Courtney, you’re alive!
Of course I’m alive.
Well, I mean talk about a cliffhanger!

The comment initiated a six-disc shuffle in my head, not uncommon when I run into people I haven’t seen in some time. On this occasion, however, I had no idea what my friend was referring to. A book club I forgot I was in … shuffle … some trending Tik topic … shuffle … The Golden Bachelor? Sensing I was searching with a faded flashlight, she threw me a rope.

Your blog. Ireland. I was following it and then, poof! You stopped posting. What happened?

Oh my gosh, yes. Thirteen months and a thousand years ago, I had been writing about our trip to Ireland.

I went home and opened the Notes app on my phone. There, in chronological order, were the half-formed, inarticulate receipts outlining the incidents that thwarted the completion of my romantic trip recaps and routine, as it were, in November 2022.

The first order of business here, out of respect for Days 1 through 7 and the sweet sediment that trip left in my soul, is to stoke the lingering embers of my memories and tie up loose ends. So, let’s begin there. 

Ireland, Day 8 – Cliffs of Moher 

On our last full day in Ireland, we decided to drive to the Cliffs of Moher. It took an hour and half, but felt sacrilegious to come to the country and not snap a photo by the infamous rocks.

This is probably a controversial opinion, as documented by a woman who, at the time, was riding the high of a series of enchanting excursions (see posts for Days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7), but Hank and I were both slightly underwhelmed by the popular attraction, ranked, I might mention here, as the ninth best Natural Wonder of the World. Looking at photos from the day now, more than a year later, sitting in my office chair, those read like the words of an insatiable moron. But I do remember feeling as though our secret had gotten out and hundreds of strangers had showed up to crash our epic vacation.

You have to walk in a single-file line a good distance as you head south along the edge, the direction we started in. (Ironically, we, with a herd of international humans, shuffled like cattle alongside a field of actual cattle. I got a kick out of that.) What you won’t see in pictures, is that the path, worn and weathered by the soles of millions of visitors’ shoes–some more practical selections than others–is punctuated by arbitrary gaps in the fences and barriers bordering the perimeter. These partitions are wallpapered with a collection of messages and, for universal interpretation, illustrations warning pedestrians not to jump and urging them to reach out for help if they’re feeling low. With these public service announcements infiltrating the experience, while completely understandable, it made each break in the boundary wall feel like a siren call. A whisper to step into the margin of danger, if you dare. I looked it up, so you don’t have to; the most recent record indicates that 66 deaths occurred at the cliffs between 1993 and 2017.

Eventually, the borders disappear and there’s nothing between the trillions of cells that make you, you, and the 390-foot drop into the swirling, thrashing Atlantic below.  And maybe that’s the thrill of it. You can’t stand on the brink of such a formidable assassin, awe-inspiring as it may be, and not taste your mortality. The cliffs are astounding in their enormity, unexpected symmetry and allure. But they command respect. And an awareness of your phone at all times.

We walked as far south as we could, and then up the northern path. We snapped too many selfies, windburned and drunk on vacation. It started to sprinkle, which felt so on-brand. We strolled through the gift shops and vendor stalls, like obedient tourists. And then we went in search of something delicious.

We settled on kebabs at a greasy hole in the wall in Ennistymon, where the only employee rang us up and disappeared to fry our chips to order. A pair of young, unsupervised boys came in and asked for sodas. The man made them say “please.” It takes a village. They did so, begrudgingly and darted to the table across the small space, the only one next to an outlet. They clumsily, frantically plugged in their tablets and faded into a digital battleground. I thought of the girls, at home, probably negotiating tablet time of their own. Kids are kids are kids, no matter where you have your kebab.

We drove into a rainbow on our way back to Galway.

That night, we walked to Monroe’s for dinner. Tucked into an intimate pocket that enclosed a pair of two-person tables, I had a warm goat cheese salad that solidified my love affair with the region’s soft dairy. After we ate, we walked back to hear the band and, like the boys and their screen addiction, I was reminded that in every bar, in every corner of the world, some universal experiences hold true. On that particular night, I noted the following:

A group of travelers, who spoke only French, lost their collective minds when the band played “Country Road, Take Me Home,” and I don’t know why, as I sang along, it surprised me so much.

Four girlfriends up from their university for the weekend commandeered the table next to us and, in the cutest British accents, unpacked the nuances standing in the way of one of the girl’s pinning down her crush. Eventually, the girl cried. They comforted her. Women forming and fiercely defending their tribes is ironclad and unequivocally, the best thing ever. Also, they were surrounded by attractive boys their age. I suppose this is how missed opportunities get missed.

“Sweet Caroline” came on and I clutched my heart. Is there any hidden crawlspace on this planet where that song doesn’t hit just the right note?

Day 9 – Dublin

Most of the bars in Galway close around 2 a.m. In the six hours between last call and 8 o’clock Mass, something incredible happens. The streets, peppered with broken glass, food wrappers and over-served twenty-somethings just a short time earlier, are cleared, making way for the good Catholics of and in the area to receive the word of the Lord, sans a single sign of residual debauchery.

Hank and I marveled at the janitorial feat as a priest shook hands with parishioners on the steps of a towering cathedral. It was a brilliant morning, sunny and comfortable. We’d gotten lucky, yet again. We popped in to Aran Island for wool sweaters and gifts that would ship to us weeks after we’d settled back into life as we knew it. We had Murphy’s Ice Cream as a late supplement to breakfast. The Dingle Sea Salt was a triumph. Street performers sang and recited poetry. We strolled and pressed our lips against the cold dessert. Nothing felt familiar, and yet, the ease of the slow morning felt more comfortable than anything.

“Let’s. go to Dublin,” Hank said.

We stopped along the highway for convenience store snacks in preparation for the heightened navigation necessary for the big city. Our last night, we stayed at the adorable Brooks Hotel. Our room was a magnificent space we barely saw.

We walked around Dublin, taking in Trinity College and The Temple Bar. It was crowded in the way capital cities are. What I remember most is our dinner at a small table at Darkey Kelly’s. A bowl of seafood chowder with mussels between us, we sipped our final ciders and heady beers, and I reminded myself to open up every porous part of my being and soak this in. The lively trad music in the adjacent room, the heat of bodies packed into tables and booths, not a disgruntle face among them. Only voices building to recite familiar folk songs.

I love you well today, and I love you more tomorrow.

If you ever loved me, Molly, love me now.

In a kiosk in the Dublin Airport, Hank picked up a calendar featuring the sheep of Ireland. “I was going to try and sneak it, and give it to you for Christmas,” he said. “But that just seems so far away.” The cashier slid it into a parchment paper sack and we went to our gate.

Welcome home

We crossed the ocean and picked our lives back up where we’d left them. Summer ended. The chicks went back to school. Hikes and afternoon toasties gave way to sports physicals and bumper-to-bumper Zoom meetings. There wasn’t anything particularly unique or shocking about the evaporation of our vacation glow. It was expected. Autumn was unfolding as autumn does. We were playing our parental and professional parts, with duties, as assigned. And for a while, everything fit into tidy “before Ireland” and “after Ireland” buckets.

On November 3, I turned 40.

On November 12, Hank and I went to my friend’s wedding. Mom and Dad agreed to keep the girls overnight. Around midnight, the screen on my phone illuminated the room, offending my eyes, powered down and acclimated to the darkness. It was Mom calling. “Don’t panic,” she said. “Dad’s having trouble breathing and there’s an ambulance here to get him.” Hank was already putting his shoes on.

What I didn’t know then–what none of us could have known then– was that we were standing at the precipice of a months-long gauntlet of progressions and setbacks. Uncertainty and altered expectations. Our family as we knew it had reached the end of the well-worn path and protective walls.

You are now entering a time warp

For the sake of brevity and, because the details have been diluted by time and diagnoses, I will say that my dad developed severe health complications after being exposed to pasteurella multocida, a dangerous bacteria found in cats’ mouths. My parents live on a farm, he has dry, cracked skin in the winter, a persistent barn cat nipped at his finger and that simple, seemingly innocuous event forever tilted our family’s axis.

While Dad was initially hospitalized for the infection, he really got into trouble when he aspirated into a Bi-pap machine shortly after being admitted. In the early morning hours, with only my sister at his side, he made the proactive decision to go on a ventilator. I saw him on a Monday and less than 24 hours later he was sedated in the ICU. (If this post isn’t long enough already and you want more details about his stay in critical care, you can check out this post.)

Thus began a strange new relationship with time. Hours in his hospital room crawled by, filled with numbing beeps and extreme temperatures. No one could seem to figure out the thermostat. My sister and I took turns sleeping on the convertible sofa under the window, 30 minutes here, a two-hour run if you were lucky. The buckets  were no longer “before” and “after.” Time was suddenly temperamental and teetering between “best case scenario” and “worst case scenario.” For days we existed in an if-then purgatory, the paralysis of our patriarch’s unstable swings in either direction serving as tools for emotional torture.

The cruel reality of adulting is that the universe doesn’t get an “attention all” memo when a piece of your personal life is swallowing you whole. Outside the hospital walls, nothing stopped, or even mercifully slowed. It was picking up, if anything. We were still signed up to bring in dinner for the basketball team’s home game. The dog needed more heart worm medicine. I was still fully employed. And, as luck would have it, the holidays were coming. It was the happiest time of the year.

My dad woke up. I watched the sunrise on Thanksgiving morning–Mom’s birthday–over the freezing ledge of his new room in the progressive unit. He moved to inpatient rehab at a different facility. It was a depressing place. We were supposed to be happy, but nothing felt light or promising. Shortly after being sent home, Dad had a setback and was readmitted to the hospital. More medical terms to look up. More sparse nights of sleep on the foldout couch. More fickle thermostats.

Christmas came and went. Dad was so out of it. He always made a big breakfast spread before we opened gifts, so we all pitched in to make eggy casseroles and slapped sweet frosting over the  cracks in our nerves. The ball dropped, ushering in 2023. I hung my sheep of Ireland calendar in our closet so I could admire it every day.

Just before spring, an unpredictable shift at work doubled my responsibilities. I waited. Still, no “attention all” memo, much to my disappointment. Then, another hospitalization. “Your dad has A-Fib and Congestive Heart Failure,” a sweet nurse told me as I tucked a fitted sheet around the thin cushion of the familiar convertible furniture, bought in bulk a decade before. “Think of his heart as a house,” she said. “He has issues with both the electrical and the plumbing.” Everything he knew and was doing would have to change. The house wasn’t just on fire, it was flooding, too, and everyone was burning and drowning, quietly, with artificial smiles plastered across our faces.

Sands through the hourglass

I was working more than ever before, searching for low-sodium recipes I thought Dad would eat and Mom would make between running the chicks around, meetings and writing. Then, one day, I looked up at my sheep of Ireland calendar, the blackface gals of March with their backsides painted pink hung above me. It was the end of August.

I had been living in a heightened state of response for so many days, stitched together with the thinnest thread, that when I tried to think back on the specifics of those weeks, I couldn’t grab anything tangible. I’d checked off hundreds of tasks, appointments, deadlines, only to have them vacuumed into some black hole, where all the hurried, tasteless, empty moments spent surviving over thriving go to die. 

I listened to a podcast a few months back about anticipatory grief. How, when we hear of a loved one’s terminal diagnosis, realize our parents’ health is failing, sense the demise of a relationship nearing, we protect ourselves by preparing for the death as early as possible. In this case, I thought we were going to lose Dad, then gratefully accepted that we weren’t, and then sobered up to the reality that we had, in fact, lost certain parts of him.

So, what is that … Griefus interruptus?

The physical trauma and chronic diagnosis only happened to one member of our family. And yet, to look at the dynamic overall, we’re like the letter-coated dice cradled in a freshly shaken Boggle board. We’re all still here, but shifted. We’ll probably never go back to exactly the way we were before. 

Processing and accepting that required a super-sized portion of self-preservation for this desperate soul. In the wake of Dad’s last hospital stay, with the appointments that immediately followed and the ever-lasting struggle to deliver caring but not condescending messages and the tireless grind of keeping my head above water, I turned toward anything that helped me rage against the changing of life as I’d known it. I started writing a novel. I purged my Instagram feed and did Amy Poehler’s Masterclass, which made me smile. I leaned hard into reading actual printed books and got lost in Ann Patchett essays, which made me smile and cry.

And then I ran into a friend who reminded me that this space exists. That this blog, like my sheep of Ireland calendar, was stuck somewhere in the “before Dad got sick” bucket.  For anyone who noticed, I can only offer this: 

Attention all: Life got really hard, heavy and scary there for awhile. I appreciate your patience during my absence, and your readership if your eyes are passing over these words now. As for Ireland, I cannot recommend it enough. I will cherish the views from the highest cliffs and summits, sweetness of the ciders, and warmth of the toasties and the people forever. Those ten days were a dream, spent with my favorite human. I don’t know how often I can meet you here, in this corner of the vast internet that we sometimes share, but I’m happy to be here now. And I promise not to let so much time go before we meet here again.