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On a fall night in 2019, we gathered at my cousin-in-law’s home in Lurgan, Northern Ireland located thirty minutes south of Belfast by train. Local relatives brought bangers, crisps, and trifle pudding. Beer, wine, and alcohol livened the party. Irish ballads like Oh Danny Boy vibrated through the air, connecting the past to the present.
I couldn’t imagine that this spirited group had lived through the intense neighbor-to-neighbor conflict that defined The Troubles. Half their lifespan had been overshadowed by gunfire and fear.
The day before the Irish Clan’s gathering, my half-Irish husband (father's side) and I took a tour of Belfast, ground zero for the conflict that lasted from 1968 to 1998.
I opened my umbrella in the drizzly rain and stared at the Belfast Peace Wall through the drops. It’s one of several barriers built by the British to quell tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Since many of the eruptions started in local pubs during late-night drinking, an effective deterrent was to wall off the neighborhoods and close the gates after dark, and not reopen them until daybreak.
The Belfast Peace Wall separates Falls Road and Shankill Road. The former is a Catholic neighborhood and the latter is Protestant. Belfast, the movie, poignantly depicts how this division came to be.
We visited the Catholic neighborhood first. On this side of the wall, the barrier resembled a junkyard fence. It was haphazardly layered with wood, variegated metal, and barbed wire. I imagined a Sunday gathering at one of the row houses that butted up against the mess. Maybe it was interrupted by a handmade bomb thrown from the other side. The next day, neighbors gathered to raise the height of the wall with whatever material was available. This scene repeated itself until the wall reached its current height of forty feet.
By contrast, in the Protestant neighborhood, the wall was bordered by a wide street with flat sidewalks and well-kept trees growing at regular spacings. This boulevard (pictured above) evokes a sense of abundance. It's a nice place for a Sunday stroll.
We had arrived in Lurgan two days before the Irish Clan’s gathering. After greetings and pleasantries, my Irish uncle-in-law made an unusual request, “How’d yous like to visit a few graveyards?” We nodded and were taken to three cemeteries.
At the first cemetery, he introduced his dead relatives like we were seated at a dinner table. Burial plots had cement borders with brightly colored glass and stones lavishly spread across like a 1950s Hollywood landscaping. The opulence of Irish graves was in stark contrast to my parents’ modest burial sites in a crabgrass-ridden field in Central Montana. Mom’s last year was 1974 and Dad’s was 1967. I've known death from the early age of eight.
The Northern Irish knew death like it occupied their homes. Mortality is a powerful commonality.
By the time we reached our third graveyard, Lurgan’s Shankill Church of Ireland Cemetery, it was dusk and an eerily quiet time to hear the story of Margorie McCall as told to me by my uncle-in-law.
Back in the 1700s, the young woman caught a bad fever. Doctors were reluctant to be physically close to ill patients in case whatever they had was contagious. She was pronounced dead from a distance and hastily buried to prevent the spread of her disease. But she was alive, though in a state of unconsciousness. Grave robbers knew her valuable wedding ring was still on her swollen finger so, they dug up her body that night. When they axed her finger off, she was startled awake. She sat straight up, which scared them away. She walked home to her husband who died from shock at the site of his walking presumed dead wife. In a twist of fate, he was buried in the grave dug for her. Margorie remarried and raised a family with another man. Her grave inscription at Shankill Cemetery now reads, “Lived Once Buried Twice.”
Humor calms the soul even when it's creepy.
I hadn’t anticipated meeting dead Irish relatives and dead local legends, but it’s hard to visit Northern Ireland without being taken in by their heartbreaking stories of conflict and pain.
Still, it was ironic that I couldn’t tell a Protestant from a Catholic by looks alone. Subtle ways to tell them apart were whether they called a certain town Londonderry or Derry. Catholics omit the London. Or which side of town they lived, the one with green flags for Catholic or the other with orange flags for Protestant.
On the night of the Catholic Irish Clan’s gathering, my uncle-in-law handed a guitar to my husband who has played since college. He strummed the instrument while his extended family sang. Goosebumps formed on my arms. It gave me unfettered joy to hear the Celtic voices meld together. It was if they had been harmonizing for years, but they hadn’t. This was my husband’s first visit to Northern Ireland since 1981 when there was considerable unrest.
Musical bonds transcend time and distance.
As the song list transitioned to pop songs like the Beatles’ Love Me Do, I joined in with my American accented vocals.
My Irish uncle smiled his approval. These were my people too.
We had all suffered losses, some in blood, some in family, some in country. It was through these losses that chance gave us an opportunity to meet and celebrate each other through our common love of music. Sometimes we’re connected purely by genetics but other times, when luck is on our side, we’re connected by spirit.
Happy Irish St. Patrick's Day.
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