In May of 2022, my adult daughter and I traveled to Ireland on for our first post-Covid mother-daughter excursion. We began in Dublin, then rented a car and spent ten days meandering through the countryside taking leisurely cliffside strolls, listening to live music, perusing local markets, and drinking plenty of cold Guiness before ending our trip in Shannon in western Ireland.

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Wanting to squeeze in one last adventure on our last evening, we drove from our hotel to nearby Burren National Park. Like all the other drives we had taken on our trip, this one took longer than expected, the road narrowing into almost a single lane as we dodged rock walls and oncoming traffic in our rental car. After several winding miles, we finally came to a small parking lot, and our GPS indicated we had arrived.

We had read that the park had over thirty-five hundred acres of limestone, shrubs, woodlands, cliffs, wetlands, semi-permanent lakes, and so on. At times, allegedly, it was bustling with people and activity, but on that early spring evening, only a couple of other cars remained. As we parked and got out, we realized the setting was more noteworthy for what it wasn’t than what it was.

Out Onto the Limestone

The landscape was eerie, silent, desolate, as if we had been teleported from the town bustling with hordes of exuberant hurling fans (hurling being, as I understand it, a Gaelic sport somewhat similar to football) and dropped on another planet. In the surrounding valley, shrubs covered the fields, but just beyond that, mounds of whitish-gray or grayish-white limestone spilled like glaciers across the hillsides. The starkness of the land brought to mind the Badlands of South Dakota, where prairie dogs are as abundant as the white squirrels in my hometown in North Carolina, which is to say they are everywhere.

The air was cooler here than it had been in town, and the wind had a bite that was not exactly spring-like despite the fact that it was early June. Pulling on our jackets, we studied the trail map by the side of the road and decided to begin with Knockaunroe Turlough. The flat path meandered for a mile or so through meadows and over rock before looping back to the parking lot. It was pretty but hardly the adventure we had been seeking.

It was pretty but hardly the adventure we had been seeking.

If we wanted to see the large sheaths of limestone up close, we needed to take the longer trail on the other side of the parking lot. However, the sky looked dark. A storm? Dusk? Maybe both. We had thought we had left with plenty of daylight to spare, but now it seemed like we were cutting it close. Still, in two more days, my daughter would be back working in New York, and I would be back teaching in North Carolina.

I didn’t know when I would see her again. Perhaps that was dramatic. We would likely see each other in a few months, but we weren’t leaving together, and after months living together during the pandemic, months where it had seemed as if no time had passed at all, as if she were a child again and I was twenty-five, and things might always be just so, the two of us indefinitely hanging out doing mother-daughter things like running in the forest and eating ice cream and watching movies, this woman-child of mine now had a new job and a new life of her own. And rightly so. And praise be for her joy. And praise be for all the joy she had brought me. And oh, my heart. All of that all at once.

The Last Bit of Light

Finally, in the spirit of wringing the last bit of light out of our trip, we decided to take Slieve Carran, the two-and-a-half-kilometer trail that looped through open limestone pavement before passing through woods of oak, ash, and hazel. This route, we had read, included a holy well that had been the site of pilgrimages since St. Colman MacDuagh had established a hermitage here in the seventh century. I wasn’t sure what a holy well entailed, but I was curious, and I wanted to see the limestone up close. Plus, we could always turn back if we thought we couldn’t do the whole trail before dark.

Heading out on the gravel road, we followed the signs until the road became a dirt path, then a dense thicket. Finally, we emerged on a wide sheath of limestone. Frommer’s guide to the park had described the limestone as “a kind of moonscape.” Sure enough, the rock resembled the moon with its pockmarked surface, only here, grass and wildflowers grew in the dips and crevices.

Should We Turn Back?

As we silently explored, the thick gray clouds that had been skirting the sky moved in, coloring the world gray—the ground below us, the sky above. It was spectacularly beautiful, but the beauty was stark and strange and oddly unsettling. We had also read that Burren was home to weasels, ermine, badgers, and birds, but we saw nothing from here—no cars, no people, no signs of other life whatsoever. Wind whipped our hair as we leapt over the holes and surveyed the empty fields below.

And so we stayed longer, drinking in the rising mist, the surreal otherworldliness.

“Maybe we should turn back,” I said.

“Maybe,” my daughter agreed.

“It’s a little creepy, don’t you think?”

“It is. And so, so beautiful.”

And so we stayed longer, drinking in the rising mist, the surreal otherworldliness. Then, leaping over the crevices, we made our way off the rock and back onto the trail, where the scenery looked more like planet earth, and the wind calmed to a gentle breeze, and our previous apprehension began to seem silly.

“Let’s go a little further,” one of us said.

The Holy Well

So we set off in search of the holy well. Soon we found ourselves standing by a sign marking the path. Next to it a wooden box was labeled Take a coin. Leave a coin. As if we had walked into a fairy tale. It seemed both odd and perfectly fitting. I wasn’t sure about the point of the coins—to count visitors? An act of faith or goodwill? —but neither of us had any money, so we turned down the path without whatever protection the coins might have afforded us.

Just when I was wondering aloud how we would know when we got to the sacred site, we came to a clearing. There, the faintest trickle of water beneath the earth belied the presence of a water source, but there was no visible spring, which, I supposed, was the thing that made it holy. Just beyond us, a rustling in the trees alerted us to a cow, its thick Oreo flank brushing against tree bark as it ambled away. The whole scene brought to mind Into the Woods and Jack and the Beanstalk. A magical cow. A magical forest. A magical elixir.

Mementos paying homage to the long dead and recently dead lined the rocks by the water.

The woods were cast in the surreal glow of twilight, and to our left, above the spring basin, rows of prayer flags swayed between the trees. A drinking ladle hung from a hook on one tree trunk, and mementos paying homage to the long dead and recently dead lined the rocks by the water: hair ties, newspaper clippings, crucifixes, and dozens of wrinkled and yellowed photos—babies in christening gowns, young women in wedding gowns, young men in army uniforms, old men and old women standing on beaches or in fields or on city sidewalks. So much loss. So much grief, the kind you gathered up and carried with you for a lifetime, a sight that brought to mind Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life.” In the essay, originally published in The Sun and the basis for the bestselling memoir Wild, Strayed challenges what she calls America’s “democracy of grief”—the notion that all grief is the same, all losses equal.

“Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist,” she says. “Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.”

Who is on Your Boat?

When my friend April was dying of ovarian cancer a few years before, I had recalled Strayed’s words wrong, or perhaps I remembered them the way I needed to, a way that was not incorrect, only inaccurate. In my recollection, eight people boarded the hypothetical boat. Limiting the number to eight was tough but doable, unpleasant but survivable. However, when I went back and reread the passage, I was shocked to find the number of people allotted was not eight but half of eight: four. At once, my answer was both clear and devastating. On my boat, I would only be able to take my husband and my three children.

All grief was not the same. All love was not the same.

Strayed was right. All grief was not the same. All love was not the same. Still, since it was a hypothetical situation, as April got sicker and sicker, I bargained hypothetically. Say, for example, my husband got to choose four people as well, and he had already chosen our children. Could I then bring my parents, my brother and brother-in-law, or perhaps my children’s loved ones? Then again, what if my three children had already chosen their partners, their uncles, and their grandparents? Could I then choose four people who were not my family? Could I then choose my friends? Could I then choose April?

This is how unreasonable my reasoning went. I needed to find a loophole in the hypothetical natural order, a scenario in which I could save April. Thinking this way, I knew, was a sign that my brain was misfiring, that I was losing touch with reality. And yet, much like Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking, my irrational thoughts persisted. And later, after April was gone, I was left with only this: despite all my bargaining and pleading and negotiating, my boat had not been big enough to save her.

Death in the Woods

There in the woods, April’s death was not the only one I carried with me, but it was the freshest, the most vivid in that moment as I imagined all the other grieving souls who had made this pilgrimage with photos peeled from wallets or Bibles or frames, carried over oceans and mountains and valleys and skies and placed here as a tribute, a memorial, yes, but also a pathway back through the desolate moonscape to the land of the living.

“You don’t honor the dead by burying the living,” a friend once told me.

Perhaps the people who brought these photos had heard this too. Perhaps they had learned how to hold their sorrow close and let it go all at once, to move through the world forever changed but not undone by grief. Perhaps they had left their heaviest sorrow here at a holy well in a spooky and mystical forest. Perhaps that was ultimately what was asked of all of us, to keep living in spite of it all, to keep moving toward joy even still, even so.

Both Haunted and Entranced

“What’s it going to be like to die?” April had asked her friends once.

“I don’t know,” we had said. “You will have to tell us.”

A few days later, at the very end, she said, “It’s so sparkly. I didn’t know it would be so sparkly.”

Joy, amazement, sorrow, and wonder all converged in April’s final days, just like they did here, just like they do now, one continual loop, world without end. Now, in the forest, the only sound was dripping water, and the light grew stranger by the minute—gold and glowing, deepening even as it dimmed.

The light grew stranger by the minute—gold and glowing, deepening even as it dimmed.

Regardless of the time on my watch, soon it would be nightfall, and my daughter and I would rush back down the gravel road with darkness pressing in on us, tumbleweeds rolling through the air. For now, though, we were still in the grove, still protected by spectral cows and mysterious springs.

Here, where the line between the dead and the living was oh, so very thin, it was possible to keep your loved ones safe, to hold them close even as they were leaving, even after they were gone. This place was—I felt it in my bones—both haunted and enchanted. It was possible, I knew now, for a place to be both at once, for a person to be both at once, and as I knelt and touched the water, then placed my damp hand on my forehead, I was both the giver and the recipient of the blessing—the blesser and the blessed.

*Originally published (in slightly different form) in The Joy Document by Jennifer McGaha (Broadleaf Books, 2024). Reprinted with permission.