Our fall/winter writing contest guest judge Sharon Bryan chose Emma Hunter’s essay, “Long Meg Speaks,” as one of three winners. This week, we have the judge’s words about the essay as well as the author’s words about writing it, and, of course, the essay.

Emma wrote this in answer to my request for words about writing this essay:

Sometimes a story tugs at your skirts like an impatient child desperate to tell you it’s tale. This was one such story. In the years since my son’s birth I have developed health anxiety, a bitch of a condition whose gift seems to be the on going lesson to get comfortable with uncertainty (a phrase I borrow from the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron). This particular tale marked the beginning of my journey with that learning and as I wrote my way through the story, I felt that learning burrow itself down into my bones. That’s why I write–for bone deep knowledge.

The emotional journey Emma takes in her essay spoke deeply to our judge, who wrote these comments about her choice of “Long Meg Speaks” as a winner:

This essay is a moving account of a woman’s exploration of her feelings about having a son with Down’s syndrome. It raises crucial questions, and addresses them with candor: How should she feel?  How does she feel?  How can she let herself love this child wholeheartedly, knowing she might lose him?  How can she not love him?  She lets readers come with her as she searches, and only begins to find some answers after she gets lost.

“Long Meg Speaks” is a beautifully shaped essay about getting to the complex emotional truths of having a son with Down’s Syndrome. Her trip to a Neolithic stone circle known as Long Meg and her Daughters, with its spiral markings, parallels her internal travels through her thoughts and feelings.  The end of her search brings her to the heart of the matter in both realms.

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Long Meg Speaks

by Emma Hunter

Speak Thou, whose massy strength and stature scorn
The power of years—pre-eminent, and placed
Apart, to overlook the circle vast.
Speak Giant-mother!

–– William Wordsworth,
From the poem “The Monument Called Long Meg”

 “From the moment they told me about his Down’s syndrome, I was terrified. The first question I asked was, ‘Will he die young?'”

I told Irene that as I learned more about his condition I felt pulled in different directions, sometimes so hopeful about what he might achieve, and how wonderfully his life might pan out. Yet at the same time I also seemed to have a perverse compulsion for collecting bad news stories; terrible gruesome crimes that had befallen people with learning difficulties, cases of learning disabled people having their benefits cut and living as virtual prisoners in sad care homes, news stories of neglect by healthcare professionals, and quickly all the fear and terror came piling in as I constructed a future for him, for us, that seemed too bleak to bear. I lived on near permanent red alert. But worse than that I believed I would be on red alert my whole life because I didn’t know how to protect him from disease, poverty or from his own vulnerability which would be forever enfolded into his face.

“Do you want your son to die?” she asked, gnarled fingers pressed together as she pierced me with dark eyes of curious tenderness.

No of course not! I screamed internally, but I heard myself say something different. “I have done.” I paused to assess her reaction, a reassuring whisper of a smile told me she already knew, so I continued,

One night when my tiny son was a few months old, and I was in a place of sheer terror, as he slept in the co-sleeper crib next to me, I felt suffocated by the futile force in me to protect him and myself from what I saw as inevitable and unbearable suffering. I curled myself around his sleeping body and sobbed into his soft pudgy baby-gro and I prayed a heartfelt prayer that we would both die in our sleep that night.

I woke in the morning to a smiling gurgling baby rooting for milk and I felt sick and leaden with guilt. Some irrational part of my psyche–the same part that only believes in ghosts when home alone in the dead of night–was convinced that my prayer had somehow sealed his fate and that life would indeed be cruel enough to take him from me. I lived in tangled terror of the net of crazy stories I had spun myself into.

“I need new stories, a new kind of faith. I suppose that’s why I’m here.” Irene slowly massaged her arthritis-ridden knuckles She had come highly recommended by a friend as a formidable wise woman who could set one on a course for the truth. That was exactly as scary as it sounded. Irene was tender and kind but she did not mince her words at the retreat centre she ran in the Lake District at the foot of a fell.

“You most certainly do, my dear. You are stuck. Your obsession with the possibility that your child might die is just a way of your ego keeping you stuck.” I gasped and recoiled as I’d expected a little more sympathy but she didn’t seem to notice and continued on, “You are grasping at certainty… will he die? won’t he die? You feel if you knew the answer then you could cope and that is your whole problem. You are only willing to live life on your terms and it has made you brittle as dry stick. Your task is to open to the unknown, you cannot possibly know if he will die, or what that will mean for you if he does. All we know is that we must open ourselves to the flow of life. I know this to be fact because I lost two children, one a baby, one a teenager. And forty or so years later I’m still here, still opening to life and its mysterious gifts.”

I was stunned into silence.

I was in awe of this tiny old woman whose arthritic body was failing her but whose mind and spirit were sharp as needles. We talked about how we would work on my stuck-ness over the coming sessions. As she rose from her chair to see me out a flock of ravens in the field behind her house took off in unison, torn shreds of blackness with fingered wings scattered onto unseen air currents.

Leaving for home, I found myself in Cumbria on a bleak mid-winter day and as I looked at my map saw that I was not far from Long Meg and Her Daughters, a large intact Neolithic stone circle. I had grown up not far from the stone circle but had no memory of it. I wondered if I had ever been there and decided to set off and find it.

It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon and somewhere behind the sludgy grey clouds the sun was setting. As I set off in my car my mobile phone lost signal and with it my map disappeared. I followed my nose and got hopelessly lost. The thin light was fading so I gave up, pulled over and started to turn the car around.

“No keep going; there is an important message for you at Long Meg!” To my shock a voice, which I was certain was not my own, delivered into the left side of my head the urgent message. So unexpected was that voice, and so different from the normal running commentary of my own mind-rubbish that I pulled the car over to the side of the road to catch my breath. This is what schizophrenia is I told myself, my anxiety has finally won out and sent me completely crazy; it starts with hearing voices and before you know it you’re a serial killer with your mug-shot on CrimeWatch. I didn’t really believe that but I didn’t have any rational explanation either. So I decided to test out the message. I only had to go there to test out my sanity. If there was no message I could go and book my appointment with a head doctor.

The problem was that I was lost. I started the car. Still no signal on my phone. The voice came back, “Turn right” it said, but it was quieter now, less shocking, and now I wasn’t sure if it was my voice or not. I followed two or three instructions and to my great surprise arrived at a signpost telling me Long Meg was only half a mile away.

I drove up the farm track and right into the stone circle before I realised where I was. A farm lay a few yards ahead and the farm track bisected the circle lobbing off about a fifth of it. Who on earth does that? I wondered, who on earth decides to build a road straight through a stone circle? If you have no spiritual reverence for such places surely architectural reverence or even just appreciation for the sheer dogged determination it must have taken to engineer such a project 3500 years ago would direct you to bend your farm track a few yards round the circle. I reversed the car until I was dutifully out of the circle and then got out.

The land was so eerily still I could hear the muddy clods of earth sucking at puddles of icy rainwater. I was in the wrong shoes. To my left a farmer roared around a field in a tractor towing a muck spreader that spewed out cow shit in a perfect arc onto a dead field. Wafts of it mingled with the sweet smell of winter mud and time-travelled me back to my childhood farm, when I wouldn’t have worried about getting my shoes dirty.

Two ancient oak trees lined the farm track inside the stone circle and I noticed bright ribbons and pouches hanging from the tree like flimsy Christmas decorations or miniature prayer flags. Pagans, I thought, just as I caught sight of the rough-hewn farmer eyeing me from his tractor cab. He must have thought I was a pagan too. I picked my way up the muddy drive and then onto the field of tough wiry grass.

I stood in the centre of a one hundred yard wide circle of large grey lumpy boulders burrowing into the ground. Around fifty or so made up the ‘Daughters’, I looked south from this elevated position across familiar Cumbrian pasture to which clung a sheer low mist. Beyond, the fells of the Lake District loomed like guardians. The sun was low and the scene took on a pallet of mauves and grey-blues.

What was I doing here? This was ridiculous. Where would a message even be in a big field? This place is huge, what am I even looking for? I tried to still my chattering rational logic, but it won out. I felt plain daft.

Then out of the mist directly below me, a silhouetted figure appeared, tall and wearing what appeared to be a cape. She had two large hunting dogs either side of her and she strode purposefully up the slope straight toward the circle. She didn’t break pace as she entered the circle coming straight for me. I held my breath as she approached. What on earth was she going to tell me? I couldn’t quite believe this was happening. She walked right up to me and then looked up from underneath the brim of her hat and said in a booming voice, “Afternoon!” then continued to stride north towards the farm, her two dogs weaving and sniffing along beside her.

I turned and watched her walk, her cape, which I now realised was a long waxed jacket, flapping behind her. I also realised I was standing on a tractor tyre track that she had used as a footpath for easier footing across the circle. At that moment the tractor swung close by the edge of the circle spewing an arc of shit into the air and the woman waved at the farmer. I felt myself flush up with embarrassment and imagined a conversation in between farmer and wife at dinner later that evening, “Bloody daft pagans; it’s only a few bloody stones”.

And they would probably have been right. My encounter with Irene had dared me to believe in magic and now I felt foolish for believing in mystical voices. I should calm down, forget messages and mystical experiences and just have a look around at the stones before it gets too dark, I thought to myself. I wandered over to a boulder and touched the grey rough granite, feeling the solidity of its cold mass, tracing my fingers round lichen maps on its surface.

Long Meg herself stands looking on, someway outside of the circle. At twelve feet tall she is angular and the deep red of the local sandstone of which many of the houses where I grew up were made. She angles forward slightly as if watching over her daughters.

I had been longing for some kind of feeling of home a lot recently and I didn’t understand it, I had a home that I loved and a family whom I loved, but still that strange homesickness persisted, I wasn’t sure if it was a geographical longing for the place of my roots or a more metaphysical longing for some internalised felt sense of being deeply at home, something, I realised, I had never really felt my whole life.

On the way to the circle I had stopped off at an art exhibition and in the shop I had purchased from a local paint makers a block of red ochre watercolour for no other reason than it was a beautiful object. It was called Egremont red after the local town where the haematite ore was mined. I have always loved this colour, this bloody clay. I loved it in Turner’s earthy rousing paintings and in Jackson Pollock’s deeply vibrating squares of colour, but I now realised perhaps it teased at my DNA because it reminded me not just of home but of place–where generations of my family had lived and farmed the earth before me. I learned that it was the same haematite that shepherds would mix with grease and use as a red ruddle to mark their sheep, I remember this colour on the sheep my family kept, though it was probably a synthetic version by that time. I fingered the hexagonal cardboard box in my pocket as I approached Long Meg.

I circled her and gasped excitedly when I discovered that the plane facing the circle was engraved with very clear cup and ring marks. Spirals have always fascinated me ever since I was a child and they had frequently turned up in my artwork as an adult. I traced my finger around the patterns of concentric circles. Whenever I see them I sense a coming home or at least an offering of an invitation as if the spiral is a pathway. I imagine the ancient maker chiselling away with crude tools and it seems so obvious to me that these patterns are not just idle doodling as some archaeological commentators have suggested but a deeply revered symbol which offers some portal into a deeper understanding of the universe. I like one theory which suggests that the shape is a stylised version of water spirals made by rain drops on the surface of water or when you throw a pebble into a pool. And that perhaps the ancients intuited that this form has some life giving properties.

I was calmer now. And slightly disappointed there was no actual message. But I didn’t feel crazy. I felt connected again to something deeper, something other. Maybe I was a pagan after all. I felt the watercolour block in my pocket and felt compelled to leave my small mark on the spiral, so that my touch might reach across the millennia and meet the touch of its maker. I spat onto the ochre block and rubbed my finger in a circular motion to mix up a small amount of russet paint. I traced one of the spirals with the watercolour paint on my finger, leaving feint traces of red on red.

No sooner had I done it than I panicked; had I just graffitied a Neolithic monument? I told myself not to be so silly, it was watercolour and would likely disappear with the morning dew. Still the thought had tainted my action so I bent down to pluck a dock leaf to wipe off my pigment offering. As I did so I noticed a tiny pile of ashes in a nook at the base of the stone. A hollow of earth had been scraped out and in it were paper ashes and one small piece of paper a few inches long which had charred but not quite caught alight. It had printed text on it. I held my breath, could it be? I stooped down barely daring to believe that whatever text was there was some pertinent message for me. It was entirely legible and I read the words aloud in a whisper:

Some people who are sweet and attractive, strong and healthy, happen to die young. They are masters in disguise teaching us about impermanence.

I dropped the paper back onto the ash pile and backed away.

For several minutes I couldn’t arrange a single coherent thought in my head. I stood back inside the safety of the stone circle catching my breath. I looked around me for a potential pagan who might have recently left this offering. Then realised that was a silly thought, the ashes had clearly been there a while.

This was my message.

Then I couldn’t remember exactly what it had said, so I tentatively walked back over to Long Meg. I didn’t dare touch the paper as if somehow it was too dangerous. I took out my phone and photographed it, then I photographed the cup and ring marks. Then I stood back and read and re-read the words on the screen of my phone, as if somehow that was safer.

I was reeling, a stream of half-formed questions flooded my mind. I briefly panicked that this might be a warning, that I was right, my son would die young. As I walked away the voice spoke one last time, “No take it; it was put there for you.”

I hesitated, wondering who had left it there, wondering if they would mind my taking it. Was it another mother trying to find her way after losing a child? Here I was living every day in the unbelievable suffering of constantly imagining I might lose my child, as if always preparing myself for the worst was somehow protecting me from an even greater suffering, when in actuality for three years my son had been here, gently breathing joy into our lives. He was alive today, sweet and strong and beautiful. With those thoughts came an opening–I had to allow life to serve me up whatever it would, because to live in constant resistance, fear and terror at what might be meant I was missing what was. I didn’t exactly know how to do that yet but I knew the first step was this one.

When I returned home I typed the phrase into Google and found that it was a page of a little book of wisdom by the Dalai Lama. I placed the fragile paper inside an envelope and put it inside a book, marking the page which described a meditation practice for opening the heart. Irene’s counsel began to settle in, like those fingered wings onto unseen air currents.

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And here is a little more about the author:

Emma Hunter was born in 1978 to family who farmed the beautifully bleak eastern edges of the Cumbrian fells in England. In 2000 she gained her BA in Fine Art from Lancaster University and in 2001, her Master’s Degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London.

Her early deep connection with the land and vast skies grew in to a lifelong creative inquiry into the big questions of life, but after the birth of her second child she turned to the narrative structures of writing to pursue those big questions through the prism of the personal story.

She now lives in Lancaster UK, her with her husband and two beautifully spirited children.