AGE QUOD AGIS: REMEMBERING SEAN SHESGREEN, 1939-2021

Can you grieve for someone you haven’t seen in twenty years, haven’t communicated with, save by letter, email, and Facebook? Yes, and yes, and yes. Not like Molly Bloom uttering this word at the end of Ulysses but more like a medieval penitent praying that grief, which scorns optics and physics, will wrap you in divine love.

“Can you write about him, Mom?” my twenty-seven-year-old son, Oliver, asks, when I tell him about Sean Shesgreen, the Irish-born professor who died of pancreatic cancer two weeks ago and whom I had loved before he, Oliver, was born. 

In my journal, I make a list: Lessons from Sean Shesgreen.

(1) Age Quod Agis. I don’t remember when it was that I first heard Sean, in his playful Irish brogue, repeating this Latin phrase, first attributed to founder of the Jesuits Ignatius Loyola, which means, “Do what you are doing.” Possibly it was shortly after we met in Oxford and he was leading a summer program of undergraduate students and I recovering from the recent death of my first husband and taking an adult education course on Chaucer. I had been trying to complete a paper on “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and was forever getting distracted by elevenes in the common room, strolls to watch the punters along the River Isis, explorations to secret, walled gardens.

Or maybe Sean repeated this maxim when I moved to DeKalb, Illinois, to live with him and was beginning a memoir on widowhood, and I couldn’t settle down to work, getting up to pee or run out to “The White Hen Pantry” for coffee or take my dog Hector for a walk along the Kishwaukee, anything but sit still in the office at Northern Illinois University he had found for me. “All you have to do is write one paragraph a day and pretty soon you’ll have a book,” he said. “Age quod agis.” 

These Latin words made such an impression that I repeated them to all the men that I loved after Sean, including Oliver’s father. 

2) Run (or Walk) Every Day. At Oxford, Sean and I met for jogs around Christ Church Meadow, and he explained that he ran forty-five minutes every day, ran even in the rain, an antidote to his sedentary, scholarly life, a salve for the depression that had dogged him for most of his life. He confided that his father, a laborer, who rarely held a steady job and who never lived with Sean’s mother and sisters in Letter Kenny, had been a hopeless alcoholic, and that running had helped him, Sean, keep moving forward, beating back the demons of his past. 

3)Butter and Olive Oil are the Only Cooking Ingredients You Need. I was recovering from an eating disorder when Sean and I met: food was the enemy, something I had to control and apportion in order that it would not get the better of me, leading me to binge on an entire packet of Digestive Biscuits. Sean loved food, loved to splurge on expensive restaurants, even when alone, a titular party of one, ordering an appetizer, bottle of good wine, ending with a chocolate mousse. When I moved into 1331 North 13th Street, his modest prairie-style farmhouse with its kitchen just big enough to fit his hand-made oak dining table, I discovered that he loved cooking as much as eating out. On his stove was a jumbo can of Italian Olive Oil, which he was always pouring into cast iron pots, sautéing onions and garlic for his famous Tomato Saffron Soup, made with fat, late summer tomatoes from local farm stands. Liberal amounts of butter were used to baste roasted chicken, pork tenderloin, roast leg of lamb. A tall wooden pepper grinder that lived beside the olive oil was drafted into service throughout the preparation and presentation of these dishes. Sean was famous for feeding colleagues and students, singletons who hated cooking for themselves, academic couples who admired his culinary expertise as much as his scholarship. 

4) Work Works. Sean did not begin his career as an 18th century literature professor. An indifferent student in Ireland, he was expected to train for a career as a pharmacist.  Instead, he became a monk, not because he was religious but because the Catholic Church offered a way out of Ireland. The order he joined as a teenager would send him to Chicago, where he would receive both his B.A. and M.A. from Loyola University, and finally his PhD from Northwestern. Life in America in the 1960s was full of sensual pleasures, and when Sean realized he couldn’t commit to a future of poverty, chastity and obedience, the order offered him a choice: a plane ticket back to Ireland or $100 and a suit.

        He took the $100 and a suit.

It was an iconic story and one of which I was in awe--I, whose people had been in this country for generations, who had never had anyone make fun of my accent, who had never wanted for money or clothing.   

“You’ll turn into a paper clip,” I once joked when he took over the Director of Graduate Studies office at NIU and refused to chat with me on the phone. Failure was not an option, and he went at this job with the same brio that he brought to his teaching and scholarship. He wrote six books, the last three of which focused on the street people of 17th century London, the fruit and fish hawkers, the rag-and-bone peddlers, rope dancers, and beggars whose cries filled the London streets, the poor and the outcast whom he resurrected from history’s middens. 

5) Buy Fresh Flowers. The Jewel supermarket was within walking distance of Sean’s house in DeKalb and every Friday he bought flowers—daffodils in the spring, irises in the summer, snapdragons in the fall. When I observed that this expenditure seemed extravagant, especially since he was otherwise so penurious—turning the thermostat to 60 at night and installing a timer on the hot water so that it would only be available at certain hours of the day—he said you had to budget for treats. Flowers, fountain pens, chocolates, croissants from a bakery in Chicago: small pleasures provided zest to daily life. If you didn’t have anyone to give them to you, you needed to give them to yourself. 

6) Words Matter.  Like his fellow Irishman, Samuel Beckett, Sean believed that “words are all we have.” His favorites were Anglo-Saxon words with storied histories, short, one-syllabled words like zest, sweet, and verve that connected you to the pleasures of this world rather than the mysteries of the next. My friend, Sarah, who accompanied me on one of my road trips from Redding, Connecticut, where I had lived with my late husband, to DeKalb, Illinois, remembered that Sean took down a volume of Yeats and read us his favorite poem, “When You are Old” the evening we arrived. Sarah said that she had never heard that poem before, and that it’s now one of her favorites and that whenever she reads or hears it, she thinks of Sean. 

7) Family (and Friends) Are Everything. When I met Sean, I was recovering not only from the death of my first husband but from my parents’ bitter divorce that had gone to trial. I was wary--both of making a new family and of my trusting my family of origin. Sean, who had raised his teenaged daughter Deirdre as a single father and who maintained cordial relations with Deirdre’s mother and her family, embraced my mother, father, brother, and sister. At blended family Thanksgivings with my father’s partner, Janet, and her four children, Sean delighted the group with his impromptu wine tastings: “Here’s to the man across the water who civilized his youngest daughter,” my father joked at one of those gatherings. My mother, whom Sean and I visited one Christmas at her bungalow in Florida, where she took out her best china to entice Sean to marry me, was delighted by Sean’s wit, despite his telling her, when she went on about her Irish ancestors, the titled Wyses, that “ancestors were like potatoes, the best thing about them was underground.” 

“Is the party really over?” my dad asked after yet another break-up, my leaving Sean to attend graduate school in D.C., his leaving me to marry a psychiatrist he met through a dating service, that marriage ending after a year, upon which Sean and I began seeing one another again, our final break coming when I married Oliver’s father in 1993 and he married his third wife, Sarah, some years later. In the end, our incompatibilities—"of age, intensity of feeling, disposition, temperament, and character,” as Sean put it in a letter to me, proved too much. We were more constant friends, and we remained friends until the end when, too weak to email me himself, he dictated a message through Deirdre, saying that he would “always think of me with esteem and affection.”    

“I’m just grateful we had him for as long as we did,” my sister, Heidi, said when I called to tell her Sean had passed and she could hear me crying over the phone.

One of the hardest things about getting older is how you must accustom yourself to losing people you love. I repeat to myself the things I have written to others: how death is not the end, it is merely a passing into the next room, how the dead live on in our hearts. And then, there is the text from my friend, Sarah, sent close to midnight and headed with a star emoji: “Sean’s in the stars. Look up."

 

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