Where Irreversible Loss Meets Unexpected Peace

They were two of the most painful experiences of her life: the loss of her then-husband, Frank, to cancer, followed quickly by the death of her mother. When Rosie Schaap sat down to write the first draft of a new book, she knew the only way to get through it was to get it out quickly. 

“So many details returned to me as I thought of that time,” Schaap told Common Good. “That feels lucky as a writer. But it’s kind of gutting as a human being.”

Those heart-wrenching details serve as the emotional core of The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country, Schaap’s latest release. The book begins with near-immediate entry into her great losses, plunging readers into a mirrored experience of how tragedy feels — that breathtaking and irreversible sense of this, now, is your life. With each turn of the page, Schaap illuminates the pathway of her life thus far, one that led her from New York City to Northern Ireland, a place where she, unexpectedly, found kinship in loss.

Schaap spoke with Common Good about caregiving, connecting with a new country, and the meaning of community to the grieving.

You wrote, “There was something different about the conversations with my friends in Ireland, a quality of acceptance, directness, interest, sympathy, unburdened by pity.” How did those conversations comfort you?

In a surprising way.

I hadn’t been looking for comfort. I had just been really happy to reconnect with some very old friends in Dublin. And then there was more quality to those conversations that surprised me.

Not every place or community in the United States grieves the exact same way. But New York is a get back to your business, get back to work kind of town. I didn’t feel that people wanted to hear more. I felt that people wanted to say, “I’m sorry” and were sincere about that. And I should add that when I say I didn’t feel that kind of pity in Ireland, I don’t think pity’s a bad thing in itself. I think pity is a natural enough emotion and response to sad things. But here, it was really, “Oh, let’s listen to this story. I’ve got time. I’m interested.”

I quote my friend Bridget about the particular Irish experience of loss and bereavement having a quality of its own — a clear-eyedness — that I didn’t often find in New York.

I suppose when people are from somewhere that has a historical period literally called The Troubles, maybe they have a category for that type of compassion.

I think it’s true, north and south. And even though it seems a very long time ago to most of us, the famine in the great span of world history isn’t that long ago. It happened in the middle of the 19th century. And I think even more than the much more recent Troubles, a lot about the Irish experience of loss and grief is connected to the famine. 

It’s easy to sort of underplay how devastating that event was — how many people died and how many people left. I think that’s still very much a sort of part of the DNA here. Here in the north, that’s compounded by these 30 years of conflict, much more recently, which I think touched every single person in some way.

It could have been easy to romanticize a place where you found so much healing and restoration. How did you keep yourself honest as you wrote about the ups, downs, and in-betweens of your new home? 

I knew from the start that Ireland has been subjected to a lot of romanticizing and stereotyping. There’s something pretty cute and sweet about that version of Ireland. I’ve seen glimmers of it, but it’s not what I see every day. 

An American friend and her fiancé came to visit the summer before last. They drove up from Dublin, and they drove into Glenarm, and they saw the beautiful marina and the lovely Georgian houses and all the trees. This was a dear old high school friend, a funny, wonderful person. She came in and she said, “This place is so corny.”

I said, “But listen, it’s also a real place.”

That’s the thing you can’t escape while living here. Maybe you can if you’re passing through for a day, but living here, the realness of this place is constantly with you. I want to recognize that. 

For all the natural beauty, if you take a closer look at the main street here in Glenarm, among the picture-perfect Georgian row houses, you’ll see plenty of derelict houses that have been abandoned. You’ll see plenty of markers to businesses that once were here during a much more prosperous time and are long gone from a much more prosperous time. So Glenarm, I think, helped me not to romanticize it just by being what it is.  

You shared that your yearning for community throughout your life has, at times, bordered on the idealistic. How did proximity to people who had grown up with a staunch Catholic/Protestant divide influence your perspective on community?

It’s less divided now in some ways than it was 20 or 30 years ago. But it still stuns me — my husband left the North to go to university in Liverpool and he’d never had a Protestant friend before, not because he didn’t want to but because it just wasn’t done even though they were literally across the street in Armagh where he grew up. 

There are some dominantly Catholic enclaves that are still here and some clearly Protestant enclaves that are still here. Glenarm is unusual in that it has about as close to a 50-50 population breakdown as I think anywhere here in the north has. So you don’t really feel it day to day here. You don’t get that kind of sense of division quite as starkly as you might in parts of Belfast or a small city like Belamina, not far from here.

As I got to know neighbors through the school integration meetings, I learned how much intermarriage was in this area. So, I think that also informed a lot of people’s attitudes toward their neighbors here. I would say at least half of the people I interviewed came from intermarried families. 

One day, when you felt you should have been walking or reading or writing, you spent hours watching the window in hopes of a robin sighting. How did discovering wonder in nature bring you comfort? 

It has been so huge to me since moving to Glenarm and it’s certainly one of the things that brought me here. Even though I am a born-and-bred New York City person, I’ve always loved nature. That’s one reason I decided to go to college in Vermont — to have the kind of experience that I didn’t have that much of growing up.

But as far as looking for a robin when I should have been writing a book, I am a champion procrastinator. So, you know, sitting near the bird feeder was perhaps more enriching than ironing a stack of napkins, another favorite procrastination tactic of mind. 

It’s hard not to connect with the natural world here. We’ve got the coastline. We have a protected forest. I have a small backyard by community standards but it’s larger than I ever had growing up in the city. Even today, there was a big party of sparrows and robins and a couple of finches. I find it endlessly interesting, these little flitting, flying, amazing dinosaurs doing their thing. And there are a lot of fledglings right now, which is fun to watch.

I’ve tried to understand, you know, what was this thing that happened to me with birds [where they suddenly became so interesting to me]? Part of it, of course, was being quarantined. I watched plenty of TV during the pandemic, but I found something that was honestly more exciting to me at the time, and I think that has a lot to do with my mother. She, as I wrote about, was a very complicated, troubled person — also very much a city person. But she found this comfort in birds late in her life. 

I thought, maybe not fully consciously, but somewhere, I think I felt that if my mother could take comfort finally in this thing — the least expected — there must be something to it.  

You described the privilege of caregiving for Frank and your mother, while also admitting how taxing that role can be. As you reflect on those seasons now, what do you wish you could tell your caregiver self? time will expand. 

You just go. You just rally. There is no time. You might run yourself ragged, and it’s probably horrible for you. But what else can we do when someone we love is dying? 

You don’t sleep; you don’t eat well. You don’t change your cat’s litter box enough or check your emails. When Frank was in hospital sharing rooms with people who had three kids at home, spouses who needed to put on the dinner and get the homework help done — I thought, How do they even fit all that into the day? 

But time will expand — even just a little bit — to make it fit, even if it’s not a perfect fit.

Many Common Good readers are church leaders — what do you want to tell them about the importance of place, community, and creating space to grieve?

I think each faith leader I’ve known is so different and each system of faith can be so different that I couldn’t possibly have advice that would fit every faith community. I went to my first-ever Presbyterian funeral here in Glenarm recently for a wonderful friend who sadly and suddenly passed away. It was very clear, having never been in that faith community, how much this promise of what comes after is part of the life of that church and its believers. And I don’t exactly know how I feel about that. 

I was a Red Cross chaplain after September 11, 2001. One of my favorite things that our trainer told us on the spiritual care path was, “I don’t care what you believe, but don’t go telling anybody that God had a plan for her 30-year-old son to die in an office building.” 

I know there are people who do take comfort in the belief that God has all of this figured out. I couldn’t for Frank, and maybe that’s why I question things more now. Looking at a 42-year-old man who still wanted to read and teach — I thought, from my point of view, that can’t be in anybody’s plans. So, to look at it philosophically, I find it very tricky.

As far as community, and I think and hope that most people know this at some level, don’t shy away from people who are grieving. Don’t be scared of us. We need you. Look us in the eye. 

We know you’re bringing us lasagna and meatloaf — and that’s fabulous. But we also need to be seen and heard in a very particular way. 

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country by Rosie Schaap was published by Mariner Books (HarperCollins) on August 20, 2024.