It Is Myself That I Remake

By Jaclyn Maria Fowler

Growing up between the west coast of Ireland and the coal regions of Pennsylvania, Sophie OConnors childhood is nearly idyllic. At an early age, she is introduced to the greats of Irish literatureYeats and Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Shaw, and Seamus Heaney, and Sophie thrives surrounded by the great myths and legends of these writers.

Just before Sophies sixteenth birthday, her life takes a tragic turn, seemingly imitating the stories and poems she has learned and loved. Rather than face her heartbreak, Sophie seals herself off from the world around her, allowing only the love of her father and the poetry of William Butler Yeats to break through her self-imposed exile from life. In every sense but the biological, Sophie dies at the age of sixteen even while her heart continues to beat.

As a young woman, Sophie takes a teaching position in her beloved Ireland; there, she looks for the inspiration she needs to restart her life. As many Yeats scholars are wont to do, the young woman soon finds herself sitting against the gravestone of the famous poet. In a place known for its dead, Sophie finally finds a reason to live.

An unconventional story of love that crosses the veil between this life and the next, It is Myself that I Remake challenges the notion that death is ever absolute.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504364775

Jaclyn Maria Fowler

Jaclyn Maria Fowler loves to write, but she doesn’t go looking for stories; instead, they find her. Sometimes they meet on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere or on a plane high above the Indian Ocean or on the back of a lumbering camel. Wherever they meet, however, Jackie sees the stories as gifts. She has published several short stories, a novel about William Butler Yeats, It is Myself that I Remake, and a well-reviewed chapter in the 2020 Colorado Book of the Year prize-winning anthology, Rise! An Anthology of Change. She is currently working on a new memoir, Memoir of a Medium, and the next book in The Twelve series, Change is the Only Constant. To pay for obsession, she works as an associate professor of English at American Public University where she is the Head of the English Department. Jackie has a doctorate in education from Penn State and an MA and MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes. She lives in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, with her little Shih Tzu, Doodles.

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Copyright © 2016 Jaclyn Maria Fowler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-6476-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6478-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6477-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016914290

Balboa Press rev. date: 12/07/2016

CONTENTS

Preface

PART 1

Chapter 1 The Stolen Child

Chapter 2 The Choice

Chapter 3 The Everlasting Voices

Chapter 4 The Stolen Child

Chapter 5 I Am of Ireland

Chapter 6 Ephemera

Chapter 7 The Stolen Child

PART 2

Chapter 8 A Poet to His Beloved

Chapter 9 The Double Vision

Chapter 10 Her Triumph

Chapter 11 Into the Twilight

Chapter 12 Calvary

Chapter 13 An Image from a Past Life

Chapter 14 Under Benbulben

Chapter 15 Her Anxiety

Chapter 16 He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace

Chapter 17 Vacillations

Chapter 18 The Wheel

Chapter 19 Among School Children

PART 3

Chapter 20 Love’s Loneliness

Chapter 21 Death

Chapter 22 When You Are Old

Chapter 23 Where My Books Go

Chapter 24 My Descendants

Chapter 25 He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes

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William Butler Yeats

(1865-1939)

Dedication

When we find that one special thing that makes us truly happy, we spend days, hours, weeks reveling in the joy that particular feeling, belief, person, situation brings to us. Our thoughts and then our lives are filled with joyous abundance. At some point, we are driven to share our happiness with others, without filter, without recognition that in sharing, we may not be able to explain it quite well enough. And because of this, we may open the very thing that brings us true joy to the ridicule and derision of others. Joy, happiness, love, passion—let’s face it—are hard to nail down with language, no matter how articulate the writer is. But share we must, and so we do.

This book is dedicated, then, to all those who celebrate joy in their own lives and in the lives of others with complete acceptance, no matter how unconventional the story. For me, they include:

• My mom and dad, Joanne and Jack, who made it safe for me to share my stories with their unconditional love and approval. They made my life easy even when it wasn’t.

• My children, Katlyn and Collin, who have never failed to amaze me with their talent, kindness, and compassion for others. They are truly my greatest masterpieces.

• My husband, Fadi Moustafa Said, who is the gift at the end of a long journey to him.

• Dr. J. Michael Lennon, my cherished mentor and friend, who pushed me to my limits, never bothering to put on the kid gloves, making me believe that I could, and so I did.

• And to all those known and unknown who provided strength through the telling of their own lived experiences both conventional and unconventional.

This book is dedicated to you all.

And thank you, Willie, for gifting me your words. I have been honored.

Preface

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Don’t you hear my call

Though you’re many years away?

Don’t you hear me calling you?

Write your letters in the sand

For the day I take your hand

In the land that our grandchildren knew.

—Brian May, Queen

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Almost from inception, Sophie imagined me into being. She called, and I responded. My words became a living, breathing reality around her in her mother’s womb as she sensed and then heard my replies to her forming thoughts. Later, as she dressed and undressed her dolls, I sat beside her, speaking softly my words of guidance. When she pulled the tiny stool to the bathroom sink to brush her teeth, I helped her, and I listened as she whispered her thoughts into the ear of her teddy bear. I was always there with Sophie, watching and waiting for the woman she would become. She accepted my presence unconditionally because, even as a child, she understood my role in her life.

I exist as a product of the no-thing-ness and Sophie’s earthly intent. I am her spirit guide, the liminal intersection between the ordinary, accepted reality of the earth-bound and the expanded natural one of spirit. So she could know me, I left traces of my time on earth in the form of poetry, the confluence of void and form in written record. My words, my thoughts, fuse with hers, never so much as to thwart her wishes though. There is heard, as is said, his voice in all her music, yet it is Sophie’s music that shapes her destiny. My words simply mark its rhythm.

Sophie lived as all living beings could, but rarely do. For most of us, except for the extraordinary moments when we accidentally find ourselves face-to-face with it, the no-thing-ness goes unacknowledged, purposely overlooked. Rather than seek understanding, we cling to the visible, sensory-driven world of form. We find the observable comforting, even safe, and we ignore the rest. As a result, we experience spectacular half-lives as mere observers of our mystical handiwork. We take no credit, no responsibility for what is ours, and reality—true reality—emerges only rarely for us. Yet, in those exceptional moments of sensing, glimpsing, dreaming, finally recognizing the void, we see again the infinitude of our opportunities. We understand—if only for a fraction of a moment—our own divinity.

Early in her life, Sophie’s parents sensed and then heard Sophie’s conversations with someone besides them—someone not quite in the room, not quite of their world. It was normal, they told each other; all kids had imaginary friends. Why not Sophie? Not much later, they were stunned when she began to quote poetry in her little-girl conversations, and Kerry and Maggie O’Connor assumed that their daughter was some kind of prodigy, picking up the bits and pieces of their adult lives.

Kerry O’Connor was everyone’s favorite high school English teacher. He was, in turns, the challenge to and the pilot of his students’ success. He steered them toward, if not a love of, a healthy respect for great literature. At the very least, they graduated having read and learned the masters; Kerry made sure of it. Maggie O’Connor was a professor of literature at University College Dublin. A brilliant researcher, Maggie was able to turn her fascination with the esoteric into a career by choosing to study Irish literature. There, faeries and angels and unseen realities were well documented, and it had become fashionable in academic circles to research the work of the writers who focused on these otherworldly phenomena. The academics accepted the metaphysical as metaphors or allegories or some other such acceptable terminology. Maggie accepted them as reality.

Kerry tried to balance Maggie’s preoccupation with the occult by instructing their daughter in the principles of Catholicism. Kerry believed that it would provide some type of spiritual anchor for Sophie, an anchor that was accepted in most communities. Maggie’s interests, Kerry knew all too well, were not. So for the sake of their daughter, Kerry and Maggie raised her Catholic, not always fully invested in the spiritual principles that governed the church. Hail Marys and Our Fathers became staples in Sophie’s early life, competing with the poems that Kerry loved and recited to her. So he was surprised when, at a very early age, Sophie asked why she was supposed to talk to Jesus, but found herself in trouble with the nuns at school if she told them that Jesus responded. Kerry shot a glance toward his wife.

Even a child recognizes the inconsistencies, Ker.

Kerry continued to stare at his wife.

What? she asked. Do you think I told her that?

Who else? Kerry shot back.

It’s all Soph, Maggie responded, turning to their daughter. Isn’t it, Sophie?

Sophie nodded. She had lost interest in the original question, already moving on to other thoughts.

Mags, don’t do this to her. We want her to fit in.

As Sophie grew, the conversations with what her parents called her imaginary friend grew more complex, and Maggie began to listen more closely, feeling that Sophie’s imaginary friend may not be a product of her imagination. Rather, Maggie began to believe that Sophie was hearing spirit.

Who are you talking to, sweetheart?

Willie, Mommy.

Yeats? her mother eventually began to ask.

I don’t know.

Ask him, Maggie would instruct her daughter.

Yes, Mommy. Willie says yes.

Maggie accepted the presence of spirit guides, and although he wasn’t as sure as his wife, Kerry was too open-minded to say he didn’t. Her parents’ tolerance allowed Sophie’s relationship with me to continue long past her childhood when most adolescents begin to sublimate their abilities, fearing social ridicule. Maggie O’Connor had grown up the product of seers. Her mother and her mother’s mother before her had always been able to hear and, from time to time, see spirit. Maggie’s mother had passed her abilities onto her daughter who, Maggie was beginning to believe, had passed it on again to hers. To Sophie.

Kerry had given up trying to provide Sophie with the relative normalcy afforded by following a major religion. Maggie, in the meantime, was trying to help her daughter understand spirit, sometimes at the expense of living in the physical world. For example, when Sophie was eight years old and she began to complain of a man in a white hoodie who lived in the woods behind the family home, Maggie took it as an opportunity to prove that spirit was not to be feared. He’s weird, Sophie would tell her mother, and Maggie concluded—knew absolutely—that the hooded man was of the spirit realm.

Are you afraid of him?

A little, Sophie would admit.

There’s nothing to worry about, sweetie. Spirit will never hurt you.

He’s not spirit, Sophie would argue.

Maggie was determined that her daughter would learn to accept the visions that she would see throughout her life. Fear, Maggie knew, would color the experience, making her gift something scary, dreaded. "We bring the fear to the spirit world, Maggie tried to explain to her daughter, but there is no fear or danger on the other side. The dead, Maggie explained, simply looked for ways to communicate their experiences. They bring solace and joy to the living, Sophie," and the white-hooded spirit man became Maggie’s greatest teaching tool.

When Sophie was almost ten, she ran into the house to report on the man in the white hoodie. She was adamant that Maggie follow her to where he was.

Mommy, he’s here again, she yelled in exasperation.

Maggie dropped the dishcloth she had been holding and raised her brows in reproof. But her daughter was unwavering in her desire, and Maggie found herself being pulled into the backyard and up onto the mountain path through the woods. Sophie stopped just short of a little clearing and pointed the way for her mother. What Maggie saw shocked her. There was a man, a physical man, shaggy and unkempt, whose long, greasy hair was stuffed into a dirty, once-white hooded jacket. He sat in the opened flap between the inside of a tent and the outside world, and aimed a small gun toward a rabbit in his sight.

Oh my God, Maggie yelled. Get back to the house, Sophie.

I told you, Mom.

All right, Maggie said to her daughter, shooing her away.

You didn’t believe me. Sophie stood her ground.

I get it, Sophie. Now go, Maggie said, pointing toward the house.

Sophie marched backward to the house on the trail, watching her mother handle the situation. When Maggie moved toward the tent, one fist on her hip in a show of anger, Sophie knew that the man was in danger. Maggie stopped short of the entrance to the tent and pushed the gun away with the front half of her foot. When her anger erupted in words, Sophie could just make them out.

This is private property. Get out, Maggie spat at the man, pointing her arm in the general direction of off-the-mountain-and-away-from-my-backyard. Or I’ll call the cops.

The man didn’t have a chance, and within the hour, all worldly trappings—the tent, the gun, the sleeping bag—were gone from the property.

At dinner that night, Maggie told Kerry about the transient as the three sat at the table.

Who’d have made that mistake but us, he asked. Jayus, Mags, you never even considered that he might have been real.

Some cleave our earthly existence into two separate and distinct components—body and soul—and define what is acceptable pertaining to the separate functioning of each. They are the first to apply labels—crazy, insane, evil—to those who experience the Divine fully in their lives—differently, in other words, than what the rule-makers deem acceptable. To these people, the spiritual is something to look forward to. It takes place after the end of one’s physical life. The arguments introduce doubt, and, on this groundwork of doubt, our beliefs are built. The spirit world must wait while the observable becomes our conviction. But the call for two separate existences—one on earth, and one in heaven—refuses to consider the possibility that spirit could be an integral, natural part of our earthly existence.

There is no contest between self and soul. They exist in a seamless whole. So while we might perceive the world of form as reality, in truth, there is a greater reality. Artists of all kinds—painters and sculptors, philosophers, writers, and poets—have always known this. Through them, we have been treated to tiny glimpses of this greater reality. Breaking through the self-imposed thresholds of space and time, flashes of the void are revealed through the sublime conceptualizations of these great artists. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The works of Shakespeare and Shelley, Shubert and the Beatles. They bring the infinitude to our doorsteps fixed in their medium of choice: paint or poetry; images in words, marble, bronze; or a transcendent measure of music.

When we stand in the presence of these works, imagination and mind combine to remind us of our divinity. And our infinity. Each physical existence is simply one manifestation in a spiritual eternity. Life and death are rendered nothing more than another of our creations marked by the arbitrariness of time and space. Listening to our higher selves, we hear the whisperings of spirit confirming this truth. Sophie celebrated the concurrence of both the nothingness and her world’s something as her own unique wholeness.

As she entered her early adolescent years, Sophie believed that her guide was William Butler Yeats. While Kerry and Maggie O’Connor weren’t yet convinced that Sophie’s guide was the Irish poet, they went along with their daughter’s belief that it was. Instead of worrying about the guide’s identity, Maggie and Kerry were astounded by the way their young daughter interacted with the unseen. The interactions consisted of more than words. In fact, they would often catch their daughter walking from room to room, undoubtedly holding the hand of an adult, an adult who was not physical, but in spirit.

What a gift, Maggie would whisper.

It scares me, Mags. It’s not normal.

While Kerry was never quite sure about spirit guides, he had seen enough from his wife and daughter to accept the possibility of them. Rather than fight it, Kerry introduced Sophie to the poet’s work. For Kerry, reading or reciting poetry was just short of something spiritual. In fact, if he were asked, he might say that he believed more in the ideas of poetry than in the rules of the church. So it wasn’t wholly unexpected that at six, Sophie could finish lines of her father’s favorite and oft-quoted Yeatsian verses. I will arise and go now, Kerry O’Connor would begin, and Sophie would finish, And go to Innisfree. Except Sophie’s Innisfree sounded something like Innithfwee. A year or two later, Sophie proved that she had developed an understanding of the verse when she began to add her own twists to the lines. On their way out the door to a nearby town, Pottsville, Kerry would begin the poem, and Sophie would add, And go to Pottsville free. Kerry’s laugh of approval guaranteed that Sophie’s twists would continue.

Soon it became a game that Kerry played with his daughter. Sophie continued to develop her cache of memorized lines and, later, whole poems. In fact, Sophie picked up her first book of poems at nine when other kids were reading the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys series. She poured over the pages, studying them, trying to break the poet’s code, trying to understand the meaning behind the words. The book A Poet to His Beloved contained images of love and angst, cataloging the working through of a bitter courtship of unrequited love. Sophie had to acquaint herself with emotions that, at nine years old, she could hardly be expected to own. But, after only a little time, Sophie understood the emotions behind the poems and would tear up when she read the words.

While Sophie had certain gifts, she still did the things that little girls did. She played Biddy Basketball for the local Catholic elementary school, and she joined the community softball league. She was a good student, always on first honors, always commended for her quiet, polite ways by the nuns in her school. All the cuts and bruises on her legs and elbows served as a veritable Picasso-ian delight of abstract designs. In the wintertime, Sophie would help the other kids in her neighborhood clear the pond that sat in the basin between two mountains close to her home, and they would ice skate and play hockey and, sometimes, just run and slide across the frozen expanse. In the summertime, she and her friends would play in the little park down the street or turn over rocks in the creek to catch crayfish.

And I was there for Sophie throughout it all: when she was bullied, when she felt alone, when she was fighting with her parents. I was there the first time a young boy held her hand on their way home from a party, and I was there when she saw that same boy—the one who filled her stomach with flights of tossing and turning—kiss her best friend. I was there for every occasion, big and small, until, that is, the tragedy that was Sophie’s sixteenth year. That was the year that Sophie tried to banish me and virtually every other person of importance from her life. I remained, of course, but she no longer heard my call.

PART 1

Chapter 1

The Stolen Child

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Come away, O human child!

—WB Yeats

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The glare of fluorescents on hospital-white walls burned through her eyelids. Behind the thin shades, she could just make out an image of memory, a flickering of moving film from the past recreated in her mind and projected into her present. This time she wasn’t a participant but instead hovered above the drama, observing it. As she followed along with the memory, she waited for the moment just before it had all gone dim, and she watched as it unfolded all over again. There was the moment when her body spasmed, pushed back across the kitchen floor from the force of the blast; and she noticed, almost simultaneously, her spirit lift from its physical shell and move toward another too-white light. She followed her body’s progression through space and time to this light. The intensity of it did not offend, not as the white sheen of hospital walls did. Instead, its power shimmered; it fascinated, entranced, invited her in. Her senses obliged its summons to explore, and she reached out for the light, moving forward into feeling. All the love she had ever known or could ever imagine embraced her in its emotional cocoon. Her mother’s smell, her grandmother’s touch—all the sensations of the familiar she had once believed were lost—became a part of her, and she saw herself, or some manifestation of herself, moving willingly toward the light’s source and into its belly.

Until, that is, something in the far reaches of her consciousness tugged at her for attention. When her father’s voice—dislocated, distant, connected to the kitchen-floor vigil in which her dream-self now saw him—soothed and then begged and then pleaded with her to stay with him, to return to him, she wavered in her forward motion into the light for just a moment. She fought against his pull; she clung to the light, to that feeling of all-consuming love. I’m sorry, she thought, an apology for his ache.

Come back, sweetheart; please come back, she heard her father pray through tears. You can’t leave me too.

Traveling through his words, his pain met her on the journey, marking the gap between her feeling of weightless delight and an overpowering commitment to her father’s earthbound love. She turned from the light, just for the smallest of moments, and saw her father’s broken, pitiful face. No matter how much she wanted to continue onto and through the light, she couldn’t shake her father’s anguish, so she turned her back on the love that overwhelmed her senses. The spirit touch of her mother and grandmother and of friends and family, known and unknown, dropped from her as she stood still in a tunnel of retreating light and love, the light speeding from what had been a great vortex surrounding her to nothing but a pinprick in front of her. She felt the emptying of absolute joy from within and the cares and worries of the physical world returning. Her limbs grew heavy and dense as she stood on the threshold between there and here. And then he spoke the line that brought her fully back:

God, don’t take her. Don’t leave me alone.

In the moment of his plea, the heavyheartedness of her physical existence now tarnished by the unspeakable fully returned. A feeling of being sucked into the physical plane through the end of a straw completed her journey back from light. Whirling, swirling though consciousness, she landed, finally, with a thud on the kitchen floor of her parents’ half double as the paramedics worked to revive her. Only she felt and heard the thud. If it weren’t for the easing, and eventual cessation, of the flatlined tone, neither perceptible sound nor