If you haven’t already, read Part 1 of this essay first.
By October 25, 2018, I was a writer—in practice, not just in pretense.
The word didn’t fit, though it remained. Some days it still doesn’t fit. But now, as then, words sew it into place. Today, the words are the inadequate thousands that I write to you. Then, the words were the nine I received from my father.
Grandpa collapsed, they airlifted him out to a hospital.
They came as a text in the first hours of November 1, before I was awake to read them and meet my family’s newest crisis. You’d be glad to know I wasn’t alone that day—my younger brother Jack had just come for a visit.
Your husband didn’t wake again. He died at one-thirty a.m. on November 2.
My father hadn’t been able to call either of us during our train ride to Galway. So he texted me the fatal news with the unwitting sound of a far, metallic fall. I repeated the news to Jack, just as we first saw Galway through the rain-splattered window.
“Oh my God,” Jack said.
I wasn’t yet thinking the same words. The grief I’d outrun since May—actually gone and not returning—was submerging me, as inevitably as an Atlantic tide. I would have to turn and face sorrow at last, then. No pathetic written words would dodge it this time. On a bench inside our hostel’s front door, I still wrote a compulsive, futile poem about ghostly blue lights waking me to bad news.
Jack and I did our best to enjoy Galway and Connemara. Both seemed drained of color. On Diamond Hill, we leaned into the frigid wind screaming off the barren landscape.
We discussed our loss, and we discussed God. Neither helped.