In Memory of Catherine Jennings: "Sometimes There are No Answers to All the Questions"
By RUTH JENNINGS
My sister loved nature. She would walk the Wicklow hills for hours in wind and rain, sometimes without a coat and her red hair astray. As children, our favourite tree was a hawthorn, circled with daffodils and purple crocuses, and we called it the fairy tree, as many protective hawthorn are called in Ireland, and made up stories in its branches, our jeans streaked green and dun from wood and wet grass.
Our home was backed by an arc of fir and birch in a valley of rolling hills crowned with heather and bog. At night, from the living room window we watched distant tail-lights of planes skim into the orange band and mouth of Dublin city. Those lights seemed a world away to us.
My sister loved to laugh. I remember how much she loved music and to dance. I think about the way her lightness and humour moved people. Her presence in a room turned heads, and her fine taste and sense of style impressed men and women alike.
However, while she impressed people with her beauty and gentleness, with her brightness and laughter, few people ever saw her sadness, her despair at time passed and passing, out of sight, locked behind closed doors. Few people knew how she longed for direction and meaning, and a sense of herself as vital to life.
Perhaps captured as we can be by the surface of things, and the appearances of life, few people notice how sad and tired others are, and how tired and empty my sister had become. And those who did notice could no longer reach her, so far from the present moment she seemed to have strayed.
She had a sharp mind and a love of knowledge, and she questioned life. She wanted to know why life dealt the blows it did, why women were jealous of her, and why the men she loved could not commit and return her love.
She questioned herself endlessly, so she might find one great thing to pour herself into, and become successful and strong in a new Ireland enamoured with the surface of things.
Perhaps as her own words failed her, and the words she might speak to the surface of things eluded her, she stood still in a time and place where no-one could listen, or see, or be still long enough.
Perhaps, in a frantic search to understand the surface and appearance of things, my sister forgot to breathe it all in, and to simply live. On March 12, 2005, my sister Catherine died from suicide.
I remember how much she loved music and she loved to dance. I think of her, and I think of what she loved. And while I turn questions over and over in my mind, I remember how easy it is to stray toward fear and self-doubt, so that I forget to simply look, and simply listen, and simply live.
Sometimes there are no answers to all the questions. Uncertainties that come and go, come and go. Sometimes, when I slow down enough, in the space between the “no more” of the past and the “not yet” of the future, there is an emptiness, and I thank God, because it is there I hold my sister, tenderly the light and wind and rain in the tree above me is a reminder and it is enough.
|
