EPILOGUE

NOT FAR FROM MY STACK of book club books, in another section of my bookshelf, is an old red cloth-bound volume from my father’s books of poetry, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats that came to me when we emptied my mother’s bookshelves in late 2014. One day last spring I opened it for the first time and discovered that it was published in 1950 in London. I’m guessing that my father bought it during his trip to England that year when he went to Little Gidding for the first time. Several pages have the corners turned down and the book first fell open at the poem “Under Ben Bulben,” revealing the lines that my father quoted so often:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Those lines are the epitaph on Yeats’s tombstone and they are the lines we said over my father shortly after he died. In my mind I was back where my own journey had started, by my father’s grave in the cemetery where the sunken earth was awaiting a marker. I recognized the connections between Eliot’s “Little Gidding” and this poem, with their ruminations on death and journeys. Until then, I had always imagined that the horseman was the horseman of death, and that the poet was asking to be spared. But another interpretation came to me that day: the horseman is fear. I had found some of the courage my father wanted me to find. I had created meaning with men who represented the very thing I feared. And, in a strange way, they had guided me back to a better understanding of my father.