I was newly divorced, sober, unemployed, and grieving. New York City should have felt hard, cold, and dangerous, but somehow it took me in. Like my ancestors fleeing the famine in Ireland and the millions escaping the pogroms, the genocide, the impossibility of their lives, I found refuge and community. Yes, it was hard at first, one bad job after another, one terrible apartment, isolation and envy of others’ wealth and success, but gradually the life there became my life. Through my horribly paid publishing job, all those church basements where I listened to the stories of addicts like me, and the relationships I had no business pursuing, I found a way to live. One morning, walking across Central Park as the mist faded from Sheep Meadow, I encountered a gigantic obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, deserted except for an unhoused man who gestured to me to come closer.

Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. There is an ongoing conversation about Black Americans carrying the DNA of former slaves. I am a white, second-generation Irish American, whose father was placed in an orphanage for a year as a child, whose grandfather, whom I never met, was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow. 

I was beaten into literacy by an angry Irish teacher at a school located outside of Dublin called Glengara Park. I was six and had managed very well in an American kindergarten where we carried our chairs for credit. In fact, I had starred as Mother Nature in the Spring play and had learned all my lines by heart because I could not read.