5,000 Years Long
At Newgrange on the winter solstice, the light only stays in the cavern for seventeen minutes before fading into nothing. The darkness before the light comes is blacker than the insides of your eyelids. It is a prehistoric darkness. A before-time darkness.
* * *
One of my earliest memories is lying along the smooth plane of my father’s outstretched leg. I clung to it as he lifted me high into the air.
* * *
No one knows exactly why Newgrange was built. The only thing that scholars are sure of is that it was used to celebrate the winter solstice. Midwinter: the shortest day and longest night of the year. It is the spiritual sister to Stonehenge, sitting in the Boyne river valley of the Irish midlands. It is an ancient burial tomb, a geographical marker, a temple.
I will be 21 when I arrive.
* * *
When I was in the fourth grade, my mother bundled me up and put me into the backseat of our van. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re going to look for Daddy.” Her palms bracketed my face.
We left all the lights on in the house, and the empty rooms rang with the noise of us closing the big wooden door as we walked out. She drove us down to the neighborhood bar of our small Northern California town where my father’s car sat at the curb—quiet, innocuous, slightly guilty. He came out of the bar and jumped (and by jumped I mean stumble-fell) into the driver’s seat of the beat-up red Mustang and hit the car in front of him.
Luckily, the car he hit was ours.
* * *
On the drive to Newgrange, everything is green. The sides of the highways, the lush fields. Lambs dot the hills. Rain storms rush over our car only to disappear as we drive through and away from them. The lanes are narrow and windy, and everyone drives on the wrong side of the road. At one point we accidentally back into a bush and hope it doesn’t leave a scratch. I sit on the left side of the car in the passenger seat and grip the windowsill and yell “Curb!” every time I think my dad is driving too close to the edge.
* * *
I go home for Halloween my sophomore year of college. My father’s mother dies on November 1st. All Saint’s Day. It demolishes him.
* * *
Newgrange itself shivers with mystery, but getting to the structure is prosaic. Bland. It is like every museum you’ve ever been to. Somebody (a friendly Irish woman in a vest) puts a sticker on you and shows you the gift shop, the cafeteria. You get into a bus with tourists: other people who have carried luggage through noxious airports and spent the day with a crick in their neck from shitty hotel beds. We’ve all come this far to see something that is older than William Shakespeare and penicillin and the ides of March. Unthinkably old. Just unthinkable.
* * *
My father and I are almost identical in some ways. We both like to make people laugh. Sometimes at the wrong time or the wrong people. Sometimes I hear his turns of phrase come out of my mouth, so obvious I can almost see them in the air. We look the same, our small upturned noses and brown skin immediately identifying us as kin. On occasion my mom will look into my face and say that she can’t see herself there at all. But then, other times, she’ll laugh and say that I’ve inherited her weak chin.
We think that we are smart, my father and I. Maybe smarter than everyone. We have large feet and large bones and, at times, large demands.
We like to be in control.
That’s also where we differ. When my father can’t be fully in control, then he’d rather be fully out of it.
* * *
The tour guide at Newgrange has a soft Irish brogue, and she looks like my first grade teacher and reminds me of my mother. I like her immediately. She never once says “umm” or “ugh” or stumbles over her presentation. She wears a flat cap and a flowered scarf over her uniform vest.
As she talks, we stare up at the looming dome of stone that is Newgrange. The structure is composed of a disc of grass-covered rock held up by a circular wall of colorless rock. Inside there is a labyrinthine stone passageway that winds to the center.
She tells us how we will climb into this piece of earth and watch light wane into nothingness. She tells us how, when they unearthed Newgrange, all the stones that circle it were flat on their backs. As if they had been designed to fall down. As if ancient people had predicted that one day this building would be buried by time and earth.
* * *
It is two weeks before Thanksgiving, just over a year since my grandmother’s death, when my mother has to call an ambulance to our house. My father is long past crashing cars.
It has been over a week since he started and my father’s gums will not stop bleeding and he will not stop drinking. I am walking home from a friend’s house, where we had been eating licorice and intending to watch a movie but really just gossiping, when I call my mom to check in. No matter why I’m calling, I hear the potential for terror, for pain strung out across the phone line.
It takes the three blocks between my friend’s house and mine for her to work up the courage to tell me the news.
* * *
When you enter there is a hole above your head. It is called a roofbox. The light will appear through this shaft when it comes calling through the darkness. To get to the center of the structure you walk at a tilt, uphill, through a series of shrinking and expanding walkways bracketed by stone on all sides. By the time you get to the center, that box is parallel to your feet.
My father and I are both six feet or over. If you’re our size, once you enter, you can’t raise your head until you reach the center of the structure. To get there, while trying not to rub the old fragile walls too much, you have to bend and squeeze, duck and twist, hold your hands out in front of you. At times you are almost crawling.
* * *
The whole year between my grandmother’s death and my father’s hospitalization is like a sickness in the hollow of my chest. In the summer there are times when I don’t go home. Sometimes I go home and wish I had not. Sometimes I take angry walks through the neighborhood. Sometimes I cry discreetly and wipe the tears away before they reach my chin and feel more disappointed than I’ve ever felt. Sometimes my mom is with me, sometimes not. I hate my father so much that only anger pours out of my mouth whenever I talk to him, so I stop talking to him. At times I am almost crawling.
* * *
When it is our turn to bend and squeeze into the cavern at the center of Newgrange I turn back to my dad every other moment, trying to offer reassurances I’m not quite sure of. “It gets bigger after this,” I say. “This is the worst part.” “We’re almost there.” He gets claustrophobic. I don’t want him to be afraid.
* * *
Newgrange has seen everything I’ve ever lived and more. What does it feel like to be 5,000 years old? To let time roll through you with hushed exhalations? To feel love and heartbreak and friends and babies and old people smelling of talcum powder and tour guides who love history and people from Spain pass through you?
* * *
It is in that liminal summer between high school and college that I have to have my gallbladder removed. I’m eating guacamole at a Fourth of July party and then suddenly I’m so sick I miss the fireworks because I can’t stop throwing up.
My dad sleeps in my hospital room all five nights. He is snoring so loudly from his medications that I try to throw a pillow from my bed to wake him up. It doesn’t reach. The day before my surgery I wake up crying and can’t stop. He asks, why am I afraid? Why am I crying? I say that I don’t want to die while I’m under, that I’m afraid of oblivion. Being put to sleep and not waking up. He tells me I won’t die. He takes my hand and holds it until I go through the surgery doors and he has to let go. He does not want me to be afraid.
* * *
The day my parents drive me back down to school, two and a half months before my father will be so lost that only the white lights of a hospital room will be able to wake him from his pain, he still has too much alcohol in his system to drive. My mother drives him in one car and I drive the other. I think his molecules must be breaking down, the very atoms of his body, committing a slow, slow death. I think he must want it that way—dying without any of the action, without any of the responsibility. Then I think, cruelly, I wish he would hurry up and kill himself. If that’s what it’s going to be then it’d be less drawn out, less painful. I regret the thought immediately, but not as much as I should.
* * *
The summer after my junior year of college, while on our trip to Europe—the one with Newgrange and the lambs and the twisting roads—he insists, as he has done since I was small, on sleeping in the bed closest to the door so he can be the first line of defense in case someone breaks in.
* * *
It is the summer before our trip, and I have to have surgery again. The day before, my father is solemnly getting drunk in his office chair.
He looks almost serene, but I think he is closer to unspeakably sad or gone.
The next day, when I roll out of bed earlier than the sun to be sliced open, he is there. He hugs me, and I press my face to his chest and feel the weft of his sweater against my cheek as I inhale one breath of his deodorant before I pull away. He sits quietly with my mother for more than four hours while sickness is being taken out of me.
He drives us home afterward.
* * *
We travel for twelve days together across England and Ireland. We miss two flights. We give up on trying to get to Barcelona. He is six months newly sober. Before this trip, I have not talked to my father in person for more than fifteen minutes in two years and only about money and toilet paper and the weather.
* * *
I arrive in London at our hotel before he does. He knocks on the door of our room. I open it and he is standing there in his long black coat and black hat that he insists is a fedora (it’s a Stetson).
It feels as if it has been years and years since I’ve seen him.
He sets his bags down on the ground. I smile.
* * *
The four shortest days of the year are December 18th through 21st. On the last day the people of Newgrange would twist and bend, maybe even drag themselves, into the cavernous space in the middle. They would sit down, and the morning light would come slipping in, wary and tentative, still so raw and fresh from the longest and darkest winter night.
Miranda Jetter (@MirandaJetter) is a writer currently based in Washington, D.C. When she's not reading, writing, or serving food to hungry people, she's trying to see as much East Coast foliage as she can.