence rested on the banks with the turtles of Crooked Lake.
That our spirits, freed from fears and misgivings, soared with the gusts of leaves in early autumn. That our energy floated like crystalline snowflakes onto the winter-bare lake reeds that frame our view from the kitchen table.
We are the phases of the moon and the ebb of the tides. Dad and I knew that every reliable ghost has a story to tell.
A year has passed since my father’s death. He passed in his own home. While the night raged with epic rain, my husband and I stayed by his side.
I pulled the sliding doors wide open so Dad might hear the steady croak of the bullfrog, the chatter of the tree frogs, and the power of the wind as he passed from this life to the next. On that night, a new chapter began.
Signs
Dad and I often spoke of signs. As he passed, I begged him to send a sign as soon as he was with mom in that ether world. Within 24 hours, he sent sun and rain falling from a clear sky.
Mysterious alchemy painted a rainbow above the small cottage. Wide, unfading brushstrokes of indigo and violet.
Dad trusted my belief in signs. Hours before my mother passed, she sent me a text message to remind her to tell me about the blackberries that grew in her native soil, the red clay of southern Missouri.
Mom’s last words mirrored my own written words. Odes to blackberries, blackberry picking, and the poetry of Seamus Heaney.
Dad knew about this sign. He also understood why my daughter and I tattooed blackberries on our inner wrists: a stenciled dirge, an ode to my mother.
Three years after my mother’s death, my daughter was diagnosed in a Dublin hospital with the auto-immune disease ITP. As I took the morning bus from the Dublin airport through town to meet my sick girl, a placard announced the “Seamus Heaney: Listen Now, Again” exhibit. The poet’s wisdom and grace were again following me on another path in my journey.
My father believed in the signs. He once fell asleep in a chair beneath his sycamore tree. A crooked tree on a crooked lake. Dad awoke to the flutter of a hummingbird on his shoulder and thoughts of mom in his heart.
Although my father never strayed far from his home on Crooked Lake, he traveled through words and music, conversation and dreams. For him, truth and magic, insight and hope were no farther than the arms of his favorite chair.
It is here that Dad and I differ. I love to travel and to meet new people that I may never have the chance to see again. For on that odd time, strangers may become new friends.
And so it was that my father gifted me with yet another sign.
On our recent holiday to Saint Lucia, sand-covered and sea-salted, I flip flopped over to the resort’s outdoor bar for the golden hour. My husband welcomed me with “meet my new friend, Nigel.”
After securing a spot for my oversized blue straw hat, I sat down next to Nigel and his lovely wife Claire. As with the start of any friendship, we asked questions of one another, “Have you been to Saint Lucia before? Do you have children? Have you been to the States? Have you ever been to England?”
“Why yes, I love England,” I replied.
Nigel’s next question opened heaven’s gate. “What do you like about England?”
I responded, “Well, everything. I studied English literature in college and graduate school, so I most enjoy the literature and history, but my favorite poet is Irish, Seamus Heaney.”
Seamus Heaney
It was then that my new friend told me that he was a friend of both Seamus Heaney and Nobel Prize winning Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott. They became friends while coordinating literary festivals held on the island.
Our chance meeting was like Christmas, Halloween, and a tangerine sunset all wrapped in Yeats’ cloths of heaven. How could it be that I was sipping a rosé the color of the Saint Lucian sky during my first ever tropical holiday that I happen to meet a friend to a Nobel Prize winning poet who has both guided and inspired me during moments of joy and pain? Was this the orchestration of fate?
I explained my admiration for Seamus Heaney and my personal connection to his poem “Blackberry Picking.” Our meeting was more than happenstance or an illustration of the six degrees of separation theory. This was a magical symphony of changing light and moving tides, of signs steeped in mystery and new beginnings.
As Seamus Heaney writes in “Postscript,” “Strange things pass . . . and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.” With all my heart, I know that Dad sent me this gift. For my own postscript, I’d like to imagine that Seamus Heaney was next to dad, draping a constellation above that strand where sea meets land, and heaven kisses earth.
