THE SLOW ROAD NORTH: How I Found Peace in an Unlikely Landby Rosie Schaap
It’s a phenomenon familiar to hospice workers, nurses, and priests that the dying often take their last breaths after their loved ones have left—to get a cup of coffee, to shower, to catch a few precious minutes of sleep. (My own father died while I was getting a sandwich.) Some say it’s because they’re held in this world by our voices, hearing being the last sense we have. When we leave the room, they drift away. But the effects of not being present for the death of a loved one can be devastating.
Rosie Schaap’s third book, “The Slow Road North,” is a story of loss and unexpected solace set in Glenarm, a coastal town in Northern Ireland. The memoir begins in Brooklyn on Valentine’s Day 2010, when she and her husband of seven years, Frank, are reading Chaucer together, according to their tradition. But that year, Frank, 42, dies in a hospice. The next morning, while he is asleep, an exhausted Schaap makes the short drive home to feed the cats and ends up napping on their bed. She wakes up in a panic and races back to the hospital; “I missed him by a few minutes.”
Frank’s death sets off a flood of loss. A year later, as she struggles with the loneliness and stigma of widowhood, she watches her “reckless,” sometimes caustic mother die as well, after a long illness. Schaap has not forgiven herself for eventually leaving Frank’s side—“the arrow of my bitterness was aimed not at God, not at other people, not even at death: it was aimed at me, and I alone was its target”—and “for all the fear and difficulty that had defined our relationship,” she writes, “I could not bear the thought of her dying alone, too.”
When she discovered Glenarm on a reporting trip in 2016, Schaap was drawn to its almost mythical history, its pub stories of murdered wolves and “cunning” fairies, its relics of St Valentine, its literal monuments to grief. From the moment she first arrived, Glenarm had “a feeling, a spirit, a strong sense of place that I succumbed to.”
