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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The Blue Hours of Coronavirus

Everything is the virus. I have become the virus, beginning my day with my phone, checking the latest quarantines, the latest emergencies. Everything that kept at bay the depression I have suffered from all my life—thrice-weekly spinning classes at 50/50 Fitness, breakfast in my local café, writing groups in nearby towns, biweekly dinners with my grown son in New Hampshire—has been cancelled. Everyone I know, depressed or not, is staying away from one another so that we don’t spread the virus. I text, call, e-mail, or instant message family and friends. The only person with whom I am not practicing social distancing is my partner, Stan, whom I see every night and without whom I could not imagine this life in Corona.

         I am 65, in the at-risk group for people vulnerable to this strange disease named after a crown and originating in a bat half way around the globe. And yet, there are others who are older who model hope: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist who addresses our nation frequently and is now the most respected man in America. Dr. Fauci is 79 and runs three and a half miles every day; he says this pandemic “will get worse before it gets better” but that we can defeat it. All we need to do is stay home, “flatten the curve,” our generation’s act of self-sacrifice.

I survive by meditating. 10 minutes every morning, before I make coffee: “Body/Mind/Spirit in perfect oneness” is the mantra I whisper again and again, the mantra my primary care doctor taught me in a wellness visit months ago, B.C., Before Coronavirus, when all I worried about was fighting depression and controlling my high blood pressure. My doctor confided that he meditated for up to forty minutes every morning—RPM, he jokingly called it, Rise, Pee, Meditate--and that it made him a better doctor, more able to focus on his patients instead of worrying about them. Meditating hasn’t lowered my blood pressure—I still take 5 mg. of Lisinopril every day—but it has made me less depressed. Less anxious. Able, if not to embrace the apocalypse, at least to face it.

I survive, too, by writing, or at least sitting down to write--from nine until noon, a ritual that has recently become sweeter with Stan spending the morning with me before returning to his home in Northampton. Before Coronavirus, I was making good progress on my memoir about my parents’ divorce, a landmark case in Massachusetts law that went to trial and rewarded a woman’s unpaid work in marriage. In the best of times, this story was challenging to write. Now, though I still dream about it, I have put it aside. Instead, I jot down quotes and facts: how Shakespeare rode out the plague in the summer of 1592 by writing poems, “The plague is banished by thy breath”; how, in the 1918 Flu Epidemic, thousands of lives were saved when the city of St. Louis elected not to hold a parade. How the doctor-hero of Camus 1941 novel, The Plague, observes that even though pestilence reveals life as random and unfair, we must still work to save others, that heroism is what makes us human. In my journal, I note that Camus was one of my dad’s favourite writers, a maybe-not-so-random detail that will, tomorrow morning or the next, lead me where I need to go.

In the afternoons, I walk my Standard Poodle, Puddle, or ride my bike along the Norwottuck Rail Trail. Now that the schools are closed and most people are working from home, the paths are crowded. But we keep our distance, and sometimes we greet one another, chat about our dogs’ personalities or share how we are holding up. As in other national crises, such as after the attacks of 9/11, people are open, porous, ready to bow before a larger world that is no longer “all about me, but about us.” There are exceptions: the older man with a miniature poodle who greeted me with an f-bomb-laced invective. All because I had let Puddle--a certified therapy dog who usually brings a smile to everyone she meets--temporarily off leash. But when I narrated this tale to the young couple I met ten minutes later, they commiserated and said, “It’s hard. People are on edge.”

Yes. People are on edge. But we will get through this. The warmer weather will come and the virus may wither, as SARS did in 2003. And even if it lasts longer, most people who get the virus will recover. This scourge cannot last forever. As Robert Frost said, “In three words, I can sum up everything that I have learned about life. It goes on.”

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Blue Healer: The Suicide of Dr. Judith Eve Sandick

“There are no words.”

Of all the comments on Facebook which appeared in the days after Dr. Judith Eve Sandick—doctor, wife, mother of four grown children, volunteer physician in Haiti and Pakistan, former Olympic-level ski racer--took her own life, the ones that appeared the most, after “Sorry for your loss,” and “Sending our thoughts and prayers” were, “There are no words.”

         I should know. I wrote them myself. Wrote them despite having been a professional writer for most of my adult life. Wrote them despite having known Judy all my life, known her longer than anyone else in the virtual or actual world, save for her two siblings.

         The last time I saw Judy was four summers ago. She and her husband, David, drove down from their home in Edgecombe, Maine to watch the World Cup finals at a bar in Brunswick, Maine with me and my then-partner, Charlie. I can’t remember who was playing—I’m not a soccer maven but Charlie, David and Judy were stoked up about the match and I wanted to hang with all of them, but especially with Judy, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year—and so we came up with this plan so that everyone could get what he or she wanted, not an easy thing to accomplish in this life.

         Judy was in fine form that afternoon. Charlie and I got there first and saved Judy and David seats. Gordon, Charlie’s Brunswick neighbor, an academic mucky-muck who taught political science at Georgetown University, also sat with us, each seat sporting a cup-holder and fold-out moveable tray so that you could drink your beer and eat your nachos while watching the game, an agreeable way to pass a hot July afternoon.

At half-time, we got another round of drinks and Judy and Gordon got into a dust-up about health care. It was all very good-humoured, even flirty; Judy had been a beauty in her youth, and she was still, with her strong-boned face and athletic body, a woman of whom men took notice. But Judy, who’d practiced emergency medicine for thirty years, who’d raced down mountains all over the world before becoming an MD, wasn’t about to let some policy wonk lecture her about the problems of Medicare for all.

         I didn’t say a word.

Part of me was appalled at Judy’s chutzpah at taking on this guy she’d never met and the other part of me admired the hell out of her. Judy had principles and she wasn’t about to abandon them in the interests of making nice.  

I’ve been in awe of Judy Sandick’s chutzpah for most of my life.    

 We met in Mrs. Moore’s kindergarten at the Berkshire Country Day School, and were inseparable for the next nine grades, both of us spending a good deal of time in the hall for various infractions: talking out of turn, not putting our books in our cubbies, failing to sit still. At recess, our problems multiplied; we eschewed the girly-girls who stood around comparing ruching on their dresses and played kickball with the boys, games that would often end with Judy beating the crap out of some kid because he’d accused her of throwing like a girl or seeing her underwear when she ran: “I see England; I see France; I see Judy’s underpants.”  Once, our fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Marks, had to pick Judy up by the sash on the back of her dress and remove her from the flailing body of some fleshy nerd she was pummeling.  Judy spent rest of the day in the principal’s office.   

Today, we would be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, medicated with Ritalin and segregated into “special” classes; back then, we were just trouble and everyone—from bus drivers to substitute teachers—gave us a wide berth.

 A trio of girls—together so much they made one formidable social animal CandyMollyFran—hated us. In retaliation, we started our own secret society, the Buddy-Buddy Club. We had secret handshakes, secret greetings, secret meeting places; when we wrote one another letters, we put “The Buddy Buddy Club” as our return address, as if we were some junior branch of The Porcellian Club.

How can you have a club with two members? my dad teased. Because, we said.

Looking back now, I can see that there were signs, even then, that Judy suffered from depression. My father’s mother lived within walking distance of Judy’s house on Spadina Parkway in Pittsfield and Judy would often walk over to meet me when I was visiting. My grandmother, who came from a family of seven and loved to regale us with tales of her childhood, would often drive us to the Howard Johnson’s on Route 7 for afternoon treats of banana splits. Judy would sit in the back seat, as grim as if she were trapped in the principal’s office. Fiddling with the sugar as we waited for our food, Judy would continue to give us the silent treatment until my grandmother would smile and say “Judy, why do you scowl so?” Judy's face would get all red and scrunched up and I could tell she was about to cry.

When we were teenagers, Judy invited me to France to attend a week-long ski training camp in the French Alps, followed by a trip around Europe in a van with several other ski racers. Judy didn’t say a word for an entire week. At the time, I thought it odd, even irritating—I was the only one who wasn’t a competitive skier, and would have appreciated some verbal checking-in--but the others knew that the best thing was to let Judy be. And hope that her mood, like days of fog on Mont Blanc, would pass. By the time Judy and I split off from the others, spending a night in Grenoble before we flew home, she was back to her zany self. We spent our last night gorging on French pastries and gossiping.

“Judy was always hardest on herself,” a fellow ski racer wrote on Facebook.

Of course, I thought. Judy was hardest on herself. Which is why she drove herself to homeschool her four kids while sailing with her family around the world. Which is why she worked double shifts in the emergency room at Miles Memorial Hospital to support her family when they returned to Maine, working even on Christmas. Which is why she went back to school in her fifties to complete a Master’s in Public Health so that she would be qualified to work as a doctor in third-world countries. Which is why, when she couldn’t shake the old, dark feeling of being unworthy, she couldn’t let it go, couldn’t forgive herself.

 “Sorry I haven’t been in touch,” she would write in an e-mail or text, as we tried to get together in Maine, where Charlie had retired, or Massachusetts, where I still lived and worked. When my relationship with Charlie ended, I intended to tell Judy, explain why I was now the one who hadn’t kept up. But like Judy, I was hard on myself, felt humiliated to have failed at another relationship. Widowed, divorced, single again—“You could check every box on your tax return,” Judy had once joked--I felt like a loser.  

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to her,” I wrote to David in a private message on Facebook. “I should have seen the signs, should have worked harder to stay in touch. I was too wrapped up in my own shit.”

In Judy’s obituary, which David and their four children wrote together, mourners are asked not to send flowers but to hug their loved ones.

It’s a singular request: my arms ache from trying to honour it.

                                    ***

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Everything Will be All Right (Published in The Amherst Bulletin, June 15, 2017)

I didn’t cry at my only child’s graduation from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana recently. The older I have gotten, the less sentimental I have grown, which somehow makes me think of Yeats’ lines on his grave, “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death/ Horseman, pass by.”

Still, there was one moment in the Baccalaureate Ceremony in the Wellness Center on Saturday morning—it had been raining with Biblical ferocity for days and all ceremonies were indoors--when one of the graduating seniors from a village in Kenya stood up at the lectern and said one sentence, in his sing-song African accent, that nearly unleashed a flood of tears inside me: “Everything will be all right.”

         Surely he must have said more, as so many of the commencement speakers did that day—reflections about the urgency of embracing lost causes, advice about tolerating uncertainty and adversity, metaphors about how humans are like stars in that none of us alone creates a constellation…and yet, it was as if those five words cast a spell over everything else—The Buddhist and Hebrew Prayers, the Quaker Quotations, the Spanish Poems—and created a stillness that quieted even the gestures of the interpreter for the hearing impaired. 

         Everything will be all right. Even though we are presided over by “the man in orange,” as one African-American student speaker referred to him, who seems hell-bent on applying a wrecking ball to every piece of progressive legislation of his precedessor, making it harder for Earlhamites from Muslim countries to travel back to their homelands. But courts have already challenged the constitutionality of this travel ban and graduating seniors have created The International Student Relief Fund to help Earlham students who might be affected by the travel ban, a fund which has already raised several thousand dollars, and to which this writer has contributed a modest sum.  

         Everything will be all right. Even though the world in which my son will be taking his place is increasingly bifurcated by the haves and the have-nots, those with many zeros behind their names and those who struggle to get by on a few dollars a day.

But all is not lost because my son and many of his peers are pledging to give back to their communities, determined not to model their lives after the self-aggrandizing offspring of the 45^th president.  In August, my son will start working for City Year, an Americorps program for Apprentice Teachers in inner-city Boston. Forgoing many of the pleasures he grew up with, he will live close to the poverty level, helping students in under-served public schools reach their potential and graduate from high school.

         Everything will be all right. Even though my only child’s father and I have been divorced for four years, a divorce that was sometimes bitter, as divorces will be, as were the divorces of both sets of his grand-parents. Still, here we are sitting for many hours side-by-side in the metal folding chairs in the Wellness Center of Earlham College, watching our son being folded in the bosomy embrace of the Registrar, filing out into the sunshine of a perfect May day and meeting the kindly professor with a full, white beard who reminds us of Dumbledore in Harry Potter and who says that having our son in his Islam and film class every morning was a joy.

         Everything will be all right because we are held still in this achingly imperfect world trying not to cast too cold an eye on those who have come before us and those who come after us and struggling, in our imperfect ways, to put ourselves to right.   

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The Magic of Pussy Hats

On inauguration day—rainy and dank and “full of mourning,” as one friend wrote on a Facebook post—we gathered in my friend Christine’s kitchen in Hastings-on-Hudson and made signs, first trolling the Internet for catchy slogans. Christine, who had already knitted several pink pussy hats, liked “Keep Your Tiny Hands Off My Rights,” while I was partial to “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention,” though I worried it could be too much work to block and color all those letters. We settled on WOMEN’S RIGHTS: NOW AND FOREVER and LOVE TRUMPS HATE, though Pat, a college English teacher, pointed out that grammar was key for this slogan because if you used the possessive LOVE TRUMP’S HATE, you could be mistaken for a supporter of the new president.  

         But with our pink pussy hats, pink scarves, and pink backpacks filled with clementines and hard-boiled eggs, we were instantly identified as women’s marchers. Riding the train into Grand Central the next morning, gathering on 42^nd street to walk up Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower, with thousands of other grandmothers, mothers, and daughters memed out in pink, we didn’t spot one he-who-must-not-be-named supporter. (The only figure remotely threatening was a hulking guy in an oversized black jacket with letters on his back screaming JESUS SAVES FROM THE WRATH OF GOD, the last four words going up in flames.) Having read about outbreaks of violence in D.C. on inauguration day—a limo set on fire, a Starbuck’s window smashed—we had worried that we could be beaten up, pepper sprayed, or even arrested.

         But the mood was benign, almost festive. About an hour before our group, which included Christine’s daughter, son-in-law, and three children, was scheduled to march, I had hurried across 42^nd street to use a café bathroom (the lines for the Ladies in Grand Central were epic). Returning, I spotted a platoon of some fifty New York City police decked out in biking gear, mounted on ten speeds and pedaling East. Along the crowded sidewalks, protesters and passersby stopped to watch, cheer, and clap. Wow! This was light years away from the sixties where the cops were pigs. It was as if all of New York were turning out to say no to this native New Yorker who threatened to take away everything—from the Affordable Care Act to Planned Parenthood to the fine points of the First Amendment—that New Yorkers held dear.  

         I took 173 photos that day, asking my friends to hold our signs so that I could record everything: the faces, the outfits, the signs, which outdid one another in manic creativity: CUT YOUR HAIR NOT OBAMACARE read one held by Christine’s ten-year-old granddaughter. A slight, sixtyish balding man standing alone in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Hall held up a sign that he’d obviously spent some time creating: REPEAL AND REPLACE TRUMP: PROFESSIONALLY UNPREPARED, INTELLECTUALLY ILL-INFORMED, MORALLY COMPROMISED, and TEMPERMENTALLY UNFIT. He beamed when I asked to take his picture. Another guy brandished a MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN sign. But my favorite was the one crayoned in childish red scrawl on a raggedy piece of cardboard and held up by a girl in pig tails clinging to her pink-scarfed mother two blocks from Trump Tower: MY DOG WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT.   

         The plan had been to walk to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and then north up Second Avenue before turning west toward Fifth Avenue. But the crowds were so thick that we only got as far as Lexington before heading uptown. At times, there was human gridlock. We came to a standstill.  If you suffered from claustrophobia, being in such close quarters with others could be scary. But the faces—black, brown, white, young, old, male, female—of the marchers reassured you, and, as you got closer to Trump Tower, there were volunteers in orange vests on the sidewalks, some holding loudspeakers. On Fifth Avenue, you could hear bells from St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church playing “This Land is Your Land,” and somehow you knew that everything was going to be okay, that the spirit of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and Ghandi were with you.

         Later that afternoon, gathering for a glass of wine in the kitchen in Hastings-on-Hudson, we watched MSNBC, which had been covering the march in D.C. all day, the sister marches in Boston and San Francisco and Seattle, in London and Paris and Antarctica, we felt what I can only describe as a kind of elation. We had lived to tell our tale; we were part of something magical, something larger and bigger than anything we had ever witnessed in our lifetimes, and even though it was disturbing to watch Sean Spicer shouting at reporters in the White House press room that the media had falsified the numbers at the inauguration, that there were more people at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s two previous inaugurations, more people, in fact, than at any inauguration in history, assertions that would later be proven false, what Kellyanne Conway would call “Alternative Facts,” even though all this was crazy-making and even more crazy-making the evil executive orders President Trump would sign that very first week—cutting funds for abortion at home and abroad, building a wall against Mexico, limiting immigration to the U.S. from Muslim countries—still, what could not be taken away, not by Sean Spicer, not by Kellyanne Conway, not by Steve Bannon, was that we had shown up and resisted and permitted ourselves to be counted--all over the city, all over the country, all over world, and that we would not shut up until this mad dog of an illegitimate president was reined in by Congress or the courts. Yes, he was the leader of the free world, but he was accountable to us, the people, and we would not let him forget it.     

All posts copyright© 2017. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

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Garlic and Sapphires in the Mud: Remembering Paul Priest, 1931-2015

He was my first cousin once-removed, which didn’t really count as family, something I was acutely aware of when the young doctor at Wheatfields appeared in the visitors room, looking grim and wanting to discuss Paul’s condition. After asking whether I was Hannah and finding that I was not, was instead this distant American relation, he disappeared down the hall. It would not be until evening that Hannah would explain the problem: Paul was getting better, or at least not getting worse, “stabilized,” as the doctor had called it. The average stay at Wheatfields was a week—Paul had been there for a fortnight--and the National Health Service wanted something to be done: a transfer back to his flat in Quaker House or into a nursing home.  

“I’m being punished for living,” Paul had wailed when Hannah told him the news. He was listing to the right in the bed he had not left since he arrived, the retractable tray across his food-stained, tee-shirted belly filled with yogurt cups, dried apricots, Sippy cups of fennel tea as well as envelopes, cards, and poetry books (a pocket Emily Dickinson, a chapbook by one of his poetry group members), far more lively than his fellow-traveler across the hall, a woman who lay open-mouthed and still as a sarcophagus, gone by week’s end.

         The password for Wheatfields’ Wi-Fi was DOTHERIGHTTHING, all in caps, a detail I noted in the black-bound journal I carried with me everywhere. I had flown over from Boston the day before, having received Paul’s e-mail explaining that a fall at home had precipitated his move into hospice: “The cancer is up and down my spine, bedecked, and I cannot get out of bed. But nurses are lovely, the food excellent, my life expectancy a matter of weeks,” he had written. I called him the next morning, a Sunday afternoon at Wheatfields, when he was surrounded by his children and his elder son Oliver handed him his cell phone and he was able to talk: He had loads of visitors. And he loved being the center of attention. His voice was faint and scratchy, but he did not sound like a man who was dying.

“Death is a joke,” he had said, but there was no bitterness, only a kind of brazen giddiness.

         Just a year ago, I had flown to the UK to attend a wedding in Wales and stopped to see Paul for what I thought would be the last time. I wasn’t much of a transatlantic traveler and had never been to Leeds: Paul and I had always met in Canada where our families had summer places on Georgian Bay or in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Paul lived with his second wife Helen and my mother, his first cousin, all of them sharing in the nursing care of his mother, the artist Hartwell Priest, who died at home at 103.

Although Paul and I were not of the same generation, we shared many things: a love for writing and all things literary (like him, I was an English professor); a need to parse our pathologic relations (there was craziness in our maternal line, and I needed Paul to assure me, as he always did, that it had bypassed me); and the fact that we both had suffered, in different ways, from the divorces in our families. Once, when I had whined on a walk along Eau de Claire beach in Georgian Bay that I felt my existence was marginal, because I was the product of an unhappy union that should never have been, Paul explained that he didn’t believe anything in this life—certainly not with regards to love—was an accident.

During those three days with Paul in August of 2014, we packed in a lifetime of memories. I rented a car at Heathrow and picked him up at Oliver and Lizzie’s house in Norwich and we drove halfway across the United Kingdom stopping to tour Sandringham (he was of the opinion that if you’ve seen one royal pile, you’ve seen them all, but agreed to indulge my infatuation with all things royal). We went out to dinner at Akmal’s Tandoori Bistro with Una, his good friend from Quaker House and discussed her recent trip to Prague to attend a co-counseling conference. The next day, he put me on a bus to Ilkley so that I might hike the Ilkley Moor, something he was not up to. When I returned, he made dinner of jacket potatoes and pork chops which we ate at his small, cluttered dining table. We were invited to dinner with his colleagues Joyce and Colin at Joyce’s home in Guiseley, where we talked of everything from the lost art of memorizing poetry to the history of Oxfam.

On the last day, we drove to Haworth and toured the Bronte Museum, discussing the triumph of Emily and the tragedy of Bramwell, both of us moved by Bramwell’s last words: “I have done nothing great or good,” then amused by Paul’s observation that the real tragedy of the Brontes was: “not a scrap of humor anywhere!” After the museum closed, Paul urged me to explore the paths beyond the car park to the ruined cottage said to be Wuthering Heights while he rested on a bench outside the gift shop. “Seize the day,” he had said, and so I had, taking dozens of photos on my phone of heather and sheep and stonewalls and skies tumbling with clouds. 

When we had said goodbye the next morning in the car park of Quaker House, Paul smiling Gandalf-like in the midday August sunlight near the vegetable garden, Una giving me a hug and a tea-towel which said, Force May Subdue but Love Gains, I had thought: This is it. The last goodbye. And yet, nearly a year later, when had I read his elegiac e-mail from Wheatfields, “So Hail and Farewell, bright, bright spot in my life,” I had cried. I wasn’t ready to let go.

So I rode the bus to Wheatfields in Headingly most days for the last two weeks of Paul’s life, carrying my black journal everywhere and recording everything: from the chalkboard in front of the cake shop on Woodhouse Lane, which read: “The more you weigh, the harder you are to kidnap. Stay safe. Eat cake.” To Paul’s commentary on the art in his room—the watercolor painted by his grandmother of the fierce-mouthed, head-scarfed Cuban woman and the reproduction by Leonardo of the heart-shaped face of the Young Woman with an Ermine: “See! The old woman is talking to the young one, and she is saying, ‘As I am, So shall you be.’”  

I recorded the Symposium-like discussions that seemed to take place most afternoons in Room 5 with Paul’s many visitors grabbing extra chairs and crowding around his bed to discuss whether Christianity was an instrument of Judeo-Greco-Roman imperialism or whether old age really was a second childhood. I noted the singular family tableaux that gathered one evening around the deathbed: Paul’s English ex-wife, Diane, whom I had never met; Martin, the affable English cleric whom Diane had left Paul for; Hannah, Diane’s daughter from her first marriage, whom Paul had raised from the age of 2 and loved as his own child; and Una, Paul’s faithful friend from Quaker House, who brought him ices in freezer packs every night. And everyone was getting along! Diane was telling me about Hannah’s father, who left her for another woman, and Paul was telling Martin about his ancestor, Diggery Priest who came over on the Mayflower and went directly back to England, unable to stand the climate.

“Garlic and sapphires in the mud/Clot the bedded axle-tree,” Paul was saying, his voice softer and weaker so that I had to lean in close to hear him.

I had been in the UK for twelve days and Paul was still at Wheatfields, the issue of whether he would stay or go still unresolved, though Hannah, Oliver, and Joel were secretly touring a nursing home in Headingly, despite Paul’s opposition: “I feel called to heaven,” he quipped, “but not to a nursing home.”

In the meantime, I was reading aloud to him from “The Four Quartets.” I had taken a side trip to Cambridgeshire to visit a friend in Great Gidding, and she and I had walked to the tiny, medieval chapel of Little Gidding, which Eliot had visited in 1936 and after which he had titled the last section of his poem. I had shown Paul photos of the church on my cell phone and he had been thrilled because he had never been there.

Paul and I were playing a game where I would read him one line and he would see whether he could fill in the next.  When I started with the opening of Burnt Norton, Paul said, “April is the Cruelest Month,” which was from “The Wasteland” “and I worried that the exercise would prove too frustrating. Then, a few minutes later and surprising both of us, he had sung out the lines about garlic and sapphires.

“Well done!” I said, clapping my hands.

“Keep going,” he whispered.

And so I did, and while he could not recite any more intact couplets, he nevertheless corrected my pronunciation of the German “Erhebung,” my Italian pronunciation of  “Figilia del tuo figlio,” and my English pronunciation of haruspicate. When I came to the line, “Like the river with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows and chicken coops,” and stopped to say, “Jesus, what a racist!” Paul did not miss a beat and said: “What did you expect? He was from St. Louis!”    

“Well, Becky, this has really taken our friendship up a notch,” Paul said, taking small, steady spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup. It was early afternoon on a Monday in the second week of September, and the doctors would take Paul off the discharge list that evening. A group of ten friends from The Struggling Christians had just left Room 5, having finished their repertory of Gregorian chants, Paul trying to sing along, though apologizing that he was “a bit off key.”

“I don’t have words for how amazing it’s been,” I said.

“The next time we see one another, I will have the entire Four Quartets memorized.”

 “Fantastic!” I said, patting his glistening forehead and thinking, magically, that maybe this was not the last time. I put on my rain jacket, squeezed his free hand hard, and attempted to give him a hug; it was absurd to say goodbye to Paul while he was eating his lunch, and yet if I didn’t go now, I would miss my train to London.

Thirty-three hours later, Paul passed away.

“PAUL IS LIBERATED!” Hannah had e-mailed, all in caps in the subject heading.

I would like to think that somewhere Paul is singing: “And all shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well.”   

All posts copyright© 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Rebecca Rice: Juror No. 3 Reflects on the Case Against Leo E. Fugler, III: Published in "The Hampshire Gazette" June 13, 2015

The excused were giddy as schoolchildren on a snow day as they hurried out of the Hampshire County Superior Court, released from jury duty in the Commonwealth vs. Leo E. Fugler, III trial, grateful that they won’t have to spend days imprisoned in the jury box, hours listening to testimony about whether Fugler forced children to perform oral sex with one another some twenty years ago, relieved of ruling on whether the defendant is innocent or guilty of the 11 indictments of forcible child rape and sexual assault and battery, the details of which, read out in rapid fire by a granite-faced Judge John Agostini, elicited uneasy murmurs.   

     By mid-afternoon that day, after two impanelments in which lawyers for both sides questioned jurors, there were only seven of us left, seven out of 80 who hadn’t been disqualified—because we knew the lawyers or the witnesses or worked in the courts or didn’t believe children could be trusted in recounting sexual abuse or admitted we would suspect a defendant of hiding something if he chose not to testify.     
     When we returned to the bare-walled jury room on the third floor of Hampshire County Superior Court a day later, we discovered that subsequent impanelments from a second pool of 80 had yielded only six more jurors, bringing our numbers to 13 instead of 14. “What does that say about this case they couldn’t get 14 people out of 160?” one juror wondered. Then the court clerk was telling us to leave our belongings behind and line up by number to prepare to enter the courtroom.      
     “Juries are the better angels of our nature,” intoned a solemn voice from the film we watched on our first day in the jury pool, extolling the system that our Founding Fathers created which gives every man, innocent until proven guilty, the right to be seen, heard, and judged by his peers, a privilege that only three other countries in the world afford their citizens.
     During my six days spent as juror number 3 in the Commonwealth vs. Leo E. Fugler, III case, I tried to channel this better angel. As the judge instructed us at the end of each day, I did not read about the case in the local newspapers, did not Google the defendant or the lawyers, did not talk about the testimony to my son in college in Indiana or my boyfriend visiting from Maine or even to my fellow jurors. This last proscription was particularly hard as we twelve (our alternate was excused on Day Two) instantly became a little family, trading stories about work and local politics, sharing grapes, mints, donuts, and even clothes (the air conditioning was punishing and I lent my fleece jacket to juror number 4 on Day 2 and an extra pair of socks to juror number 10 on Day 3).         
     But what I could not do, which the judge urged before releasing us for the Memorial day weekend, was not think about the case. He might as well have asked me not to dream. I thought about it while shopping for organic blueberries at Whole Foods (one of the jurors worked in the florist’s department and I prayed I wouldn’t run into her). I thought about it while checking e-mail (a friend had forwarded a joke entitled Murphy’s 17 other laws, number 16 of which read: “When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.”) I thought about it while grading a student’s extra-credit paper on plagiarism (he had copied an entire assignment from the Internet, and instead of failing him for the course, I was giving him another chance).  
     At night, I shunned my boyfriend’s advances—engaging in sexual relations was as ugly as watching slasher porn—and wrapped myself in blankets and comforter, despite the summer heat. Closing my eyes, I met Leo E. Fugler, III: his massive body barely contained in its funereal suit, his huge, close-shaved head with his toothbrush mustache, his impassive face registering no more emotion than a parked front-end loader as his accusers testified against him. How did this man, sitting stoically between his lawyers--the soft-voiced, red-haired counselor to his right who did all the objecting and cross-examining and her grey-haired, yellow-tied partner to his left, mute except in sidebars with the judge—how did this fifty-five-year-old man match his twenty-years-younger doppelganger who had done all the evil deeds attributed to him? 
     Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep and failed to lose myself in a Dickens novel, I thought about the victims. The prosecution had projected school photos of them on two TV screens in opposite corners of the courtroom. The eldest girl broke my heart: an exuberant, soccer-playing teenager, her face was heart-shaped and dimpled and pretty and her smile open and unaffected and trusting, as if life would forever offer up its gifts like a succession of happy Christmas mornings. How had this girl turned into the thirty-three-year-old obese woman who suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Type II Diabetes and alcoholism and drug addiction? Whose swollen hands and feet were shaking from the side effects of all the medications she was taking? 
     Courtrooms, despite how they are portrayed on TV, are not dramatic places. After the prosecution rested its case in the second week, the defense called several witnesses, none of who offered new or germane information. There was the repeated trotting out of an architectural drawing of the floor plan for the house in South Hadley where the abuses allegedly took place—pretty useless, as one juror pointed out in our deliberations later as the drawing did not include doors. Fugler’s attorney made much of the discrepancy between testimony about where the abuses first took place—on the third floor or the first floor.  
     To my surprise, the defendant did take the stand. Speaking in a preternaturally calm voice, he fixed his gaze upon his attorneys—not once looking at the jurors—and denied the accusations, claiming that the three children had gotten together as adults five years ago and cooked up the charges because one had not been invited to a Thanksgiving dinner and another had not been given Christmas money and another had not been given a car.    
     “Someone is lying,” said one juror at the beginning of our deliberations, “and we have to figure out who.”  
     “I believe the kids,” another said when we first went around the table to see where each of us stood.  
     “It’s hard to imagine that someone would make up a story about being forced to have sex and stand up in a courtroom and admit to this humiliation without it’s being true,” another juror said.  
     “But there’s no evidence.”  

     “There rarely is in childhood sexual abuse.”

      Back and forth we went like this for almost two days, writing the names on a blackboard of all the witnesses in the order in which they had testified, going over our penciled notes on the legal pads we had been given, asking the judge to explain “beyond reasonable doubt” to us again. In a much slower voice than the judge had used seven days ago, our jury foreman, a dignified retired newspaperman, read aloud each of the eleven indictments, so many times that I no longer winced with the multiple referencing of sex organs. And because we were eager for unanimity, we haggled with one another on which charges we could rule not guilty because there was only one person’s testimony and which we could rule guilty because there was more than one person’s testimony.  
     We lined up for the last time to file into the courtroom to deliver our verdict on a thunderstorm-threatening Friday afternoon. The seats behind the prosecution and the defense were full. Most of the witnesses who had testified were present. When the bailiff delivered a guilty verdict for eight indictments out of eleven, the three grown children cried. Throughout the trial, I had kept my eyes pinned to the floor when proceeding in and out of the courtroom, but when I walked out, I nodded to the district attorney and then to the eldest girl witness who had so affected me.   
     Some of the jurors talked about going out for a drink afterward, but none of us felt like celebrating. Instead, we said goodbye and hugged one another in the hot sun on Gothic Street and headed home to mow our lawns and hug our kids and call our friends and try to process this experience which had affirmed the better angels of our natures while, at the same time, weighing our souls down with acts which the judge, a week later in his sentencing, called “beastly.” 

Published in The Hampshire Gazette, June 13, 2015. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author