SEFF Remembrance Day Ceremony, Lisnaskea

It was an overcast Sunday afternoon in October 2022. In St. Tiernach’s church in Clones, Co. Monaghan, the Southeast Fermanagh Foundation sponsored a service for the families of victims of the Troubles. It was impossible not to be moved by their stories, the river of sadness cascading through the decades, its tributaries permeating every heart.

“If ye ask me, the border’s a magical line,” said Colin. I was in a trendy café in Derry/ Londonderry. Colin, the barista, had just asked me to stop interviewing his customers. I told him why I was doing so. “It’s a divided city,” he said, with an apologetic shrug.

From the east coast, the journey to Clones takes you first along speeding motorways, then to winding backroads, through small towns boasting little more than a pub and a church. Behind the scrabbled hedges that line the road lie rolling hills of dank green sod and mud, populated by cattle and sheep, and the occasional home.

It’s Sunday morning, and I am not going to Mass. That’s nothing exceptional here in the new, secular Ireland—but religion still defines communities along the border.

Sometimes, I feel like Wile E. Coyote in those old roadrunner cartoons, when he chases the clever bird over the edge of a cliff and keeps going, as if he still has the ground beneath him. He stops in midair, looks down, sees the abyss below, looks at the viewer; only now does gravity kick in, and he careens to the bottom of the chasm. Splat.