The Irish Goodbye
By the time you see this, I will have left....
I haven’t been around these parts much in the last few months because I’ve been working on a big, semi-secret project….
One month ago today, after 15 years living in Laguna Beach, we left California for greener pastures—quite literally, in fact. More on that in a few moments.
But first, I bring you greetings of grace and peace from the middle of the North Atlantic where we are about three-quarters of the way through an international move.
Since April 28, I have traveled 4,325 miles eastward (so far) from the Golden State—the first 2,800 by car and the last 1,500 or so on the only ocean liner in service today: The Queen Mary 2. We have another 1,500 miles to go to reach our port of disembarkation in the United Kingdom on May 30.
The reason for choosing what might seem to some as an antiquated mode of transportation—I prefer to think of it as mindful, deliberately slow travel—is solely because our beloved fur baby, Elaine “Stritchie” Stritch, does not do well on planes. (Several years ago, she and I flew from Orange County to Oakland and it was the longest 45 minutes of my life.)
If we couldn’t get her safely to our destination, then we weren’t going. Full stop.
Stritchie, who turned 10 years old in March, also deeply dislikes car travel, but needs must, so we worked with a trainer for months to prepare for this great, big journey, helping her to feel calmer around other dogs and strangers, in new settings with lots of unfamiliar sounds and smells and people, and in the car.
So, last month, after we had sorted, culled, and packed the three-story house that had been our home since 2009 and put our belongings into a shipping container, we began driving across the United States in increments of six or seven hours, from California along the southern route through Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Chicago—where we spent a fortnight visiting family and friends—before driving the last stretch to New York City where Stritch and I embarked on the Queen Mary late last week, while Maury flew ahead to make preparations at our ultimate destination.
Our voyage on the 20-year-old Queen Mary 2 will take seven days before we disembark in Southampton along England’s southern coast. In addition to being the only ocean liner still in service, The Queen Mary 2 also is the only passenger ship equipped with kennels. With space for two dozen dogs and cats (and also ferrets, apparently, although the kindly kennel master, Oliver Cruz, tells me they’ve yet to host a ferret or other weasel-adjacent pet), the kennel books up years in advance of each transatlantic voyage. I phoned The Cunard Line (proprietors of the Queen Mary 2 and other ships) once or twice a month for more than a year before we found a spot for the sassy, ten-pound, furry sun around which our family orbits.
There are sixteen other dogs of various sizes, breeds, and ages—and two hairless Sphinx cats—on our voyage. Those of us accompanying the doggos and kittehs spend six or seven hours a day with our pets on in and around the kennel and pet lounge, or walking and sitting on their literal “poop deck” where only the animals and their family members are allowed to enter. It’s a lovely, international group of people and we’ve made some fast friends already—one of the pleasures of travel in general, and slow travel in particular.
You can learn more about the Queen Mary 2 kennels here and here.
I’d imagine at this point you may be really curious about where we’re headed.
If you’ve been reading the tea leaves (hint hint) for the last couple of years, you might have a pretty decent idea already, but we’ve been keeping our plans close to the vest, for once, because … Well, because it’s a huge move, one we’ve been thinking about for more than 20 years, a deeply personal decision that we made after many months (and years, truthfully) of careful discernment. We’re confident about the leap of faith we’re making—as some of you know, our family has a history of taking some pretty big swings, usually to great life-changing effect—and we didn’t want a lot of input, invited or not, well intentioned or not, muddying the waters or raining on our parade.
There were thousands of moving parts, logistical puzzles, and bureaucratic tape that needed to be managed and navigated before we embarked on this journey, some of which weren’t settled until we were about to get on the boat (literally).
Now that Maury has arrived via plane and we’re well on our way on the high seas, I’m truly delighted to share with you, dear readers, that our ultimate destination is Ireland, where I am a newly-minted citizen, and where we will be spending the rest of this year, while continuing to mindfully discern whether the country my grandmother Nellie left in 1920 to make a new life for herself in America is the right place for us to write a new story for ourselves more than a hundred years later.
We’re maintaining an open stance to the Universe, watching for signs (and wonders), and hoping that while we’re in our motherland (Maury’s family is also largely Irish, and his mother’s people emigrated from County Kerry about a half-century before mine departed County Cavan for the New World) the way will become clear.
Why Ireland?
Well, we love Ireland. We have loads of family (my grandmother was one of 21 siblings) and friends in the Republic and in the North of Ireland; we spent our honeymoon there and we’ve passed many more happy weeks there during the intervening 27 years since we were married. (We’ve probably been talking about spending an extended period of time living in Ireland for 26.5 years.)
Ireland has, for me, ever felt like home in the kind of primal and spiritual sort of ways that are hard to properly articulate. It has the kind of pull and draw on my heart that feels “like well water, far down” as my beloved Seamus Heaney put it.
So, there’s that.
Also, Ireland has no snakes. (If you don’t know why that is a particular selling point for yours truly, might I encourage you to read this entry from 2022.)
Ireland also has far fewer guns than in the United States, where gun violence is an epidemic we can no longer endure. We (and my husband especially) have done our best to combat gun violence by advocating for sensible gun laws for decades. At this point in our lives—me in my early 50s, he in his early 70s—we’d like a break from the seemingly unstoppable madness of mass shootings and living with the constant menace (even if it’s unconscious) of the possibility of gun violence anywhere, anytime.
We know that being able to pick up and move to a different country for a break or a new beginning is an absolute privilege, we are grateful beyond measure for it, and we intend not to squander it.
While we’re not sure exactly what Ireland holds for us, we trust that the Universe does, and if we’re paying attention and stick by our heartfelt intention to be useful in whatever way we can be during our tenure there, we have faith that all will be revealed at the right time. This is the part where Father Richard would remind me not to “push the river.”
When I was at mass on Mother’s Day at St. Sabina’s Church in Chicago, Kimberly Lymore, an associate minister at the parish, introduced the guest speaker (the Rev. Dr. Carmin Frederick James) in part by reading James’ “life verse,” Isaiah 43:16-20 (from The Message paratranslation of the Bible), which says:
“Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it? There it is! I’m making a road through the desert, rivers in the badlands.”
I decided to take that as a prophetic word. (More about such things here.)
Show up. Be present. Pay attention. Look up. Shut up and listen.
I’m about to create a new thing for you, so be open, brave, and kind. Don’t be afraid.
#NoliTimere
Apart from my plan to try to be useful, a non-anxious presence wherever I am, and open to all manner of possibilities and opportunities, I also intend to share with you on a more regular basis what happens during this grand adventure and the new stories that arises from it.
One of the homes we’ve rented in Ireland for much of the year is an old stone cottage in a forest overlooking a loch (with swans) in a quiet corner of the countryside. It has a writing studio with heaps of light and a simple desk next to a window that, when I first saw a picture of it online, I could picture myself writing at, with a cup of Barry’s tea and Stritch under my chair.
Ireland represents roots and possibility. Connection and exploration. As I was working with spiritual directors as my family and I discerned whether to make the leap across the pond, when I imagined creating a life there, even with all the unknowns and accompanying anxieties, it gave my soul a feeling of freedom, as if I could sense the widening of my aperture on the world and a vast expansion of whatever reserves of creativity I already possess.
Why now?
:: gestures to everything ::
I mean…here’s an abridged list in no particular order:
Guns.
Trump.
Too much noise.
The empathy deficit.
Too much psychic noise.
The rampant entitlement.
Too much feels too busy too much of the time.
It’s too hot (in all the ways, none of them good).
The ubiquity of active shooter drills for children.
Christian nationalism has become one of the United States’ top exports globally.
Undecided voters in a presidential election where they behave as if the choice between top party candidates is apples and oranges when it’s actually more like choosing between an apple and a 300-pound syphilitic flying scorpion where the 300-pound syphilitic flying scorpion has demonstrably attempted a coup, brags publicly that he would like to be a dictator for life, is under criminal indictment for a litany of offenses that would make Al Capone blush, has the intellect of a gerbil, the moral conscience of a sebaceous cyst, and the compassion of a toaster oven.
Those are a few of the more negative reasons motivating our decision to take a time-out from the US of A.
Far more important than any of those, however, are the positive factors that have been catalysts for such an epic change at this moment in our lives.
In the last 18 months, we have lost several people who we loved deeply, including my sister-in-law, Madonna, who died far too young from cancer last autumn. Her death and those of other friends and family so dear to us, led us to take stock and think about what we wanted the next 20 years of our life together to be, and how it might look like if we had the opportunity to start afresh.
“If not now, when?” has been our guiding mantra.
The exercise of taking inventory of what we want, don’t want, hope to accomplish, never do again, etc., led quickly from superficial what-kind-of-a-house-would-we-like to what-kind-of-a-life do we want, and the answers—and priorities that grew from those conversations—were as illuminating as they were clarifying.
We yearned for stillness, for quiet, and a simpler, slower existence.
We’d like to have neighbors we could see (or not), but not hear—at least not as clearly as we could in the beautiful surf town with the gorgeous view of the Pacific, where we’d lived cheek-by-jowl in Southern California; where we literally could hear our neighbors fart and where there’d been nearly constant construction noise for 15 years straight as house after house flipped and new owners often would tear down the existing house to the studs (or raze them entirely) and start again, time after time after time after time.
We wanted to be in even closer proximity to nature and its rhythms, to learn the sounds and names of the fauna and flora, to be nearer to the source of the food we consume, to be able to read the Book of Nature more closely, unfiltered and unfettered.
We desired space, physical and psychic, to roam, breathe, explore, grow, cultivate, and evolve spiritually, emotionally, artistically … in all the ways.
We hoped to discover community among like-minded people for whom artistic expression is close to the center of life, where spirituality and “lived theology” has more to do with kindness and hospitality than factions and “rightness” in the prevailing culture, and where we have been embraced with the words “welcome home” by friends, family, and strangers alike who genuinely seem to mean it, and where our talents, gifts, experience, and intentions might be useful and helpful in new and perhaps even surprising ways.
We’d like to be near trout streams and (snake-less) hiking trails and farmers markets and fishing docks and musicians and poets and makers and farmers and weavers and workers for justice and spiritual explorers and where we might live life at the speed of footfalls; where there are true seasons and people who don’t take themselves too seriously and also who look out for each other and our animals.
We’d also like to design a life where, as Ron Swanson might say, we could whole-ass one thing at a time rather than half-ass a bunch of things, where multitasking is not an olympic sport or a life goal, where when we’re walking our dog, we are just walking our dog—mindfully, gratefully, non-anxiously, whole-heartedly walking our dog.
Take my hand.
We will walk.
We will only walk.
We will enjoy our walk
without thinking of arriving anywhere.
Walk peacefully.
Walk happily.
Our walk is a peace walk.
Our walk is a happiness walk.
Then we learn
that there is no peace walk;
that peace is the walk;
that there is no happiness walk;
that happiness is the walk....
—from Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh
Our dog is a nervous pooper.
(Stay with me on this, I promise it’s germane.)
Stritchie (her given name is Elaine Stritch Possley after my favourite Broadway diva and legendary broad) has a good reason for being an anxious defecator: When she was about three months old (and the approximate size of a large guinea pig), on one of her first forays going potty outside after dark, a monster tried to eat her.
This is not a metaphor and I’m not remotely exaggerating.
As Maury stood at the end of our driveway with the tiny “Baby Lady” on a blush pink leash, a huge, stealthy coyote appeared seemingly out of nowhere, inserted itself between Maury and Stritchie, and tried to grab the puppy.
Maury yanked on the lead with one hand and lunged to pick Stritchie up with the other, just as the wild beast closed its jaws, biting him on the hand but, blessedly, missing the tiny dog by mere inches. Terrified, covered in poop and blood (that turned out to be Maury’s not hers), baby Stritch arrived in our bedroom a few minutes later screaming inconsolably (I can still hear it in my mind a decade later.)
While Stritchie was safe, thanks to her hero and favourite human “Daddy,” that puppyhood trauma was imprinted on her canine psyche and she can be a wee bit … um … let’s generously call it skittish.
Despite now having reached elder doghood—she turned 70 in canine years in March and has come into her full Stritch-ness—the whole pooping outside, whether in broad daylight or under the cloak of darkness, is still a whole thing.
Last fall, as we began preparing in earnest to leave California, knowing Stritch would have to spend time traveling, which could be stressful on her (and us), we enlisted the help of an expert dog trainer to help deal with her anxiety and reactivity.
As some of you who have canine companions likely already know, dog training is usually more about training the dog’s human family than the dog, and that’s precisely what happened to us. Stritchie has trauma from that coyote encounter and subsequently, because I have a black-belt in co-dependence, I have indulged her nervous (mis)behavior by coddling her and trying to run interference between her and other animals/strangers to avoid confrontations that are distressing for everyone. By doing so, I unwittingly had made her anxiety worse.
She needs to know, the trainer told us, that we are in charge and she is safe with us, that she doesn’t need to protect us (which she thinks she does as the self-appointed alpha of the Possley pack), and that she can relax and let us take care of her in any and all situations.
How we communicate this to her is through a series of terse, guttural vocalizations that sound like we’re shouting in Germanic slang—”BUH!” or “HUH!”—that are meant to mimic the sound a mama dog makes to keep her pups from acting out in their den. It seems a little bonkers, and to be honest it looks pretty bonkers to neighbors and the occasional startled passers by, but it has worked wonders. Stritchie is less stressed when we go for walks and when she encounters other dogs. She’s even slightly less distressed in the car, even as we’ve clocked more than 2,000 miles during the last fortnight.
And yet, pooping has remained something of an ordeal. She still remembers the monster.
One evening a few months ago, before the California house morphed into a three-story fort of cardboard boxes and plans for the next chapter of our lives evolved from mere dreams to technicolor realities, I was walking Stritch in our neighborhood. As we approached one of her usual pooping spots—a small, dusty hillock in an undeveloped lot overlooking the ocean—I had something of an epiphany.
You may recall my having said at the start of 2023 that one of my intentions (rather than resolutions) for the new year was to be a “non-anxious presence in the world.” Unlike almost every resolution I’d made for 50 years, that intention was one that I was able to embody, imperfectly but with increasing consistency. In stressful situations with other humans or even while I’m alone, I am more often than not able to recognize when anxiety has entered the group chat and mute it. I employ various contemplative practices, chiefly taking a moment to regroup, slowing my breathing, meditating (even if it’s just for a few moments), and de-escalating the disquietude.
Becoming an non-anxious presence takes practice and I’ve had many opportunities to do so this last year and a half. But it wasn’t until that evening in Laguna Beach, while Stritch was preparing to poop—squatting and jostling and bobbing and weaving almost getting there but then hearing or smelling or sensing something that triggers her internal alarms and trotting off to another spot where the process starts all over again—that I thought about attempting to de-escalate her uneasiness by trying, in that moment, to create a peaceful space for her.
I stopped what I was doing and let the lead go slack. I took three deep breaths and exhaled them slowly as if I were blowing through a straw. I closed my eyes and calmed myself. And I waited. Patiently and as non-anxiously as I could.
It wasn’t an instant fix. She’s still a nervous pooper, but she’s less anxious than she was and usually follows my lead, energetically or spiritually or however you choose to describe/understand such things.
When I’m calm and not in any hurry, when I’m not anxious about how long it might take her to do her business, she’s not as anxious and the whole process is less fraught. Over time she’s become pretty efficient and less stress-y about the poop thing, even in a very different setting to the only home she’s ever known. Even on an ocean liner in the middle of the North Atlantic, surrounded by other dogs and strangers.
Before we headed for New York and the Queen Mary, we spent a few weeks in Chicago where we stayed in an apartment downtown not far from the Magnificent Mile, amidst thousands of other people and what felt like almost as many dogs. Even amidst the cacophony of a metropolis, Stritchie adapted seamlessly to urban life. Now we’re both less nervous about the pooping—as well as about change and new experiences in general.
That’s growth. That’s also grace. For both of us.
Back on that hillock in Laguna Beach, when I stopped to create peace in my heart and mind that I hoped would extend to my fur baby, I began thinking about what it would be like to curate a life with that intention at the center of it.
Creating peace.
Breathing deeply.
Doing one thing at a time with intention and love.
Just … walking.
If all of that happened amidst great natural beauty, country lanes, flocks of sheep, and the occasional donkey, so much the better.
As it turns, the route Stritchie and I are taking to reach Ireland is almost the precise reverse of route my grandmother took to get from Ireland to New York City nearly 104 years ago. When we disembark in Southampton later this week, we will travel by car to Liverpool where we catch the night ferry to Belfast and meet back up with Maury.
When Nellie was 20, she traveled from her home in Ballyjamesduff, County Cavan, to Liverpool, where she purchased a second-class ticket and boarded The Baltic ocean liner. Eleven days later—on Dec. 19, 1920—she arrived at New York’s Ellis Island, alone, with $20 in her pocket.
My Italian grandparents made similar voyages from their home in Abruzzi a few years before Nellie emigrated from Ireland, eventually settling in New Hampshire.
When The Baltic pulled into port at Ellis Island in late December 1920, Nellie disembarked, made her way to the immigration inspector, answered his 29 questions, and walked into the Great Hall to find her older sister, Rose—who had arrived at Ellis Island in 1913, married, and settled in Orange, New Jersey—waiting for her.
Nellie moved to New York City, where she had other siblings, and eventually settled in working-class Stamford, Connecticut where she was as a domestic for a wealthy family, and soon met, fell in love with, and married my grandfather, Francis Page, himself an orphan of immigrant parents from Ireland and England. They had three children in four years, and in 1936, Nellie died giving birth to their fourth child, a girl named Elizabeth, who died a day after her mother.
I never met Nellie, but she has loomed large all my life. She has given me, my brother, and cousins and our parents an enormous gift that we each continue to strive to pay forward in our individual ways.
As the Queen Mary 2 pulled out Pier 21 in Red Hook, Brooklyn last week, where I had a clear view of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty for hours during embarkation (dogs and their human companions board first and so we had plenty of time to kill before the ocean liner got under way), I couldn’t help but wonder what Nellie would make of me making the “reverse commute,” if you will.
I never knew her. My mother, who left this world five summers ago, had few memories of her mother. But Nellie seemed like a woman who was brave and courageous, not afraid to take big swings and follow her heart wherever it led her, whatever awaited her at her ultimate destination.
I hope she’d be pleased about her granddaughter, now a citizen of Ireland with a Irish passport in hand, coming home.
As Lady Liberty slowly disappeared from view as our ship passed under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, I felt somehow assured that she would be.
I know I am. And grateful. So profoundly grateful.
More from the proverbial “auld sod” next week, and thank you for joining me on this adventure, whatever it may bring.
In the meantime, please be as brave and as kind as you can.
And remember that you haven’t met yet everyone you will love and you haven’t met yet everyone who will love you.
Before I leave you, here is your moment of Zen from the aft of the Queen Mary 2:
Great big love from me (and Stritchie),
Thank you everyone who read and commented with such enthusiasm for this new adventure and chapter of our lives. We're finally settled in our first house here and I will respond to each of you individually, but in case I miss anyone, I wanted to express my gratitude to everyone. Here we go!
I am weeping to the point of being unable to breathe through my nose. I am such a wuss. I don't know how much more of life I have left to live, having used up 83 years of it mostly unwisely. I aim to fashion what remains from the "instructions" in this post...insofar as I am able. Thank you for leaving those shall-we-say suggestions...plus grace and courage and peace for all of us. Blessings by the bushel for all of your family. I will be waiting here for reports of new adventures and mishaps...with love.....