Serendipity & Subtraction

Photo of a confluence on the beach by my home in Newfoundland, November 2007.


And the confluence of serendipity and subtraction is irresistible.

Subtraction, I was told by a wise old man once upon a time, is the secret to true happiness, never addition.

So on this principle, we were sorting through my Toronto lockers today in an effort to purge more "stuff" and I opened a box of books and sitting right on top was Nuala O'Faolain's "Chicago May".

I had goosebumps just looking at it. I am not meant to keep it. That is oh, so clear. It needs to be subtracted from my stash and added to someone else's.

So would any of you out there like this book? I thoroughly enjoyed it - it is a true story, well written by Nuala and it has some great old photos.

Let me know and I will mail it to you - on me, of course.

PS:
This is the poem that goes with the above photo for the photo-poem-card series I've developed:

Glove story

Grasped, then
Clasped.
Flower from the graveyard
Hay from the harvest
Leaf from the alder
Told to the stones
And
The stones
Weep.
And drying off
Say
No more now for
Tomorrow at dawn
The fish will return.

Nuala O'Faolain

She's one of those writers that causes extreme divides among people. You either hate her or love her. I'm the latter. I've devoured everything she's ever written in books and read as many of her columns in the Irish Times as I could get my hands on. I love her style, her intelligence and her heart-breaking honesty.
This was the first book I read of hers:



I loved her honest and heart-wrenching recounting of her sad family history, her well known father who always maintained a mistress, the abandoned alcoholic mother besieged by far too many children

Then I read:


This continued her life into the present times, the dismayed reaction of her family to the truth of her book, the death of two of her brothers from alcoholism and her own discovery of love through a successful online romance with a New Yorker.

Next was this, her first novel:



This followed a favourite theme of my own, a back story and a front story, well written and unputdownable.

Then she tried an experimental book:



This traced the true story of an Irish girl who emigrated to Chicago, intercut and interpersed with her own reflections on what she was writing and the research she had to do. Not to everyone's taste but I really liked it.

And then I hear Marion Finucane of RTE interview her on her Saturday Flesh and Blood series. And it turns out that Nuala has very little time to live, her newly diagnosed cancer has mestastisized from her lungs to her brain and liver. She speaks openly and freely of her cancer, her anger, her sense of being ripped off, her non-belief in an afterlife, her loss of music, reading, and most of all the loss of her joy in nature. She speaks of how utterly alone the process of dying is, no matter who is around you. She spares nothing and cries openly along with Marian.

It is profound, it is shattering, it touched the deepest part of my soul. I wept. For all of us frail humans. For the death that waits around the corner with our ticket out of here clutched in its skeletal fingers. For this incredible, exquisite life with all its joy and pain. For how truly and magnificently precious every moment of it all is.