Mariner
Review by Walter Cummins
My own attempt at a geographic cure many years ago ended up as foolhardy, which is the common result for most who try. Canadian psychologist Paige Abbott verifies, “As a therapist, I would say this is actually harmful rather than of benefit because it further delays people from doing the work they need to for themselves as they get lulled into an artificial sense of “okayness.’” Fortunately, Rosie Schaap’s relocation from a life in New York City to a tiny village in Northern Ireland—as dubious as it may sound—has been a more than okay, so much so that she wrote this book about it.
Schaap was coping with a double grief, the death from cancer of her young husband, Frank, that left her a widow at thirty-nine, and the death of her deteriorating mother not long after. The grieving for Frank was exacerbated by the lingering guilt of her failure to be with him in his hospice room when he died; after spending most of the day with him for their Valentine’s ritual, she had gone home to change and fell into a long unintended sleep. He died while she was gone.
But why Ireland? She had studied in Dublin when in college and saw a bit of the country, very much drawn to the people and the culture. After Frank’s death she made a trip to Ireland and knew she had come to the right place:
But it wasn’t until a few days later, after a quiet two-and-a-half-hour train ride to a place [Belfast] I’d been told to stay away from long ago, that I disembarked in a city whose intimacy with grief was painted on its walls and lodged in its cobblestones. In a country striving day after day to surmount sorrows of its own, I intuited that this might be the Ireland where I could tend to my sorrows, the Ireland I needed most. By then the path had cleared enough that I could see it was not directionless, and that my compass pointed north.
But the transition wasn’t immediate. Back in Brooklyn, Schaap received an offer to write a travel piece about Roger Casement, the subject of a Yeats poem, who had been knighted for his humanitarian work in the Amazon and later became a committed Irish revolutionary. She invited a friend grieving the death of her own parents to accompany her on the research trip to Ireland, the two of them relishing the appeal of County Antrim.
It was on a second trip for additional research that Schaap discovered the village of her future. By chance she booked a few nights in an Irish Landmark Trust cottage near Glenarm Castle. There, Mark, then a friend who would later become her husband, shared her attraction to the sense of place, ”enchanted by the seashore, the forest, the light, the quiet.” She knew she would be back and suspected that she would stay much longer.
What brought her back was writing. At forty-seven, after publishing a successful book, Drinking with Men, and teaching in an American MFA program, she wanted to be a writing student herself. She received a scholarship for the MA in creative writing program at Queen’s University in Belfast, and planned to commute from Glenarm. She assumed she would spend a year: “And I knew if I didn’t make it happen then, I probably never would—and I would feel stuck, in the home where I’d lost my father, my mother, my husband, my aunt and uncle, my cat. It had been a beautiful home, but it was haunted. And I sensed that the grief I had postponed would never find solace until I left my ghosts behind, until I was in Ireland again.”
Glenarm was a village that had seen better days, its few hotels and shops closed, only two pubs still open, not even an ATM. There, Schaap found a cottage with much more space than she had known in her twenty plus years in a 450-square-foot Brooklyn apartment. She also found water, woods, views, and people she quickly bonded with. But most importantly, although it seemed the village had been left for dead, she chose to live in place she considered well-suited to grieving and, ultimately, healing.
One step she took was involvement in the issues of the village, such as the decision whether the then Catholic school would change to integrate Catholic and Protestant students in a country where many had been killed over matters of religion and “community” was a charged word. But Schaap sought a sense of community by attending meetings, writing letters, and signing petitions to help the village heal, a step in her own healing.
One of the book’s strongest chapters addresses widowhood as it is regarded in Ireland, a subject of many novels and stories that Schaap cites. She connects with women in her village who are also widows, sharing emotions. Even before living in Ireland, she felt stigmatized: “When Frank died, I doubted I’d ever be in a meaningful romantic relationship again, and I didn’t think I deserved to.”
She quotes the opening sentence of a story: “There was an old woman living with herself,” paying special attention to the substitution of “with” for the usual “by,” as it captured her own sense of doubleness, “that I am both myself and herself—woman and widow—and they do not always get along.”
Through grasping the deep grief of a friend in the village who had lost a son in a car accident, Schaap achieves an illumination: “It was the kind of openness I had myself been reaching for and maybe getting closer to, especially whenever I was in Ireland—in part because I saw it enacted here more often, and more fully, than I had seen back home.”
Reflecting on the “improbable” in her title, there is an underlying sense of wonder in the many coincidences involved in the steps of Schaap’s geographic cure, a healing that allowed her to come to grips with her grief and start a new life in a new marriage, even though she won’t stop considering herself a widow. She attributes this renewal to all that she has learned in a place far from and very different from the city where she first experienced her losses. “Living here has transformed the way I grieve: what I had hoped for was not only a way to live with it, but to live in it—without giving it the authority to define or limit me.”
