During a trip to Belfast in 2010, Rosie Schaap was at a big crossroads in her life. The New Yorker was grappling with the loss of her first husband, Frank, who had died from oesophageal cancer earlier that year. She didn’t know it yet, but that trip would change everything. Nine years later, Schaap was slowly settling into life in the Glens of Antrim, making a new home in the coastal village of Glenarm.
“I had one remarkable encounter involving grief when I was in Belfast,” she recalls. After meeting three women in a hotel bar – “Dubliners” – and exchanging pleasantries about the cocktails they were drinking, Schaap suddenly found herself “pouring my heart out to them”.
“Something made me feel very very safe and sheltered in their company and I told them about Frank’s death and his experience with cancer. They surrounded me, I mean literally, in their arms. As wonderful as my friends and family had been in the States, it just had a different feeling. This openness to a stranger’s grief and loss.
“There are a lot of cliches about Ireland being particularly good at death and loss and grief, but I think like some cliches it is based soundly on the truth of experience.”
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A journalist and author, these themes would later come to inspire Schaap’s memoir The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country, her memoir about finding solace in Glenarm.
[ The Slow Road North by Rosie Schaap: A beautiful, unsparing memoir about griefOpens in new window ]
The visit to Belfast in 2010 was not Schaap’s first time in Ireland, however; that had been in the summer of 1991. Despite many returns to the country since, this trip was the first time she ventured back up North.
“It was 1991 to 2010. I waited that long to travel North again and I saw a very different place from the place I’d seen in 1991.
“I’d spent a summer doing an Irish studies course in Trinity [College Dublin] and it was a ball,” she says. “It was such a great time and I made lifelong friends there. In 1991, which was some years before the peace process started up North, Trinity was pretty paternalistic about telling international students not to go up North.
“So I did exactly as they told me not to do, like any self-respecting 20-year-old person would, and it was eye opening. It wasn’t a great visit. When I could really afford to travel again in my late 20s and 30s, I came back to the Republic many times, but I hadn’t been up North.
“As a native New Yorker, I’d lived through tense times in New York city but of course it was a different order of tension in Belfast and one I wasn’t accustomed to.”
Rosie Schaap’s love letter to Northern Ireland
A “terrific afternoon” spent with Belfast poet Ciarán Carson was the beginning of a domino effect on Schaap’s life. “He gave me a tour of the Falls area where he had grown up and then he took me to the [Seamus] Heaney Centre” in Queen’s University, which the journalist would later come to know as a student and teacher.
It was on the same tentative visit back to Belfast that Schaap met and struck up a friendship with Mark.
“Because I had such a great time here, I kept pitching stories to bring me back to the North. Mark became my sort of helper/fixer. If I needed a restaurant recommendation in Ballycastle or a driver.”
Over time their relationship developed into something more, and the pair moved in together during Covid, shortly after Schaap’s move to Glenarm, and got married.
“We had a really great lockdown experience together. I think also the intensity of the experience of Covid had the effect of, in some way, making certain things get very real ... We celebrated our third anniversary this February.”
Her wedding band, a silver Claddagh ring, glints as she talks about the first few months of that new chapter of life.
“I arrived here on 9/11 which is not the most auspicious date for a New Yorker to try to start something new in her life,” says Schaap. “At least now I have something happy to associate that day with, rather than just something very sad.”
After a lifetime in New York, Glenarm is what I wanted. I wanted the outdoors, I wanted wildlife and nature and just a very quiet life
Schaap was on a work trip when she first became acquainted with the village she now calls home.
“I had been through here on a reporting trip in 2016. I knew nothing about Glenarm, but I wanted a quiet place to stay and write for a couple of days. I liked it so much on that short visit that I came back the following year for a month and I liked it even more.
“What I didn’t know before I got here was that not only do we have the sea at one end of the village, we have a protected forest at the other end, and it was really that combination that captivated me,” she says. “After a lifetime in New York, Glenarm is what I wanted. I wanted the outdoors, I wanted wildlife and nature and just a very quiet life.”
Although “the great majority of people have been incredibly kind and welcoming”, Schaap notes that “roots here are so deep. It’s very small and ... there have been little frissons of suspicion. You know, ‘Too many outsiders coming’”.
Thinking of it now as an “indoctrination ritual perhaps”, Schaap remembers a sense of paranoia was instilled by some of the village’s children initially. “When I first moved here and it was just me on my own ... some local schoolboys really made it their mission to just bang on my door and run away. I don’t think of myself as a particularly paranoid person but I didn’t quite understand the meaning of it.”
She is now the chairwoman of Glenarm Wildlife Group and has fully immersed herself in the tight-knit local community.
“There is a strong sense of community, for sure, and community can be a very loaded word here in the North of Ireland. When you see it in its kindest, most generous, most kindest iterations it is a real thing and a positive thing. It’s not just a euphemism in those cases.”
Giving the ritual of a funeral as an example, Schaap says “the way that people honour and remember and pay attention to their lost loved ones” has touched her.
“In the almost six years that I’ve lived in Glenarm, I’ve already lost some wonderful friends in the village ... Here it’s so small that you’ll go to one of the churches for the funeral and then the casket is walked through the village to one of the cemeteries. Even people who can’t come out and go, everybody stands outside their door and takes some time and I find it really moving.”
“It’s something I certainly wouldn’t have seen in New York.”
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
