Ethel Rohan's Blog, page 12
August 12, 2013
Sniper
Yesterday, for the first time, I shot a gun. I aimed, fired straight, but overreached, missing the tin can by inches. After, my arm hurt from the rifle’s kickback. I wish my arm still hurt. I wish I had shot more, had hit the target even once.
My lifelong friend had no idea I possessed any interest in shooting; I hate violence. Yet I loved shooting that rifle, aiming for a target and hoping to hit. Just like I love archery, firing that bow and trying for the red eye. I want to go to a shooting range. Right now. I want to riddle holes in hard things that can’t hurt. Instead I’m here, bang, bang.
Maybe my writing is me firing holes in things.
My lifelong friend joked I think I’m one of Charlie’s Angels.
Oh to be young again. Hot. To be a weapon this time around: aiming, firing, hitting what and where I want. To stand solid inside me. To dare you to fuck with me.
Anger is a textbook stage of grief. I thought the anger was aimed at death. Thought I was supposed to feel angry at death for taking Mam and Dad, and so close together, and so cruelly. Thought I was supposed to feel angry at my dad for dying, and at my mother for dying three months before him.
Stupid that I’d feel that kind of anger.
Maybe no more stupid, though, than my feeling angry at not being a Charlie’s Angel.
Angry at friends I haven’t heard from since Mam died. Since Dad died. Since Mam and Dad died.
Or friends that meet me and say nothing. Pretend. What’s there to say, I know. But try. Please.
I’m even angry at nothing to say. At pretend. At not trying.
We have nothing to say to the grieving. Bang, bang.
No more stupid than my feeling angry at 3 of the maybe 15 ICU nurses who took care of Dad over 24 days before he was moved to a private room for 20 more days of dying and with a different lineup of nurses.
The worst ICU nurse, her name is Pauline. Pauline, at the top of her voice, complained about the stink of Dad’s bowel bag while she sprayed green fecal odor neutralizer and batted her hands, like Dad’s stink was something she could beat down and drown. Pauline, as Dad lay dying, stood at the opposite side of his bed and spoke to me over his paralyzed body, telling me how years back the cousin of a mutual friend had committed suicide. Very sad, she stage-whispered. Pauline then shouted at Dad with violent good humor, saying how sunny it burned outside, how she wanted to take Dad down to the river, to picnic with her, on salty ham and tomato sandwiches. “Will you come with me, Ed?” Dad’s name was Ned. We told the nurses and doctors over and over. They couldn’t get it.
I’m angry at couldn’t get it.
The less worst ICU nurse also shouted at Dad, like he was deaf and not dying, saying she wanted to take him home with her, because her dad was dead. Said she knew he wanted water, but he wasn’t getting any water, ha, ha.
I’m angry at ha, ha. I want to shoot ha, ha. Cleave ha, ha with an arrow.
The less-less worst ICU nurse said she doubted Dad knew we were there, even as Dad smiled, as he squeezed our hands, nodded yes and shook his head no.
I’m angry at me for not speaking up for Dad and telling off those 3 nurses. At me for not putting a sign over Dad’s hospital bed in huge purple Sharpie saying, My Name is Ned.
Bang, bang Edward, Ed, Eddie.
I’m angry at me. At writing. At me for writing, for not writing, for not writing when it matters, for not writing what matters, for not writing better, for not writing best.
For not knowing who or what I am anymore. For not knowing ever.
I’m angry at me.
I’m angry at angry at me bang, bang.
July 29, 2013
His Heartbeat in my Hand
Dad is dead. He died last Sunday, on July 21st. The Lord’s day. He died after six weeks in hospital, 3 in ICU on life support and 3 on starving with his ventilator, dialysis, heart meds, and feeding tube removed. His final 10 days, he also went without fluids. We treat animals kinder.
The NG tube that snaked from inside Dad’s nose and down into his stomach for 5 weeks pushed his nose to the left and made it crooked. I still do not know what the NG stands for. I could look it up. Make educated guesses. I don’t feel the need to bother. Of all the horrors Dad went through in those 6 weeks the thing that seemed to hurt him most was the NG tube. One night, Dad pulled out the tube and doctors decided to leave it out. Dad’s small act of defiance, of taking control, made me grin.
Dad died with a crooked nose, with bed sores, with water blisters, with bruises, with a hole in his throat, with several small brain strokes and a massive spinal cord stroke, with wasted muscles, with his ribs high and his stomach caved in.
Just lying in a bed for six weeks can batter us so.
Just 7 weeks ago Dad was fit and healthy and walked into hospital for surgery, hoping with all his heart he’d come home again.
Dad is dead. I can’t seem to make that sink in.
My two sisters and I were with Dad in the end, his hands and paralyzed feet cool, his fingertips blue, his breathing labored and too much of the whites of his eyes showing. He died quietly and without fuss. Just a few clicks in his throat to signal the end and then those final few exhales. At last his ventilator barrel stopped its dance, a dance I had watched for four weeks following the tracheostomy, dad’s breath and the pulse in his throat the barrel’s puppeteer.
I can still feel the memory of Dad’s heartbeat against the palm of my hand whenever I stroked his head. I can still see the continuous shake of his head just from the effort of breathing.
Dad fought hard to live. He proved to be so strong, stronger than he or anyone else ever imagined. Least of all me.
Two hours before Dad died I asked my sisters if I could be alone with him for a few minutes. I told them that in the entire six weeks I had spent beside his bed, I hadn’t yet had any time alone with him. In those moments, I believed that to be true. My two sisters, twins, must have thought I was crazy or a liar. As I write now I realize that of course it wasn’t true. I had spent days alone with dad while my siblings worked at their regular jobs. But something urgently made me want to be alone with him that afternoon and to say to him what I said.
My head close to Dad’s, I said a garden awaited him. A beautiful garden with flowers and trees and birds and a cool, running stream. Also a large rock just for him. A rock where he would stand and survey and see all was well and good. He would feel oh so free and happy. He was strong, I told him. The nurses and doctors were all talking about how strong he was. I had learned how strong he really was. He had learned how strong he really was. We would keep his memory alive, I told him, and we would tell his grandchildren how good and strong he was. Go to your beautiful garden, I told him.
Two hours later, Dad went to that garden. I can see him there, standing on that rock. He is well pleased.
The night that Dad died I slept in his bed at home, on his side, the side next to the window, and I imagined my mother lying next to me on her side next to the door. They died just three months apart.
For hours, I couldn’t sleep, crying and having panic attacks about Dad’s wake and funeral services, wondering how my 5 siblings and I could possibly have enough strength to give him a send off nearly as good as our mother’s when we felt so worn out and heartcut.
I didn’t see or hear Dad, but I sensed him. He sat on the edge of his bed beside me and stroked my head, just as I had stroked his for six weeks. “It’s my turn now,” he said. “Go to sleep, everything is going to be okay.” And I did fall asleep, my Dad stroking my head, making me feel safe. Safe: It was my final gift from him. It was what I had always wanted from him.
My 5 siblings and I gave Dad a hell of a send off. He is at rest now. As is our mother.
Ned & Kathleen.
STRONG my imagination has tattooed on the edge of my right foot. On the edge of my left foot is tattooed SERENITY.
July 15, 2013
Height For Hire
It will be two weeks tomorrow since removal of Dad’s life support and feeding tube. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the hardest thing I hope I will ever have to do, to watch Dad waste away and to die so slowly, gagging and choking on his own secretions.
My siblings and I take shifts and sit with Dad, talk with him, hold his hand, stroke his head, put a cool cloth to his face, damp gauze in his mouth, play his favourite songs, apply lavender moisturizer to his skin, run a fan continuously in his room, and liaise with his nurses and the palliative care team, making sure he is as comfortable as possible.
A couple of days ago I sat alone by Dad’s bedside, holding my hand to the top of his head and rubbing my thumb slowly back and forth on his forehead. I could feel his heartbeat though his crown, beating strong and fast.
A young man appeared at the window. Dad’s hospital room is on the 4th floor, at the top of the building. The man stood inside the carriage of a crane, a window cleaner. He struggled, but couldn’t close the window to clean it completely. I rose from the plastic chair that my body now knows much too well and, using all my might, managed to close the stuck window.
The window cleaner washed and wiped the window and then started to sink in the glass, the crane lowering him. Just before his head disappeared from view, the window cleaner looked from Dad lying prone on the bed and to me on the chair and, grim-faced, he raised his hand, his gesture less a wave and more of a salute. It was a moment of connection, of a stranger honoring suffering and grief, that will always stay with me.
The side of the window cleaner’s blue crane read “Height for Hire.”
Dad still knows us. Still smiles for us every day. Still nods yes and shakes his head no. Still squeezes our hands. My whole life, I needed Dad to be stronger. Now, I’m praying he were weaker.
Perhaps those of you who pray will help me ask for Dad to be taken soon and for his, for our, suffering to end.
Dad has great faith, and he felt a special affinity for St. Francis. My prayers do not seem to be reaching St. Francis or anyone else. My prayers aren’t making any heights.
June 20, 2013
“Overshadowed” Overshadowed
A few days ago, thanks to the wonderful Vanessa O’Loughlin, my personal essay “Overshadowed” appeared at Writing.ie. Little did I know at the time of writing the essay (about my mother’s death in April) that I would return to Ireland again last week, this time for my dad.
Dad is on day 9 of life support following what we believed to be a fairly routine operation for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. The operation was in fact highly risky because of the location of the aneurysm, but Dad choose not to tell my 5 siblings and me. As doctors feared, he suffered massive internal bleeding and we’re left clinging to hope.
I’m furious with this blog, with writing. Why am I here now anyway? Why does some force insist on wringing out of me what I don’t want to say. I have nothing left to say. To write. I’m spent, and then some. Yet I’m here. It always comes back to the page for me, to the unsayable getting out, despite me.
Two nights ago, in the ICU waiting room, my younger brother said, “we didn’t talk to Dad, we exchanged stories with Dad.” My brother is so very right. Dad was a storyteller. Like, an endless storyteller. Like me.
My God, the obvious we don’t see.
I hate that I’m talking, writing, about Dad in the past tense.
I always try to be positive, to have hope. But right now hope is like the dark and light in “Overshadowed” and I just can’t grab hold of it.
I hate that writing this post makes me feel a little better. How so very self-indulgent.
I suppose this is how I scream.
June 6, 2013
Abroad Writers Conference Flash Fiction Contest
ABROAD WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
Lismore Castle, Ireland, December 9-16, 2013
Short Short Story Contest
Judge: ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Pulitzer Prize Winner & F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature
Three Winning Stories will be published in the February 2014 issue of
How deep can you dive into your imagination? How breathless can you make readers feel? How brief can you make your best stories? Dazzle us with your brilliant brevity and you might just win a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience during that magical month of December with Abroad Writers’ Conference at Ireland’s historic and awe-inspiring Lismore Castle in County Waterford.
In 500 words or less write a standout story that seduces us, sings to us, shakes us, grabs us by the throat, or that’s so quiet we have to strain to hear. Any subject and any genre, but whatever you do be interesting and make us care. Take the leap, you just might be about to lose and re-find yourself inside a twelfth-century castle in picturesque, hospitable, and literary-loaded Ireland.
1st Prize: Free Admission to award-winning author Ethel Rohan’s 3 Day “Brilliance of Brevity” Workshop* & a Celebratory Lunch with Contest Judge, Robert Olen Butler
2nd Prize: A scrumptious full banquet dinner at Lismore Castle with conference luminaries: Robert Olen Butler, Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Gristwood, Mariel Hemingway, Edward Humes, Claire Keegan, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Anne Perry, Michelle Roberts, Ethel Rohan, Alex Shoumatoff, Patricia Smith, Jane Smiley, and Lily Tuck.
3rd Prize: A complimentary pass of your choice to any one of our many exciting conference events at Lismore Castle.
Entries Accepted June 1st through July 15th, 2013
Winners Announced August 15th, 2013
$10 Entry Fee: https://abroadwritersconference.submittable.com/submit
For Full Contest Details Visit: http://www.abroadwritersconference.com
For Full Conference Details & Registration Visit: http://www.abroad-crwf.com
*A $500 value to be used in full payment for Ethel Rohan’s “Brilliance of Brevity” 3 day/15 hr. workshop or can be applied as a $500 discount toward a conference package purchase.
May 31, 2013
Exciting Short Short Story Contest
ABROAD WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
Lismore Castle, Ireland, December 9-16, 2013
Short Short Story Contest
Judge: ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Pulitzer Prize Winner & F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature
Three Winning Stories will be published in the February 2014 issue of
How deep can you dive into your imagination? How breathless can you make readers feel? How brief can you make your best stories? Dazzle us with your brilliant brevity and you might just win a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience during that magical month of December with Abroad Writers’ Conference at Ireland’s historic and awe-inspiring Lismore Castle in County Waterford.
In 500 words or less write a standout story that seduces us, sings to us, shakes us, grabs us by the throat, or that’s so quiet we have to strain to hear. Any subject and any genre, but whatever you do be interesting and make us care. Take the leap, you just might be about to lose and re-find yourself inside a twelfth-century castle in picturesque, hospitable, and literary-loaded Ireland.
1st Prize: Free Admission to award-winning author Ethel Rohan’s 3 Day “Brilliance of Brevity” Workshop* & a Celebratory Lunch with Contest Judge, Robert Olen Butler
2nd Prize: A scrumptious full banquet dinner at Lismore Castle with conference luminaries: Robert Olen Butler, Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Gristwood, Mariel Hemingway, Edward Humes, Claire Keegan, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Anne Perry, Michelle Roberts, Ethel Rohan, Alex Shoumatoff, Patricia Smith, Jane Smiley, and Lily Tuck.
3rd Prize: A complimentary pass of your choice to any one of our many exciting conference events at Lismore Castle.
Entries Accepted June 1st through July 15th, 2013
Winners Announced August 15th, 2013
$10 Entry Fee: https://abroadwritersconference.submittable.com/submit
For Full Contest Details Visit: http://www.abroadwritersconference.com
For Full Conference Details & Registration Visit: http://www.abroad-crwf.com
*A $500 value to be used in full payment for Ethel Rohan’s “Brilliance of Brevity” 3 day/15 hr. workshop or can be applied as a $500 discount toward a conference package purchase.
May 30, 2013
This Is What It Means
I learned several weeks ago, while in NYC, standing in line to visit the 9/11 Memorial, that I had won the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award, a prize hailed as “one of Ireland’s most prestigious awards for the single short story.” I felt winces of guilt–celebrating amidst the shadow of death and the 9/11 Memorial, but I couldn’t help my excitement and the leap of my insides.
Shortly after my return from NYC to San Francisco, I booked my flights to attend the Listowel Festival to accept my prize in person (approx. $2,600) and to read my winning story. However, my mother passed away on April 11th and I had to phone the airlines and ask them to change my itinerary, bringing my travel forward and allowing me fly home for my mother’s funeral. The expense aside, I did not have the energy or heart to return to Ireland again this month for the Festival–even though I very much wanted to be there.
The award remained confidential until last night, when it was at last announced at the opening ceremony of Listowel Writers’ Week. During the ceremony, I received the most surprising and touching of emails–from someone I had met for the first time in Dublin the day after we buried our mother. In his email, he said he was standing inside the Listowel Arms Hotel, amidst the applause for my “great win.” He also said that he had no doubt my departed mother was also sharing in the joy. I really like to believe that. That my mother’s spirit continues, whole and well, and that at long last she can be the kind of mother she always wanted to be. I can see her nod and smile, her eyes alight and her face full with pride, just as I see in this win my mother country nod and smile, telling me to keep on. And it feels like grace, like I can breathe better.
May 8, 2013
Goodnight Nobody Is Born
Ethel Rohan knows how to startle the dark. Her compassionate intensity illuminates the prose and the people of Goodnight Nobody—thirty short stories that are as sharp as they are earnest, luminous stories that reflect with sparse elegance our humanity and our often brokenness. As the moon circles the Earth, always separate but always drawn near, so too the cratered, alienated characters of Goodnight Nobody orbit others, striving to connect. By turns heartwarming and heartrending, this collection constellates ordinary lives gone wrong—the disgraced Dublin Reservist; the wife jealous of bees; the pyromaniacal mother craving warmth; the one-armed identical twin facing incompleteness; the photographer striving for the perfect image before losing her sight; and a host of others in trouble. Lives gone wrong, but always trying to get right.
PRAISE for Goodnight Nobody:
“In Ethel Rohan’s Goodnight Nobody, while breaking into her own home, a young woman unknowingly slices open her arm. This image is quintessential Rohan—characters trying, and often failing, to gain access to both safety and family, rendered with prose so swift, eviscerating, and brilliant that readers don’t realize they too have been opened up. Rohan elegantly weaves tattooed women, Irish Army reservists, identical twins, a missing monkey, traumatized girl scouts and more, into a world we all recognize, fear, and can’t help but love.”
—SIOBHAN FALLON, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone
“Fans of Ethel Rohan’s writing will find, in her latest and outstanding collection, Goodnight Nobody, a writer who has never been more intelligent, more graceful, more moving. Whether it’s a young girl torn between a loving father and an abusive mother, or a photographer who is losing her eyesight while her husband bears witness, or a woman who wants nothing more than a sign from her husband that he sees her, Rohan writes about people searching for a place to belong or a place to breathe or simply, a place to be. In Rohan’s eminently capable hands and words, these stories give us that hope that these searching people she writes will find everything they want or need.”
—ROXANE GAY, author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist
“Ethel Rohan speaks in many voices, all of which need to be heard. She goes so deeply into the hearts and souls of her people. And she wounds, she heals, often in the same sentence. Plain and simple, Goodnight Nobody is a great and unique collection of stories.”
—PETER ORNER, author of Love and Shame and Love
“Early in Ethel Rohan’s arresting collection, Goodnight Nobody, we encounter a character staining glass, ‘playing with light and dark and crooked and jagged, wanting the window to finish misshapen and almost frightening, gorgeous on the edge of grotesque.’ I couldn’t help but conjure that artist and her approach to her work as I simultaneously devoured and savored this book of beautiful and breathtaking stories. Each gem-like piece is capable of dazzling you, but these stories might cut you, too. They will without a doubt leave you unsettled.”
—CHAD SIMPSON, author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi
May 7, 2013
Book Giveaway
Further to my review of Brian Sousa’s story collection, Almost Gone, at Necessary Fiction, I have an immaculate copy of same book to give away. Just head over to Necessary Fiction, leave your name and a way to contact you in the comments and I’ll draw the winner and mail you the book the next day. Open to everyone everywhere. Ends Midnight, PST, May 8.
You’re welcome.
April 24, 2013
I Told Myself I Wouldn’t Write About
my mother’s death, but here I am. My mother, Kathleen, passed away on April 11th and I returned last night from Ireland and her funeral services. I feel wrecked in many ways.
In the end, just some seventy-odd pounds and completely erased by Alzheimer’s, I’ve expected her death for years, but she defied leaving this world so many times and now that she’s actually gone I can’t quite believe it’s happened.
As hard as the flight from San Francisco to Dublin was on April 11th, knowing that she was already dead and that I wasn’t with her in the end, the flight back to San Francisco yesterday was almost unbearable. I kept thinking of that flight I made over twenty years ago as an immigrant, when it was me leaving my mother and not the other way around, and her face at Dublin Airport, twisted and tear-stained, her chin trembling, all in a way I’d never seen her cry before.
I have two sisters and three brothers. The six of us carried our mother’s coffin on our shoulders into the church and carried her out again to her final resting place. That act of carrying her, of raising her up, gave me such comfort. At long last, she is at rest. Her suffering is over. I forgive her everything just as I know she forgives me everything.
I placed a short letter in the coffin with her, right before the undertakers placed the lid on her for the final time. I wanted her to go with a tiny piece of my writing. She is also gone with a piece of my heart.
