Yvonne Watterson

And when people die, and I don’t know what to say to bring any comfort to their loved ones, my condolences will come wrapped up in a Seamus Heaney poem – the right words at the right time. What I meant to tell her was that in the crucible of Heaney’s poetry, she would no doubt find herself represented along with everyone else; she would find “the music of what happens” then and now; she would find not what it means to be Irish, but all that it means to be human and searching, always searching – digging – for the goodness that’s in us and still for us. So on March 21, World Poetry Day, UNESCO recognizes again the point of poetry, celebrating it as “one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity. and on this World Poetry Day, I am in love, remembering a wintry day in County Clare, on The Flaggy Shore.

For cancer patients, there are plenty of milestones – the date of a surgery undertaken to remove tumors or breasts or pieces of a lung; the completion of radiation or chemotherapy; and, the day, five years after diagnosis, when a kindly oncologist makes the pronouncement of NED – Essentially, she didn’t have enough to work with; therefore, the surgery to remove my breast and reconstruct it would be trickier than the “simple” lumpectomy I had anticipated. So she recommended – and I nodded sagely as though I knew what she was talking about – a skin-sparing mastectomy which entailed removing only the skin of the nipple, areola, and the original biopsy scar to create an opening – a small opening – through which she would remove the breast tissue. On one of the anniversaries of his death, she told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store.

The following post was also published on the Irish Times website as part of a collective tribute to David Bowie from Irish writers Julian Gough, Joseph O’Connor, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, Eimear McBride, Hugo Hamilton, John Kelly, John McAuliffe and many others – Lazarus” had stopped me in my tracks that weekend and prompted me to mention to my daughter that I thought it sounded like the work of a man at the end of his life – a brilliant, beautiful man who for decades had illuminated the edges of my life – my world – with his sound and vision. The weekend before Bowie died, while listening to “Lazarus” and David Bowie telling us that he would be free – just like that bluebird – Thank you, David Bowie, for dazzling me with your ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Wherever you are in your life, you’ll find yourself in his reflection on life, the passing year, and how to greet the future: This is from Ted Kooser’s lovely book, Local Wonders. Wherever you are in your life, you’ll find yourself in his reflection on life, the passing year, and how to greet the future: Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend