Don't be afraid

On death, dying and starting over...

Lookit. Frankness is a renowned Irish quality. My paternal grandfather back in Dublin was named Francis and I even had an Uncle Frank. So let me be frank. I admit this is an awkard way to introduce myself. To ‘birth’ my Substack presence by talking about Death with a capital ‘D.’ Maybe this is for the best, though? Honesty right up front. Tell it like it is.

Like once the first couple of dates prove successful enough, you progress past the café, cinema and resto to enter someone’s actual living quarters. You examine book titles on shelves and music albums stacked in old milk crates to gleen further insight, some better understanding of this yet undiscovered human. (At least, that’s what my generation did. Playlists are equally as revealing as vinyl for modern purposes here.)

You know the drill. You ask them what their favourite food or song is; what movies they love or even the ones they hate. You try to find commonality or enough differences to keep a new connection enticing enough to continue. I’m generally hesitant about telling people a favourite film of mine is Délicatessen by the fabuleux French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. It’s a dark comedy. Post-apocalyptic. And maybe that reveals more about me than I want a new friend or date to learn right off the bat.

But here I stand with my proverbial robe open. I’ve been planning to join this space for some time now. Draw the curtains. Open a window. Hang some plants (and photography, of course.) I’m in a new place right now, literally and figuratively. I figure this is as good a time as any.

View of Hurricane Fiona from the hotel window. The hurricane hit just as our furniture was arriving from Ontario a year ago. Climate crisis amplifies other stress. September 2022. Photo credit: Nancy Forde

August has been a month of taking toll. Of shaking carpets and wiping surfaces. Likely why I’ve been coughing for two solid weeks. My Irish Da would tell me a joke about a funeral director who had a cold. He couldn’t stop coffin. In the wake of COVID, this extended duration of respiratory unrest unnerves me. I tell myself it’s got to be the film of particles in the house I evacuate, these rooms I scour top to bottom as they are emptied. Must be the fine layers lying on the surfaces in the new place or unleashed from the packing paper of all the boxes I open in rapid fire succession like a kid on Christmas morning. I blame my congestion on the dust tornado that inevitably rises from packing up one home and moving to another. This is the second time we’ve moved in 11 months. Between you and me, let’s hope it’ll be the last such occasion for the next eon.

Pyschiatrists will affirm that certain events in life cause increased stress: divorce, being fired, being hired, buying or selling a home, weddings, new parenthood, teenhood, adulthood, menopause, aging, funerals, global pandemics, climate crisis. And moving. Moving causes stress.

I’ve always been one to welcome change. Probably because my childhood was riddled with uprootage. Is that a word? I google the noun: uprooting, uprootal. I like the term I coin better. My childhood felt nomadic. Canada, UK, Belgium, Canada, Wisconsin, Canada, Illinois, Canada. We moved A LOT and I always considered the act itself a thrilling adventure. Likely why I get restless if I stay too long in one spot. My own version of the seven-year itch, maybe.

When I was a child, I loved the mystery of a new, undiscovered setting. The mystery of others. The mystery I could become to people I met or friends I might yet make. Maybe this is why as an adult I am drawn to the mysterious, to investigation, dissection and puzzles.

Moving has always offered opportunity for reinvention, the cleaning of slates, the turning of new leaves. I am an optimist with a penchant for dark comedy. Dark tales. Even dark clothing, mostly. My heart is a winter cabin. I’m more at home anywhere in autumn and winter. Wyeth put it best:

I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape---the loneliness of it---the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it---the whole story doesn't show.

I like to imagine this time of year as the dark side of the moon. And that I am Bill Anders emerging from it fumbling for my camera in microgravity, gasping at the sight of Earth rising out of the moon’s shadow. I think of the photograph Earthrise as spring sometimes after the long, dark winter. But right now, I’m a passenger on Apollo 8 as it begins its first orbit of the moon. Right now it’s the season of Samhain. The Celtic New Year. It’s the season of the Crone who reigns over death and dying as trees weep their leaves and bears cloak themselves in caverns beneath the earth for hibernation. After harvest, the broken stalks of farmers’ fields poke through the snow like a final farwell.

Autumn always evokes Ireland for me, the land of my ancestors. And now, for the second autumn in a row, we turn another new leaf. One week in, I am still unboxing it all. Unpacking my life. All the —pardon my Irish—shite I have accumulated from all my former lives lived elsewhere. After the cardboard is folded and recycled, the unpacking of my life remains ongoing.

Caveat: no one I personally know is dying right now. Knock on wood. Though even spelling that out, I can hear Buddha giggling in the wings somewhere. Some gentle reminder echoes offstage that we begin to die from the moment we are born. I don’t mean to put you off your cereal. It wasn’t my intention to introduce my writing here with such morbid focus. Just this summer and even well before the spring—since COVID hit to be honest—I’ve been dwelling on death and dying. Not my own exit necessarily. Though each time I buckle myself on a plane like I did this summer, I am confronted with thoughts of potential impending demise. There’s a famous film director (whose work I can no longer stomach watching) who said he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work but rather through… not dying. Good luck is all I can think. We are all dying, I guess. From the moment we’re born.

Last April, shortly after the vernal equinox, I celebrate the verdant season of new life by volunteering for a post-winter cleanup of the Old Burying Ground (OBG) in downtown Halifax across from the Government House at the intersection of Spring Garden and Barrington. Craig Ferguson who runs @deadinHalifax on Twitter has organized this gathering via a callout on social media. And true to its repute, the OBG is hauntingly beautiful. It lies smack-dab amidst shops and restaurants in the city’s core. The last burial here occurred in 1844. In 1991, the OBG was granted designation as a national historic site. A local band of champions continue to protect and preserve it from being turned into a parking lot, something the city council previously petitioned to do in 1958. Several hundred headstones stand like hesitant wallflowers in uneven rows, some dating back to the 18th century. Dead leaves and soda cans blanket them and we are here to clear the grounds, at least of the detritus above-ground. The headstone count belies the number of actual dead. Beneath the trees and grass, the physical remains of about 12,000 souls call the OBG their final resting place.

On a crisp, spring morning, over a dozen volunteers gather to rid the grounds of garbage tossed over the iron fencing during the winter. We raise weighted covers that protect the oldest and most fragile or unique headstones for storage during the summer. The cemetery is, in fact, very inviting. A bit spooky, yes, but the organization that manages it hopes that tourists and locals alike feel welcome to wander, bring a lunch and even sit for a picnic on the grounds during summer months. With so many volunteers, we make short work of pre-opening prep and sit for a photograph. (I’m absent because I am behind the camera for this one, as usual.)

Haligonian spirit and generosity is evident when over a dozen volunteers show up to spruce up the OBG after a long winter. April 2023. Photo credit: Nancy Forde

This month marks a year since I moved myself, my kid and our dog to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after decades in southwestern Ontario. Our first experience of the coastal city has been the Hydrostone, otherwise known as the city’s North End. Last week, we moved closer to the Armdale Rotary, a roundabout that lies like a giant, auto-wielding squid with tentacles stretching from its central body to every corner of the city and beyond.

The new place offers us more room for less rent. More trees. Less noise. And for the photographer in me, much more light. In the former abode, windows felt few and far between and faced the walls of other buildings in closer proximity. Amidst a national housing crisis, we count our very real blessings. The first morning I walk the dog along a nearby trail. On the return stroll, my pup freezes. I gaze up the street, squinting to focus. I’ve left my glasses on the kitchen counter but out of the morning mist, I discern the shape of a deer slowly crossing our path to a lawn where two fawns await her. I’m shocked my dog who sometimes barks at ants remains silent. His confusion supercedes his anxiety. What is this creature? Four legs like him, but taller.

The sight of the doe looses the cork on the bottle of my hippocampus. The vapour it emits is that scene in Stand by Me, based on Stephen King’s novella, The Body. The breathtaking cinematic moment when Gordie sits alone on the train tracks and encounters the doe. I think of my kid who’s about the same age and my lashes dampen with the dew. As dawn breaks, four eyes—canine and human—follow this ephemeral triptych of Wild up and over a manicured lawn. They flash their white tails in zig-zag staccato and disappear. Like some blinking farewell in morse code. Morse. Inspector Morse. Morose. Mortal. Morbid. My very strange brain loves language. Death feels stapled into my skull like a coffin’s silken lining. A coffin for thoughts I seek to bury. For many thoughts I cannot.

Our new abode lies near another Halifax cemetery: Mount Olivet. Olivet is home to some of the humans who perished in the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 and the Halifax Explosion of December 1917. For years, each time I drive my kid past a cemetery, I ask if they know how many people are dead in there? All of them, they laugh. They recognize this is another joke their grandfather back in Ontario still has on repeat. As we drive by Olivet yesterday, I verbally rewind this old gem and hit play. They reply, “most of them” with a smirk. My kid is still a newly minted teen who clearly shares my black humour. We recently guffawed our way through Warm Bodies together so I appreciate this spontaneous, alternate quip.

Mid-July when I drop them to their annual YMCA two-week, overnight camp in Northern Ontario, I hug their growing bones in furtive brevity to avoid causing any teen angst or embarrassment. This year they are deep into Dungeons and Dragons and, in lieu of twenty-sided dice, they roll their eyes when I announce plans for my own “DnD” adventure: Denmark n’ Dublin!

As campers canoe Lake Vernon and stargaze on slabs of Canadian shield, I make a peaty pilgrimage to Jutland and Ireland. While we are each out of province, Nova Scotia is beset with historic flash flooding. An email from a photo editor pops into my inbox offering a photojournalism assignment. I am forced to regretfully decline. I am not in Halifax, I explain, but am across the pond in Dublin, birthplace of my parents and siblings. I watch the deluge unfold from afar like the rest of the planet, heart in the throat for everyone affected. By the time my kid and I reunite and return to Nova Scotia at the beginning of August, we have a measly two weeks to prep our belongings for the move. The rooms of our temporary home slowly empty while those in my head fill with ancient burials and the myriad precious objects unearthed alongside human remains.

Precious objects. I think about how much crap I still have. How much I might still donate or dump. I try to consider what holds meaning. I do my best to Kondo the feck out of my prep work. What holds Joy? The summer’s flash floods follow quickly on the heels of the spring’s wildfire disasters. I wonder what I would grab in the event of any home we make succumbing to the kind of catastrophic climate events that continue to unfold globally? My kid is surprised when the lump in my throat makes me suddenly stride through piles of packing paper on the floor to wrap them in a hug. Our dog noses himself between our knees. This is it. This is everything, I think to myself. Right here in my arms. Just last night my kid asked me about existence. I curl around their gangly limbs and play with the cowlick near their brow. They used to fit in the crook of my arm. Wasn’t that only yesterday? Somewhere in the wings of my brain Chaim Topol starts singing.

Lately it feels like no one on the planet can avoid thinking about our future (individual and global.) Life, especially over the past few years, feels so much more ephemeral. What holds meaning? What does our existence mean? Why are we here? Even the span of human presence on Earth appears like a dot on a timeline that seems unfathomable. We are but a blip. Like an atom. A dust particle. Cosmic dust. We are comprised of the same stuff as Earth. Stardust.

The words of physicist Alan Lightman’s beautiful collection of essays Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine surface like a buoy. Lyrical stuff about atoms. I talk to my kid about the early morning walk. About perspective. About the time I travelled to Guatemala to begin a build of a home for Josefina, a single mom of six. We talk about nature. Earth. Stars. Our species. Other species. The fact that atoms now floating in the form of a dog or deer or human comprised other life forms a century ago. Millennia. Eons. Atoms move and morph, taking one shape, then another. I wonder if they hold memory as they pass through Deep Time into new existences?

It’s why I love photography. Photography documents moments in time that trigger memory. When someone dies, photographs are often the first things our grief clings to. A visual glue. Maybe that’s all we can truly take with us at the end? Imagine if all the memories we make are embedded somehow in our DNA, right within the floating atoms that comprise us. Memories are perhaps the singular treasure we might at least bestow in our wake once we shuffle off this mortal coil.

This week marks ten years since the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and icon Seamus Heaney passed on. Poetry seems as good a religion as any. I like this phrase for death. To pass from one world to another. Neither solely an end nor a beginning. Maybe both. That’s what this autumn feels like to me. Neither an end nor a beginning, but both.

Heaney’s words are inked all over my skin. Tattooed upon my brain, too. Poetic polaroids that develop whenever I pull them from my neurological filing cabinet.

The morning he died, Heaney sent a final text to his wife. The latin phrase, noli timere. Even with death on my mind, I refuse doomism. I heed his wisdom and advice. I place the phrase on the mantel in our new home. The mantel of my mind.

Don’t be afraid.

A chalk wall that bids farewell at the ‘Listen Now Again’ exhibit on Irish Poet Seamus Heaney. Dublin. July 2023. Photo credit: Nancy Forde

I hope the writing and photography I share here won’t scare you away. This first post is me striking a match. To light a fire in my own heart and the hearts of others. I aim to keep it alight. This is a hello, not a bell tolling nor a final farewell. I have much more to share with you here probably once or twice a month at first and eventually I might even aim for once a week. There will be impending talk of bogs and bog bodies and body farms, but I swear to all the ancient deities, whatever I share won’t be all about death!

Noli timere.

Here, now. Pull up a chair. Pretend it’s an Irish wake. Grab a parting glass. Keen with me. Tune a fiddle. Sing a song. Sip your whiskey. I promise more clarity and deets next time. And I’ll return soon. Picture Lazarus. No, no. Bad analogy. Uh. Think Persephone. Not the part where she (purportedly) looses all the ills into the world. Just the part where she closes the lid in time to capture Hope. That part.

For now, I leave you with Frank Patterson singing The Lass of Aughrim in the 1987 film by John Huston of James Joyce’s short story, The Dead. Picture the final scene. With the snow quietly blanketing the fields.

Here’s a snippet of Heaney’s poetry below.
Sláinte! Health, until we meet again.

Take the lamp if you want it.
I’m waiting on the last turf to burn down
So I can rake them into the ash. There’ll be a
heart in the fire for the morning.

---