American author and journalist Rosie Schaap was just 39-years old when her husband Frank died from a “very rare” form of oesophageal cancer. The couple had been told of Frank’s diagnosis only two years earlier.
Her husband’s final days were spent in hospice care in New York, with Schaap by his side. “It was Valentine’s day, 15 years ago now,” Schaap tells The Irish Times Women’s Podcast, recalling the last time she saw her husband.
“We spent the day together and watched the Winter Olympics... and then the following morning, I thought I’d go home to quickly feed our cats, shove some laundry in the machine and by the time I got back to the hospice, Frank was gone”.
Schaap tells podcast presenter Róisín Ingle that not being there for Frank when he died, overwhelmed her with guilt and sadness. These feelings haunted her “for a very, very long time”. Then, just over a year later, as she was battling loneliness and the stigma of widowhood, her mother died following a long illness.
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At home in New York dealing with her double grief, Schaap felt she was surrounded by an unwillingness to talk openly about death and loss, which made the healing process all the more difficult. However, during her many trips on writing assignments to Ireland, she was met by a very different approach to sorrow and mourning.
“I found an openness to talking about death and loss here in Ireland, that I hadn’t really found in New York. People didn’t seem as shy of talking about it, or at least looking me in the eye,” she says.
Although Schaap says she has “always loved Ireland”, having first come to the country as an undergrad in 1991, the writer could never have imagined herself living in a rural village in Northern Ireland, miles away from the bustling city she once called home. But that’s exactly where she found herself a decade after her husband’s death.
“How did I wind up here? That’s such a good question that I wrote a whole book about it,” she laughs. The book in question is The Slow Road North, part memoir, part social history, which tells the story of the solace she found in her new home of Glenarm in Co Antrim.
“What’s a nice girl from Brooklyn doing in a place like this? It’s just one of those things, when you connect with a place and you can’t exactly explain what it is, but it’s a feeling, people, landscape, just so much of it clicked with me”.
You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
