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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What Color is the Sky?

I’m told that when you get really old, death doesn’t bother you anymore. You get accustomed to it, in the same way you get used to brushing off the dried wasps and blue bottle flies that gather on the windowsills in early fall. Death loses its power to hurt you, its sting leaving only the faintest swelling, the tiniest bull's-eye upon your age-spotted flesh.

I am far from such equanimity. Death still cuts me, even the death of my 93-year-old mother-in-law, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past decade, who had not recognized me, or her youngest son and grandson, in a very long time.

She was 76 when I first met her, still living on her own, still driving her own car, still working part-time in an antiques store on the coast of Maine. She lived in low-income housing for the elderly, directly off Route 1 in Wells, Maine, across from a Market Basket, a Wal-Mart and a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was a humble address for a direct descendant of a Mayflower ancestor, an engineer’s daughter who had grown up in a sea captain’s house in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

But if she had fallen from upper-middle-class gentility, there was nothing sorry about her or her surroundings. She tended a small flower garden that snaked around the edges of her condo; hollyhocks, delphiniums, and bachelor buttons grew in well-watered profusion. Hydrangea and rhododendron bushes stood on either side of her small stone terrace; a marble cherub invited one to savor the delights of all things horticultural.

Inside the dusted and polished spaces of her tiny home, she made sure no one rucked the oriental scatter rugs layered like patchwork quilts in her living room. She invited callers to sit on the creaky-springed sofa bed that was covered with a hand-crocheted throw; or in one of the two wing chairs, whose arms and backs were protected with freshly laundered antimacassars. A glass-fronted grandmother clock in the corner kept time, tolling, to the agony of anyone who camped on that pullout sofa bed, the quarter, half and full hours. A tasseled Chinese porcelain lamp stood sentry on the flute-edged mahogany end table. Glossy magazines--Coastal Living, Smithsonian and National Geographic, a testament to her weakness for entering Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes—were stacked on her antique coffee table.

(A twin of that coffee table, with its brass fittings and foldable sides, stood before the sofa in our living room in my childhood home in western Massachusetts, which partly explained why my mother had nothing but praise for my mother-in-law. The two women, both conservative and proper, unskilled in the business of making money, loved elegant things.)

My mother-in-law was a still-handsome woman, with a broad forehead, distinguished Roman nose and dazzling smile. One could see that she had once been beautiful, and she carried herself with the sureness of someone accustomed to fielding compliments about her looks. She had been a dancer as a girl—the story was that she had been invited to join Martha Graham’s company in New York but that her father wouldn’t permit it; he needed her at home to help care for her three younger siblings during her mother’s protracted illness from cancer, a condition that, in the days before anyone had health insurance, drained the family’s fortunes.

Hemingway says that all of us are broken by life, but some are strong at the broken places. My mother-in-law was strong in many broken places. Her beloved first husband, Woodrow Wilson White, was killed in Italy in World War II, leaving behind an infant daughter. My mother-in-law, then a drop-dead gorgeous widow in her twenties, remarried an Army veteran who had survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The couple forgot about the evils of Nazis and Japs, and had two children.

The second husband, whom everyone called Smoky, was as humble as the first one was grand. Smoky, who repaired musical instruments for a living and played the trumpet in a band, doted on the fatherless little girl, and tried to be a good dad to his own two boys, though my mother-in-law once confided that she had never loved Smoky, and had only married him to provide a family for her little girl. My mother-in-law also claimed that Smoky was an indifferent father, and spent every family vacation at the beach shut up inside their rented cottage, working on his music. Like so many things she told me over the years, including why she later divorced Smokey (she was convinced he was having an affair), it was hard to know what was true and what was the ashy residue of her fury for all the men who had betrayed her.

The greatest tragedy of my mother-in-law’s life was something she never talked about. When she was still in high school, she had gotten pregnant; once she started showing, she was sent to upstate New York to a home for unwed mothers. She named the baby girl after her mother, and then gave the child up for adoption. Shortly before my husband and I married in 1993, this baby girl, now a sturdy woman in her fifties with two grown children, tracked her birth mother down. I can only imagine the relief, regret, guilt, and gladness my mother-in-law must have felt when she first embraced this lost girl, who had been blessed with her mother’s good looks and radiant smile. My mother-in-law confided many things to me, but she never discussed the details of how this child was conceived.

In her early eighties, my mother-in-law started behaving strangely—accusing neighbors of breaking into her condo and stealing her things, turning upon her family and friends (she called the child she had given up for adoption a “rat” and me, her mild-mannered daughter-in-law, a “mouse”). Her children moved her from Maine to New Hampshire, to another condo in the complex where her daughter lived, but the rages and midnight calls to the police continued. Something had to be done: her sons took her to court to become her legal guardian, upon which they placed her in an assisted living facility, and then, when the dementia worsened, into a nursing home.

Alois Alzheimer was the German doctor who treated the first patient who started showing symptoms of the disease after which he is named. The woman, referred to in patient records only as Auguste D., first entered Frankfurt Mental Institution on November 25, 1901. She was 51 years old, the mother of one daughter. Her husband, Carl, a railway clerk, had brought her there because he didn’t know where else to take her and because he could no longer endure her bizarre behavior —the delusions and night wanderings where she dragged her bed sheets across the apartment screaming.

Dr. Alzheimer conducted interviews over several weeks with Auguste D. (Her married name was Deter, but Dr. Alzheimer never recorded her maiden name in his otherwise meticulous notes.) Dr. Alzheimer asked her what year it was, and she said, “Eighteen hundred.” He picked up a pen from his desk, and asked her to identify it, and she said, “pencil.” He asked her what color the sky was, and she said blue. But when he asked her to write her name, she could only get out the first few letters of her first name. In a heartbreaking moment of lucidity, she cried, “Ich mich haben verloren (I have lost myself).”

Auguste D’s conditioned worsened; she had periods where she sat motionless for hours, where she could not eat. She never returned to her apartment on Waldenstraat, and five years later, she died. Dr. Alzheimer then performed an autopsy on her brain, and found, in her cortex, the telltale amyloidal plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that have become the signature of Alzheimer’s disease.

The blue cardboard file folder in which Alzheimer kept his 32 pages of notes was discovered in 1995 in a basement at the University of Frankfurt. The notes, recorded in the outdated German “Sutterlin” script, were remarkably intact, having survived the Allied bombings of 1944 and 1945, which destroyed much of Frankfurt Am Main, including the entire medieval city center, as well as the Municipal Library with its collection of Cairo Geniza documents, which included some 280,000 Jewish manuscripts found in 1895 in a Cairo synagogue.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, and though there are theories as to why some older people get it and others don’t—obesity is a risk factor, as is high blood pressure, Type II Diabetes, extreme sedentariness, intellectual incuriosity, and depression—these theories shed little light upon my mother-in-law’s condition. Although she was slightly overweight and didn’t exercise, she was otherwise risk-free. She took the drug, Aricept, but it did little more than retard the ravages of the disease.

The last time I saw her was on Mother’s Day. It had been a habit of ours to visit on this holiday. We would drive to Portsmouth, New Hampshire; my husband would go into the nursing home to fetch her, while my son and I stayed in the car, clearing out the front seat and making space in the back for her walker. We would drive to The Works Bagel Café on Congress Street, and get take-out: sandwiches for us and hot tea and a cookie for her because she had already eaten her lunch.

My husband would drive us to Sea Point beach in Kittery, not far from the Rachel Carson Nature Preserve and a favorite destination for dog owners. In the early years when she was in assisted living, she would climb out of the car and walk slowly along the beach. But as her condition worsened, she preferred to stay buckled into the passenger seat, watching from behind the windshield as Golden Retrievers, Poodles, and Portuguese Water Dogs leapt for Frisbees and tennis balls.

This past Mother’s Day, because of roadwork along Route 1, we never got to Kittery, but stayed in Portsmouth, driving to a park near the Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion which overlooked Little Harbor. Our destination was of no consequence to my mother-in-law; she wanted merely to sit in the car with us, to sip her milky tea and break off pieces of her chocolate chip cookie and smile that winning childlike smile, which was remarkably unchanged in all the seventeen years I had known her.

Our routine never varied: my son and I would get out to walk the dog, then return to the car, upon which my husband and son would head out to collect shells, and I would climb into the driver’s seat, keeping my mother-in-law company. I never knew what to say to her; the days were long gone when she railed against Smoky and his shortcomings. I filled up the silence with random musings; pointing out this or that wet dog; this or that freighter on the horizon. Whether I spoke or was silent didn’t matter; she smiled and nodded and made these rhythmic humming noises that came from deep inside her thorax and seemed almost like a cat purring.

Nothing seemed final about this last time we sat watching the water. The weather was warm, the sun was out; the tide was low. After she had finished her cookie, I offered her a square of shortbread that I had baked the day before. She took it, and murmured, "Thank you, Honey," and made a satisfied "Ummm," sound while she slowly, bird bite by bird bite, ate it. And though she could not have told you what year it was, though she could not have named the color of the sky or identified the snowy-haired man who presented her with a quahog clam shell when he returned to the car, she was happy, content simply to be.

And now she is gone, and the clamshell sky seems paler.