When Rosie Schaap was 39, her husband, Frank, died on Valentine’s Day. She buried her mother just over a year later, leaving her an orphan because her father had already passed shortly after 9/11. The Slow Road North begins with Frank as he lies. “But he did not lie; really, he revolved with effort to one side, flipped sharply on the other like a fish pitched ashore, and then, with resignation, rotated himself flat on his back again, back to where he’d started.”
Her “road” to the North is indeed a meandering and often painful one. It takes a decade for Schaap, who is the rarest of New Yorkers in that she was actually born and bred there, to leave those two deathbeds behind and finally come to rest in the village of Glenarm, in Co Antrim – an unlikely place for an urbanite without a driving licence. However, given that she is no stranger to death, perhaps Northern Ireland, a place populated by ghosts, is a fitting home.
It is also no stranger to alcohol. Schaap’s first book, a whirlwind through her young, adult life, was titled Drinking With Men. After Frank died, she worked at her local bar and was the drinks columnist for the New York Times. Alcohol – whether a post-yoga pint at a Glenarm pub or an aperitif on the patio – is laced liberally through her writing. Even shame can be measured as a “cold, heavy liquid”.
Schaap is a passionate, omnivorous reader; Chaucer shares the same space as the Pogues. The map of her memories is charted, not with towns and roads, but with books, her love of Yeats initially beckoning her to Dublin when she was 19. In some cases, literature allows her levity. She contemplates being a widow, a “hard” word, “(t)he w at both ends – like fence posts with sharp, pointy finials”, by reaching for Mary Lavin, Synge, Eibhlín Dubh’s Lament for Art O’Leary, and the “widow-women” of Irish folktales, many “embittered by their widowhood”. About one story that begins, “There was an old woman living with herself,” she observes that “with herself hits harder and truer, than by herself.” The written word gives her the intellectual distance to analyse sorrow and its barbs.
An ordained interfaith minister, Schaap believes in God – exotic in liberal Manhattan and more common in Antrim. However, in Co Antrim, it is possible that she is “the only Jew around”. Sometimes, she adds, “I think about mobs with pitchforks.” At one point, Schaap is menaced by local lads, knocking at her door in the wee hours. With a balance of bleak and screwball, she writes: “(M)aybe because it was night-time, and I was alone, and I was reading The Dead Fiddler, one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s dybbuk-haunted stories – that Poe and his raven sprang to mind.”
Schaap refuses to betray those who have been kind. It is a decision most memoirists face but rarely uphold
She is wonderful at capturing the absurd moments threaded through the often-humdrum routine of everyday grief, such the glamorous blonde-coiffed funeral director showing up at Frank’s grave. (She wonders if her friends think she is her dead husband’s mistress.) She is heart-wrenching in flashes of rue about her marriage. However, Schaap’s deceased mother is her most vital character.
“My life was lighter without her,” says Schaap about this woman who looked like Elizabeth Taylor and wanted to be a famous actor. The morning after her mother hits her (her face, Schaap recounts, “a heat map of overstimulated capillaries and veins”), they breakfast on scrambled eggs and rye toast. “We ate and talked about boys and Ma told her favourite dirty jokes, which were very dirty.”
Schaap began writing Drinking with Men when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and both he and her mother died in the time it took to complete it. There is fun in Drinking, but also anguish that twangs. In Slow Road, Schaap has mellowed. At times, I find myself missing the sting of the first book, wishing that the ends were not so neatly tidied, and that she was not so steadfastly affirmative.
Still, she is a beautiful writer, unsparing about herself. “Had I broken his heart?” she wonders about Frank, “And had his broken heart made a dense and irresolvable knot inside him? Was that knot a tumour?” She can be wonderfully, wrenchingly matter-of-fact. “Grief, I thought then, will always prevail. I would go away for two weeks and I would try to leave it behind, knowing that it would be right where I left it, waiting for me, when I returned home.”
[ Rosie Schaap: ‘In Ireland, I found an openness to talking about death’Opens in new window ]
And although she is perhaps a touch too glowing about her pals in Glenarm, Schaap is a respectful author, and, above all, friend, who refuses to betray those who have been kind. It is a decision most memoirists face but rarely uphold.
What’s more, Slow Road reminds us of how personal the experience of grief is and, as such, every well-written approach to the subject will resonate with each reader differently. The sweetness of Schaap’s wonder, as she watches a robin hopping around her Glenarm garden, is saved from saccharine by the practical observation – when he vanishes – that robins live only two years. The Slow Road North may not offer the exact solace I was craving, but many readers will find it in her courageous and lucid prose.
