The Gift of Goodbye

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I was a typical 80s wild child. My friends and I went home when it got dark and our respective mothers started calling for us as the porch lights were turned on. When I moved to New Hampshire shortly after high school, I went into profound culture shock.  I didn’t understand the regional drop your r’s accent. I pondered how the alphabet was taught to young children here?  “Q, AH, S?”  

The cerebral whiplash I suffered when being labeled the oxymoronic, “wicked nice,” lasted for days, until I understood it to be a high compliment.

I pined for New Jersey pizza, late nights at 24-hour diners and people who knew how to drive faster than the local cows.

Nine months later, I opted to leave this frozen tundra and move to South Carolina. Surely palm trees and sweet tea were the perfect remedy to my first – and hopefully only – winter in New Hampshire. My teenage self firmly stated, “Cold?  Ha! Never again.”  

This was to be my first lesson in, “Man plans and God laughs.”

Three weeks before my plane was set to deliver me to the land of southern hospitality, I met my husband on February 8th, 1989.

Love at first sight is best summed up in a number.  Eleven. That was the number of days it took him to ask me to marry him. Barry was a handsome, smiley, well-read Air Force veteran from Connecticut ; I was 19, insatiably curious and headstrong.  Inside Barry’s first Valentine’s Day card to me he wrote, “If you lost half your attitude, you’d be perfect.”  I told him it was his fault for falling in love with a Jersey girl.  Attitude comes standard issue with Jersey girls. He decided I was worth the risk. 

Our marriage followed quickly and I have slogged through every New Hampshire winter since.  Although we did visit South Carolina’s mini golf, gators and warm water beaches as a compromise. 

Over the course of the following 35 years, I morphed from wild child to wife, losing some rough edges along the way. I learned to appreciate the slower pace of life in New Hampshire, the incredible history in the New England region, the stories that literally surrounded me .

A special place I began to collect stories was the Pine Hill Cemetery. Our home is located a stone’s throw from the nearly 300-year-old cemetery. Our ten children, much like Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, learned their alphabet from reading the letters on the headstones.  For the record, they can all say the letter R properly. 

As the years flew by, I learned that if I wanted to lure Barry into the cemetery for my daily walks, I would need to entertain him. I enchanted him with the poignant stories of the people laid to rest at Pine Hill Cemetery, of which there are myriad.

The humble headstone of Elisha Thomas serves as a cautionary tale against drunkenness. Thomas, a disabled tax collector, was injured during his service in the Revolutionary War. In a tragic drunken brawl, he accidentally stabbed and killed his closest friend, Captain Peter Drowne. Thomas, who took full responsibility and warned everyone against the ‘demon rum,’  was later hung on a hill overlooking the current Henry Law Park.

Henry Law’s headstone is a towering monument compared to Elisha Thomas’, but the gentlewoman laid to rest beside Law is the personification of William Congreve’s quote, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

Heartbroken fiancée Cordelia Teatherly Griffin took her life after Henry Law broke their engagement, allegedly due to Law’s canine critical ultimatum, whereupon he demanded Griffin either choose her dog or a marriage to Law.  

Griffin’s competing monument is known as the ‘Weeping Woman,’ topped with an elegant sculpture of a distraught woman with her back facing away from Law’s monument for all eternity.  Griffin’s wishes for Olympic grudge holding in death were fulfilled by her cobbler father, ironically most likely funded by the railroad shares and diamond Griffin had been gifted by Henry Law in life. 

A few rows separate Cordelia Teatherly Griffin from Lucy Hale. Hale’s engagement to her handsome suitor was kept secret and was positively wicked for its day. Lucy Hale was the daughter of New Hampshire’s first abolitionist senator, John Parker Hale. Senator Hale gained knowledge of his daughter’s secret suitor, an actor with Southern sympathies. Senator Hale asked President Abraham Lincoln for a two-year ambassadorship to Spain, to break his daughter’s engagement through distance. Later the same day, Lucy’s secret fiancée, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated President Lincoln. The Hale family fled to Spain, which spared Lucy Hale from some of the scandal, but more importantly – all of the investigation. 

These are just a few stories I shared with Barry as we took our walks, but there was one bittersweet headstone we walked by that stood out as an unsolved mystery. The little information I had to share with Barry, I had gleaned from the former cemetery director, the late Mr. Paul Talon. The headstone simply reads, “The Unknown.”   I had asked Mr. Talon one summer how many people were buried at the grave of the Unknown and he shared with me that there were a few indigent people who had been laid to rest there,  he remembered one person was found lying near the local railroad tracks.  The headstone was a kind gesture to mark the humanity of the lost souls of Pine Hill Cemetery. 

Barry kept working, we kept raising our children, kept taking our walks but life has a way of simply passing, so that conversation with Mr. Talon was stored away until recently. 

 On January 25^th, 2025 , I morphed from wife… to widow.  Sudden cardiac arrest ushered Barry into heaven and me into singlehood again.  Saying goodbye to such a good and loving man was agonizing, but my children and I had that gift.

If you have lost a loved one, you know that goodbyes are a precious gift, but that not all people receive it, which delays healing. 

After putting all of Barry’s affairs in order, I took an impromptu first-time trip to Ireland in May. I needed to put some breathing room between my past and my future.  My mother’s side hails from Ireland, and I grew up surrounded by Guinness drinking uncles,  31 cousins, a family priest at the family picnics, and reminders like, ‘You come from good stock.’   

Barry and I had talked about going to Ireland, ‘someday.’   I am still a Jersey girl, still Barry’s girl, so I went for the both of us. 

After finding a really cheap last minute airfare from Boston to Dublin I was on the plane a week later, packing nothing but a purple thrift shop backpack and a sense of adventure. I planned nothing , leaving myself open for where the wind took me.  

Staying in coastal Malahide which is a little outside of Dublin proper, I went to dinner at a local pub, and a kind Irish woman named Cathy approached me and asked if she could sit at my table.  I didn’t want to sit alone, so I happily agreed. Cathy is a no nonsense divorcee who speaks fluent sarcasm and I knew I had met a kindred spirit when she told me after I explained my grief, “Darling, I’m Irish, we wail with the banshees. If you want, I will cry for Barry too.”   

Cathy peer pressured me into trying a pint of Guinness, which I never had before. She snapped a photo of me taking my one and only sip and our friendship crystallized in that moment. Cathy promised me that if I returned to Ireland, she would take time off from work and personally drive me wherever I wanted to go.  Oh, that we should all have a friend as dear as Cathy.

I tested her promise by returning in September.  Cathy was as good as her word and took me to Glendalough and Belfast to see the Titanic Museum. While on our road trip to Northern Ireland, we discussed an Irish woman I had read about in the news – Catherine Corless.  Mrs. Corless has been a tireless crusader for truth – she discovered there were 796 bodies of children possibly buried in sewage tank of a local closed ‘mother and baby home’ run in Tuam, Ireland ( pronounced Choom.) Corless was ridiculed and disbelieved by the local authorities and the Catholic church who were trying to hide the failure of the nuns who ran the home.  Corless’ efforts were inspired by taking a night course in history where the instructor told the students – “Start with your local history.”   

In 2025, Corless wrote, 

“Last week, three years after that law was passed, pre-excavation work finally began at Tuam. After more than a decade, I can let go and take a step back.

As I stood outside the barricaded burial site and watched through a peephole, I felt a sense of joy. The grounds are now full of cabins, small diggers and fencing. There are workers in hard hats, forensic archaeologists and a multitude of others who will keep us up to date on what they find. Hopefully it will be the full number – 796 little bodies waiting for a dignified burial.”  

I came home inspired by Catherine Corliss.  The grave of the Unknown in Pine Hill Cemetery was calling to me. The lost souls buried there were anonymous – but not for long, if I could change it. They have stories too.  Maybe their stories aren’t as ‘dramatic’ as Elisha Thomas, Cordelia Teatherly Griffin or Lucy Hale’s but their stories, their voices,  deserve to be heard.  The gift of goodbye needs to be given to the families of those lying in wait for decades. 

I hesitantly approached the current cemetery director, Mark.  I explained what I was hoping for.  He wasn’t aware there were bodies buried there, but I assured him there were. based on that long ago conversation with Paul Talon.  Mark was kind and respectful when I pressed him to please dig deeper. I reminded him the unknown were, “Somebody’s someone.”   The gift of goodbye is precious, and I wanted their families to have it.

I am excited to report that Mark recently followed up to tell me that in early summer, a crew from the University of NH forensics department will perform ground penetrating radar, and then the process of identification will begin. With the quest for dignity from the staff at Pine Hill Cemetery, the determination from many skilled hands at UNH, DNA technology, and the never lost attitude of one Jersey girl, the unknown of Pine Hill Cemetery will become known, and the gift of goodbye given. 

Part 2 – to be continued, summer, 2026.

I am reminded of Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1-8. (Emphasis mine.) God’s timing is perfect, even if we don’t see it in the moment. Thank you God for allowing me this moment in time to partner with you in this ‘moment to search.’ I pray it yields answers and healing.

1) To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
(2) A time to be born, And a time to die;
A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted;
(3) A time to kill, And a time to heal;
A time to break down, And a time to build up;
(4) A time to weep, And a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, And a time to dance;
(5) A time to cast away stones, And a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
(6) A time to gain, And a time to lose;
A time to keep, And a time to throw away;
(7) A time to tear, And a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, And a time to speak;
(8) A time to love, And a time to hate;
A time of war, And a time of peace.