Day of love and lovers, of hearts and roses red! Is Geoffrey Chaucer, the great poet-pilgrim of medieval England, to blame for this? Some say so: that it was he who transformed the ordinary enough feast day of an ordinary enough saint (what business does a saint have with all this hearts-and-roses stuff, anyway?) into a festival of courtly love. The association of February 14 with romance may have hatched about halfway into Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” with these lines: For this was on Seynt Valentines day/Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make. Saint Valentine’s Day—when every bird comes to choose his mate.
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On Valentine’s Day, 2010, I lugged all five pounds and four ounces of my old college copy of The Riverside Chaucer to the room in a Brooklyn, New York, hospice where Frank, my mate of thirteen years, husband for seven, lay dying. But he did not lie, really: he revolved with effort to one side, flipped sharply on the other like a fish pitched ashore, and then, with resignation, rotated himself flat onto his back again, back to where he’d started. And again. He squeezed the white plastic button that permitted him to activate the pump that pushed opioids into his bloodstream when he needed them. He was forty-two.
There was little relief left for his bones and joints, his limbs and ligaments, but his mind was still alight with curiosity, still glimmering, more votive than bonfire now. His imagination, and that pulsing knot of muscle that is Saint Valentine’s emblem: they were still active, and he was still yearning, even adrift on a plain of poppies. So, he—we—persisted in marking the day with our yearly tradition: reading “The Parliament of Fowls” aloud, each taking three stanzas before yielding to the other. If Chaucer really was behind all this, we had agreed long ago to surrender the day, or at least some good portion of it, to him, with pleasure. We liked to think we weren’t corny (ha!)—especially Frank, who was always much cooler than me, a pretty low bar he cleared like a high jumper. He was an indie-rock, punk-rock kind of guy. I was an unreconstructed late-model folkie hippie.
He wanted to go on reading because he wanted to go on living. He was not one of those people who say they are ready for death.
Frank outstretched an arm to reach for his glasses on the nightstand and put them on: professorial but not prim, smart, with muddy-creek brown-green frames and glass trapezoids for lenses. An artist friend who had a day job at an optometrist’s helped him pick them out. (I kept them for a very long time. They were one of Frank’s totems, like the cast-iron skillet he cooked with almost every day for, what, fifteen years? Twenty? Since before we met. I kept that for a long time, too).
I held the Chaucer book open in front of him; he did not have the strength to support it. Neither of us could remember how long we’d been doing this, reading this long poem together on this day. Neither of us felt much but contempt for Valentine’s Day— commercial! sexist! nonsense!—before the tradition began. I’m a Capricorn, he was a Capricorn, and Capricorns don’t do that sort of thing (he’d cringe if he heard me say this—because Capricorns don’t do this sort of thing, either). He was an English professor; I wanted to be a poet; this was the kind of thing that could happen. And if any time was the right time to perform our most insufferably earnest selves, without shame, this was it.
But even reading—high on his list of loves, up there with our cats, cheese, punk rock, France, baseball, me—had become difficult to focus on. Still, he wanted to go on reading because he wanted to go on living. He was not one of those people who say they are ready for death. Can those people be serious? There were still too many books Frank wanted to read.
“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” I started, then caught my breath. How had I not thought about this first line, Chaucer’s Middle English version of Hippocrates’s ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short), after so many readings of the poem?
Life is short: there, in that hospice room, it wasn’t like we needed a medieval English poet or an ancient Greek physician to remind us so. But after almost two years of the ministrations of oncologists, endocrinologists, gastroenterologists, and surgeons; emergency room doctors, intensive care nurses, chemotherapy and radiation and PET scan technicians; a lay Jesuit chaplain-philosopher, a hugging saint from India, and a purveyor of medical marijuana—there was room for Chaucer and Hippocrates, too, and they took their places, as rightful as anyone else’s, among all of those angels of life and death.
We sprinted—life is short—through the poem’s long prefatory warmup, then slowed down to luxuriate in Chaucer’s catalog of birds (The peacock, with his angels feathers bright! The popinjay, full of delicacy!) and the self-conscious enchantments of stanzas 53 and 54. What should I say? the poet asks at the start of 53, and I imagine two fingers pulling at a pointed beard, I infer a silent hmm. Stanza 54 begins with But to the point, and the reader wonders: Wait, there’s a point? And does it matter?
“Pull yourself together, man,” I said, to Chaucer, not to Frank, but to make Frank laugh, which he tried to do: a wrinkle tugged at the corners of his lips, at the edges of his drowsy blue eyes.
Soon came the single moment I love most: when the goddess Nature herself kisses with tenderness the beak of the lady eagle she holds on her hand, and who is central to the rest of the poem’s action. Frank got this far maybe only to indulge me—even with the pain, the bullying pain that would not be subdued, even with the drugs, he remembered it’s my favorite part. But then, he had to sleep, or at least try to sleep. Maybe we would read the rest later. Maybe we wouldn’t: art is long.
*
In the afternoon, Frank sighed and rumbled in and out of sleep, while I sat in the chair beside his bed. I thought about him, and his suffering, and I considered the poignancy of his optimism, which hadn’t flagged until these final few days. If anything good can be said about his cancer, it’s that it hadn’t caused excruciating pain until it spread to his pancreas not long before he died. He had taught his last class only yesterday, online, a little loopy with meds, but he wanted to be with his students. We were both teachers when we met.
I thought about our marriage: when it was good, and when it was not. I thought about my mother, who was also dying, but not so soon: she had been dying for a long time. I thought about bills. And changing the cat litter. And taking out the recycling. And I thought about Ireland—because it was there, long ago, that I met Saint Valentine.
I made my first trip to Ireland in the summer of 1991, when I was twenty, because of another poet: William Butler Yeats. I wanted to study his poetry in Dublin, where he was from. But lectures at Trinity College tumbled swiftly from the top of my priority list; within a week, they foundered far below the other pleasures that had revealed themselves to me: long afternoons and evenings at my favorite pub, and another blue-eyed man I loved, who had had cancer, too.
One afternoon, when I’d strayed only blocks from my usual circuit, the terrain grew unfamiliar. I kept walking: unknown streets were interesting streets. I stopped in front of a grim, gray building, as practical and unadorned as a small fort. It was Whitefriar Street Church, dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel—the Virgin Mary in her persona as patroness of the Carmelite Order.
Curiosity drew me into its sanctuary. Much better inside: pale as thick cream, cool, calm, clean, quiet. And, there to one side as I walked in the direction of the altar: a shrine to Saint Valentine. What was he doing here? In a marble alcove in the wall, above a side altar, his likeness in statue stood barefoot, draped in red vestments, clutching in one hand a crocus. Below the altar: a casket, inside which were swaddled the saint’s remains, or some of them, anyway, taken there in the 1830s by an Irish Carmelite named John Spratt. So admired was Spratt for both his homiletic virtuosity and his care for the poor people of Dublin that Pope Gregory XVI himself saw fit to confer upon him Saint Valentine’s relics as a token of his esteem. The inscription: This shrine contains the sacred body of Saint Valentinus the Martyr, together with a small vessel tinged with his blood.
So grave, so serious! But I found it funny, too: another example of the habitual, sometimes charming, sometimes exasperating strain of embellishment I’d grown accustomed to from Dubliners I knew. There had to be other sites that claimed to be Saint Valentine’s final resting place. But something, some softening, made me lower my shield of skepticism, and let Dublin have it: here, in this gray everyday church in this gray everyday city that had come to feel like home to me, among its public houses and two-story brick terraces, its low, impassive office blocks and bookmakers’ storefronts, rested the priestly Roman prince of love himself.
*
Then a disordered reel of memories from that summer: a comic drama starring some stern goats on a beach in Sligo, a rave in the Wicklow Mountains, a lonely ride to a place I was told I should not visit, a kiss beneath the Spanish Arch in Galway.
Frank had never been to Ireland, but had wanted to visit—he loved Yeats, too, and Joyce, and part of his doctoral dissertation was about George Bernard Shaw—which, in that hospice room with no time left, felt unjust. But I might as well admit right now that there was a part of me—a shameful part where generosity falters—that had wanted to keep Ireland for myself, as if that were possible.
*
When Frank woke up, my thoughts of Ireland faded, and my attention snapped back to him. It was not time for Chaucer again: Frank was too tired, too restless, too aching. That Valentine’s Day, we would not get to the end of the poem. Instead, we had the 2010 Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, for our evening’s entertainment. I went out to buy milkshakes from the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop around the corner from the hospice: strawberry for him, mint chocolate chip for me. Frank, the best home cook I’ve ever known—he of the New Year’s Eve cassoulet that took a week or more to coax and caress into being, the pork and pistachio terrines and duck rillettes and choucroute garnie, all of which had often made me refer to him as my French farm wife (which he knew I meant as praise), whose rare splurges were on special-occasion dinners at restaurants beyond our means—only wanted ice cream. Who wouldn’t?
We toasted “Happy Valentine’s Day” with our milkshakes and sipped them while we watched the women’s speed skating in quiet awe—those lean, powerful bodies crouched nearly parallel to the ice, the blades of their skates like cleavers poised at the close, correct angle against a sharpening steel. We coasted into sleep with the television on, and neither of us slept well.
When he needed me most, I was not there, and for that selfishness and carelessness, I could not be forgiven.[/pulluquote]
It was not until early morning that Frank fell into a deep sleep. After twenty-four hours at his bedside, I left the hospital and went home, just a few subway stops away, to take care of a few errands. I shoved an arbitrary armful of laundry into our landlady’s washing machine; she let me use it that week, knowing that Frank was in hospice and there was no time for a laundromat. I fed and petted and talked to our cats: a silver tabby I’d raised since she was weaned, and an ancient rescued tortoiseshell whom Frank and I re-rescued from my mother when she could no longer care for her. I had paid them too little attention lately, but because they loved him, too, I assured myself that they would understand. I thanked them for their patience and asked for their pardon. I scrolled through a week’s worth of emails. I wrote a message to Frank’s far-flung family. These were not the words I used, but this was what they meant: Get here. Now.
A short shower. A glance at our bed: not a chair in a hospice room, our bed, with our frayed flannel sheets as soft and fuzzy as lamb’s ears, and what Frank always thought was an overabundance of pillows, especially because I tossed most of them to the floor before going to sleep. It would only be a quick nap, half an hour at most. I sank into it.
When I woke up, it was after noon.
What have I done?
*
I had missed him by minutes.
A nun, the hospice chaplain, stood in front of the closed door to his room. She wouldn’t let me in, wouldn’t let me see him. I shouldn’t have gone home. I shouldn’t have slept.
I collapsed to the linoleum floor. I screamed and sobbed at the same time—is that what wailing is? had I wailed?—and the nun shushed me so I would not disturb the other patients, the other families. I had soaked my green woolen cardigan with tears, and the dampness drew from its fibers a sour, lanolin smell.
She shushed me again. She was small, and old, but strong enough to hoist me to my feet, lead me into her office, deposit me in a stiff chair like a sack of groceries, and pull the door shut behind us.
“He was afraid,” she told me, as though candor is always for the best. I hated her more than I had ever hated anyone in my life.
I thought of Frank, alone with only this person at his side. Alone, and afraid, just like she said. I considered the miserable truths she might have felt obligated to tell him out of her commitment to honesty, and I pictured him again: alone, afraid, then gone. When he needed me most, I was not there, and for that selfishness and carelessness, I could not be forgiven.
Were his glasses on? Where was his wedding band?
What did she say to him?
Had I kissed him before I slipped out of the room that morning? What were our last words to one another? Had they had been “Happy Valentine’s Day,” said for the fourth or fifth time in as many hours?
I hoped they had been “I love you.”
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Excerpted from the book The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country by Rosie Schaap. Copyright © 2024 by Rosie Schaap. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
