When it’s the end of August, I usually gain a sense of empowerment.  Fall is coming with its new school year, crisp ideas, and full plans.  Fall is coming, oh so soon, with its determination to last through winter.  The end of August brings me to a state of bolstered can-do.

Perhaps this is why I became stuck in the last few pages of Frank McCourt’s ‘Tis this evening.  From pages 350-367, McCourt narrates the death of his first marriage, mother, and father.  At death’s house, there is little to be determined about.  It is all that one can do to simply be in the house for a spell, and then leave.

I knew McCourt’s marriage was ending because the first sentence of that chapter read, “Before Maggie was born I dreamed of being a Kodak daddy.”  What follows is a list of McCourt’s memories of early days with his daughter.  These may as well serve as a clothesline of sweet dresses drying in a setting sun, something you might see in a painting.  They are small moments, pleasant and gratifying in the emptiness of a dissolving marriage.  McCourt lets go for good.

When his mother dies, confused and torn from her purgatory life, McCourt sits on his bed with a cup of tea.  “When Malachy calls at three in the morning he doesn’t have to say the words.  All I can do is make a cup of tea the way Mam did at unusual times and sit up in bed in a dark darker than darkness knowing by now they’ve moved her to a colder place, that gray fleshly body that carried seven of us into the world.  I sip my hot tea for the comfort because there are feelings I didn’t expect.  I thought I’d know the grief of the grown man, the fine high mourning, the elegiac sense to suit the occasion.  I didn’t know I’d feel like a child cheated.  I’m sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won’t come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.  For once, Mam, my bladder is not near my eye and why isn’t it?”

And when his father who abandoned him dies far off in Ireland at the Royal Victoria Hospital, McCourt goes to his funeral because his mother would have said it was something you only have one chance at doing–which is something I’ve read from other Irish authors.  And he went with that formal feeling, but no pain like Emily Dickinson said there would be.  Another swell of images, of morning fireside talks and begging at the St. Vincent de Paul Society, of poverty and longing.  True things.  Things far off from me.

So far off and yet so a part of my soul that I laid my head on the couch and meditated, which is something I generally reserve for Holy Books.  There was a deep stuckness.  What am I to derive from a sense of connection to an ocean of sorrowful tears trapped around my heart?  To a marriage lost to differences?  To a mother confused and giving up?  To a father absent and pretending not to be?  The world is full of small oceans around hearts.

I am assured there is an outlet for my tears to follow and water some good soil to produce good fruit.   It opens from time to time and it closes from time to time so that I might know of my need for it.

Even at the end of August, especially at the end of August, there is need to be reminded of my sorrowful state.  To be reminded how my heart requires room to swell and burst and let go of its ocean.  Before the bolstering of fall, there must first be a final storm of summer.

*Into the fire was thrown II Samuel 12: 23 this morning: But now he is dead.  Why should I fast?  Can I bring him back again?  I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”