“People who have suffered, who have lost too much to recollect, and have found a way through, will not allow the past to repeat itself so quickly”
KERRI NÍ DOCHARTAIGH,
I’ve lived in the very heart of Ireland for just over a year, now. My partner and I crossed that meandering, century-old Border just as 2019 began its shape-shifting into the year that would be 2020. We were leaving a house in Derry, something I seem to have spent most of my life doing — but this time I was leaving through choice — for reasons other than violence or pain. I was moving to a place where I might finally learn how to stay.
That Border we crossed has been the thread that has run through my entire life. A ghost vein on the map of my insides, it is a line that is political, physical, economic and geographic; yet it is a line I have never once set eyes upon. This invisible line has been the cause of such sorrow and suffering, such trauma and loss, that I ran from its curves and coursing flow at the very first chance I got.
I first left the North almost two decades ago, when I was 18. I moved back when I was in my early 30s, in 2016 — the year the UK voted to leave the EU. Despite the words about unity, solidarity and strength in togetherness, lots of people decided they wanted to choose a different path. Derry-Doire-Londonderry — my Border town in the north-west of Ireland — known for being the place “the Troubles” began, voted to remain.
There is a very particular type of wisdom that is born out of witnessing unimaginable cruelty, out of the experience of dark, harrowing sorrow. I remember standing on Shroove beach, across the Border in Donegal, just after that vote and weeping; memories of dark days from childhood surging through my insides like hidden tributaries. No more, I thought — no more, no more — we have all had enough already, enough for many lifetimes.
I have not been able to bring myself to read the statistics on how many young folk have once more felt forced to leave Derry in the past year. Even before the pandemic hit, things had gotten harder due to the (then) impending Brexit deadline. Job losses, loss of vital services, loss of safe and supportive spaces: loss at that level is too much to try to process, sometimes.
The experiences so many people have gone through in the North are too much to comprehend. The human loss is, of course, the hardest to cope with. So many people have died or have left through trauma. Some have chosen to end their own lives; they had reached a point they could not see any way back from.
Suicide has had an immense impact on my life, and on the lives of many in the North of Ireland. The year I started writing my book Thin Places, six deaths touched my life. At least two of those friends ended their own lives. One struggled with addiction; the other had long been suffering with mental ill health. Both were gentle, good people who felt the impact of the place where they were raised. The cause of death wasn’t shared at the third funeral — that of a close friend from my past — and it all feels too raw to even think about. She had told me so many times over many years that she was going to end her life. Every time the words came out, the pain I felt thinking about her suffering, and the worry about what I was meant to do, floored me. I didn’t know how to make her feel better. I had no idea how to even try.
The fourth person died of organ failure, resulting from alcoholism.
Later, when I too got to a point where I could imagine no way of ever feeling better, no way to shake off the awful way I felt about myself when I looked back over things I’d lived through — where it felt like the only way out was really out; I had no idea what I was meant to do then, either. These feelings affect so many of us, and still — even now — we struggle to know what we are supposed to do.
Loss in Northern Ireland, for many people, consists of layer upon layer of despondency and hopelessness — things that are exceptionally hard for one person to shift on their own, just trying to get through. I discovered that year that the suicide rate in Northern Ireland was the highest in the UK — over twice what it was in England — and one of the highest in the world. More people have now died through suicide since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 than were killed in political violence during the Troubles. Suicide rates in those years, have, in fact, doubled. Of 28 countries that participated in the World
A culture of silence takes years, perhaps, to break. Many of us choose to simply leave
Mental Health survey in 2017, Northern Ireland had the highest rate of PTSD. Talking about traumatising experiences, as peace has unfolded, has remained a difficult thing. A culture of silence takes years, perhaps, to break. Many of us choose to simply leave.
Many of us from that walled, maiden city come and go like the seasons; flitting around from place to place, never quite anchoring ourselves anywhere — nearly always with half a mind of returning; drawn back to its river and its oaks, almost tidally. Ours is a history seeped in loss, and we feel it — perhaps sharpest of all — in the way that we have simply always been leaving.
The year I started secondary school, my
childhood home was almost burned to the ground — with us all sound asleep inside. I was 11 when a group of misguided youths threw a petrol bomb through my bedroom window, in our house on a Protestant council estate in the Waterside of Derry.
A month later we were driving to get petrol — across the Border — when I had one of the most important encounters of my life. It began with a sound I have never managed to get out of my head. Wing-beats like the beginning of life, or like the very ending of it. Eala glórach — whooper swan, its name meaning “noisy swan” — but when I think back to that first whooper swan I ever saw taking to the air above us, it is the silence that she left in her wake that lingers the most. The knowledge that silence does not always have to speak of things that cannot be said. The sense that there are things that can move us to silence that are beautiful things.
I read that in 1995, the year we were petrol bombed, more of them wintered on Lough Swilly than anywhere else in the UK or Ireland. That winter I shared company with so many of those creatures on the hill of another housing estate — a Catholic one– overlooking the River Foyle. All of us were seeking a place to call home — until the next wind called us up and away.
I was recently asked by a publication for a
bit more background about my relationship with my hometown, and so I sent it on. I hadn’t sent enough, though, they wanted to know more. Which exact streets I had grown up on, the specific schools I had attended; what I was really being asked was: ‘Which side of that divided city do you call home?’
But for some of us there is no simple answer to that question. I was petrol bombed out of one side, bullied out of the other — but I still hold both those places so dear to me, somehow. Those things I experienced on both sides of that river are not what defines my relationship with where I come from; no more than a mixed background, a particular surname or a petrol bomb does.
So what is my relationship with my hometown? Here is what I know of Derry; that aching, gorgeous city, on the banks of the River Foyle.
The city I come from has witnessed
bloodshed which can never be undone. That “Stroke City” has observed the making of life-changing promises — despite the supposed differences between the people involved — promises that have long been kept. Words were shared between people from both sides of that city, people who had sworn never to be together in the same room as the other. Light threw itself down onto that city’s pathways, after so much darkness, and allowed us to find the way through.
When I think of my hometown, I think of the brutal history we have been trying to make peace with. But I think, too, of all those strong oaks, deeply rooted and full of resilience. Brexit has left scars on the city already and there looks to be worse on its way. Divisions, fear — the emphasis seems to be on difference and separation, on borders and on keeping us apart.
I have no doubt though that the people of Derry — and other parts of the North who have watched their safe spaces finally be restored in the recent past — will not stand by and watch their homes, lives and futures be stamped into the ground again. People who have suffered, who have lost too much to recollect, and have found a way through, will not allow the past to repeat itself so quickly. I may have left my hometown but I am still that same wee girl who spent her childhood there, I think I always will be.
And here is what I know about life — and I will carry this inside me always. Here is the lesson given to me; by the place where I grew up.
I was born in 1983, in a city like no other, in the midway point of those dark, liminal days between Christmas and New
Year. Things nestled in the middle of other things hold an energy all of their own. I was born into another middle, too: the middle of the Troubles. No one knew it, of course, but that year I was born cut the violent, terrifying period known as the Troubles completely in half, making a border out of time. They would continue — those tragic years — for as many years again as they had already been raging for. There are particular periods in time that seem as though they might allow for things to happen in ways that could not happen in any other moment.
Time is a gift.
There is a time for everything — for sowing, planting, harvesting. A time for holding on, and a time to let go. A time for sorrow, and a time for healing. More so, there is, simply, time. There is time for it all. We still have time to step in or out — of places, of relationships, of thought processes, of our own selves.
Time is a circle.
Sometimes the snow will still be here on St Brigid’s Day, and sometimes we will have a year without it coming at all. There will be years when the autumn trees seem more vibrant, more sublime, than we ever remember them being before.
Time is a healer.
There will be years when we have suffered so much that we can’t pick out one season from the other, never mind one day. There will be months when we think we will never make it through, there is too much pain and loss to even try to fix things. Days when we cannot imagine ever feeling okay again, thinking that we have taken enough of it all, enough already, enough.
Then, a change in the wind, the first bluebell, the smell of snow in the sky, the moment courses on, and light finds its way back, somehow.
Everything has shape shifted — everything is OK again, more than OK, maybe, even.