Somehow, I neglected to post this here, well back after my trip to Ireland. So, I post it now...
Bringing Home Mary Kennedy Maher.
Waterford, Ireland. A pilgrimage. Ancestral. Following a bloodline route, coursing across a mythic land. A ritual with dirt and water and spirit. It leads to a cove, like a womb carved out from solid thighs of stone, cliffs rising up like knees, the body of a woman lying open to the ocean, ancient waters flowing into her and out of her, into her and out of her. For eons. An unending mothering.
It was here that I symbolically brought home Mary Kennedy Maher. Here, at the edge of the ocean, the oldest of all Grandmothers - “Seanmháithreacha” - is where I returned my Great Great Great Grandmother, to the sacred land and holy waters of her birth. Primordial. Her beginning. Here, where she, and all of her Grandmothers before her, women made of sea water and stone, like blood and bone, were made stronger by the power of the waves, the fury of the wind, and the hardship of hunger.
I returned to this place all that I have of Mary, which isn’t much. The dirt from her grave. The history of her story. And, there, beneath calling gulls, my hair wild, in salt spray, heart swelled, among rocks rolled smooth, I channeled the belly-born mournful incantation of the keening song-sounds. Soul-bound to her, and all the grandmothers before her. And, the ones after. I cried for this far-back woman of my spear line, this woman who left her home, the arms of Mother Ireland, exiled by starvation. She abandoned her life in order to live. The irony of travelling aboard a coffin ship across the great waters to do it. A woman who found an Irishman, a tether to her home, in a foreign land, and married him. This mother who carried babies inside her body beside loss and longing and great courage. Birthing ten that I know of, my own Great Great Grandmother among them, and maybe more. Because death had a way of often taking babies. I cried for this woman I never knew, would never see, who died 57 years before I became her progeny. Descendancy. Hail Mary, full of grace.
I symbolically buried her, buried her grave dirt, whispered her story, in the intertidal zone, its own kind of liminal space, beside a mass of stone, like a monolith, bairneachs clinging to the dark surface like constellations of stars. Bairneachs, like reliquaires holding the stories of the ancients, the stories of My People. Bairneachs, once the poor people’s food. A means of survival when the great hunger washed over the island. Bairneachs holding fast to the rock, whose harvest must be swift, for forewarned they tighten their grip becoming unmoveable. I found their presence auspicious. I would forever hold tight to this Ancestral matriarch, whilst also setting her free.
So, I stood on wet stone, the wind whipping, and watched Spirit in motion, as Mary Kennedy Maher set sail, at last, over sand and through foam, past weed and beyond whale, to the far side of the horizon, and across the Nine Waves of Water to the Lands of Undying.
Her journey over, my pilgrimage complete.