Can what looks like running away from grief and sadness actually be a way to heal?
In “The Slow Road North,” writer Rosie Schaap chronicles her circuitous route from spending most of her life as a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker to finding herself settling down far away in a small town in Northern Ireland.
Schaap, an established journalist, teacher and occasional bartender in Brooklyn with a cozy apartment she’d lived in for decades, seemed set as a New York lifer.
But she is dealt a crushing loss when her husband dies of cancer in 2010, leaving her a widow at 39. A little more than a year later, her mother, with whom she had a complicated relationship, dies, too. Faced with conflicted feelings that she isn’t dealing with her grief in the “right” way, she begins to ache for change.
Schapp has a longtime fascination with Ireland and its poets, writers and history, and after returning there over several years, she decides to attend a creative writing program in Belfast in 2019. She soon settles in Glenarm, a coastal town north of Belfast.
Facing loads of skepticism — from her friends wondering why she would give up her perfect Brooklyn apartment, from Irish neighbors wondering why an American would move to Glenarm, and even her own fear that she might be running away from her problems — Schaap dedicates herself to becoming involved with Glenarm’s community. She finds solace in the people, the countryside, and establishes her place among new friends. She even embarks on a new love.
Peppering her own story with snippets of Irish poetry, folktales, colorful descriptions of small-town characters, and the history of Irish travesties like the potato famine of the 1800s and the later decades of the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles, Schaap’s memoir details how Glenarm and Northern Ireland’s nuanced relationship with grief helps her face her own.
“Moving would not ‘fix’ me, but another way of living, here, in this quiet and healing place, might start to heal me, too,” she writes.
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