Of Celtic Charms

I just finished reading Cathy Cash Spellman’s “So Many Partings”.

It is one of the most beautiful things I have read in quite a while. It spans almost three generations and uf. The tales of love, life and loss. They fill me up with this strange aged grief of how much a person goes through in one life time. You are born wanting love and then you’re fierce in your youth and then placid in late adulthood because life has done so much already.

This book, especially the ending, has this Celtic charm in it. Like some ancient magic whose secrets are whispered in the winds quietly and tumultuously to those who hear the wind in silence.  It makes me want to cry, but silently and with peace in my heart that life will go on as it wishes, with sorrow and happiness side by side. Makes me wonder, what will I go through in my life time? How many times will a piece of the rebellion against life be stripped away painfully, until only peaceful acceptance at the mundane high’s and low’s of life remain?

I loved it. I loved it all. When Diedre dies and a piece of Tom’s soul is stripped. When he is unable to be a parent to his kids in Diedre’s absence, and they become all that he was not. I especially loved this part because it made me question if Tom had been there for his kids like he was for his granddaughter, would they have turned out different? No doubt they would have. They would have grown up to be like him had he been there to show himself to them. It’s this guilt that stayed with Tom too. And then Megan. It was good to see how getting love, care and attention can make a child what Megan was (Would Tom’s own children would have turned out to be the same had they received the same love, care and concern? Maybe.).

I loved the part in the end where Megan decides that she needs to discover herself before she could love Jack. Absolutely loved it. It was a sign of a child raised in a healthy environment – self-assured, confident and she loved herself enough to want to know herself better. That bit was beautifully written, especially the part where she knows that until she knew herself, she would never be able to love Jack properly because she would have taken himself into her and she wouldn’t know her own worth, which is why she will be unhappy and will always fear Jack leaving her. So for the sake of loving someone completely, she decided to know herself completely. That was beautiful.

Another thing I noticed was this gradual trend of relationships from old to the modern era. Relationships were tad bit more romanticized in the stories of the previous generation. The modern love story, like that of Megan and Jack, was almost practical and focused on realization of self-worth before giving yourself to someone else; Tom and Billy’s relationship was focused on friendship, love which comes from having lived and experienced life together, understanding and being a source of comfort for each other; Mary and Thaddeus’s relationship focused on the willingness to sacrifice, compromise and growing to love each other eventually after having lived together. I liked these modern calmer portrayals of relationships as compared to the tumultuous passion derived relationships like that of Mary and Michael Hartington.

It’s been quite a while since I got absorbed into words. I’m glad I could feel the beauty of it again through this book.