Chasing the Dead
Today is Samhain (pronounced “Sow-win) in the old Celtic calendar. The Irish of pre-Christian time — and still these days with New Agers and would be witches and druids — believed that the veil between the living and dead worlds was thinnest at this time. To those who march up dark hills and hurl pieces of paper with wishes into a bonfire Samhain is a good time for contacting the departed for answers, guidance, or just the shadow of a smile. The late Irish author and champion of the Gaelic language Manchan Magan whose ashes were scattered by his widow on this very 2025 Saturday expressed this yearning wisely:
“So many of us are feeling a stirring inside. A wish to reconnect to something deeper that our forebearer had, but which we may have lost … The best way of describing it is an impetus. An inner urging based on an uncertain sense that it is time to delve deeper into who and what we are. And reassert our connection to our ancestors, to the land and to the spirits that it holds”
To delve deeper into who and what we are. To reassert our connection to our ancestors. That motive has hovered over me for many years now and Samhain seems a good day to start publishing in pieces my new book Chasing The Dead. After all, any method that gets me closer to that connection shy of Ouija boards and seances suits me.
This journey started for me fifteen years ago, when my eldest brother John marshaled three of his siblings — Jim, Brendan, and myself — to undertake a genealogical mission to Ireland. Two years later in August of 2012 while recovering from cancer, I drafted Chasing, a digressive account of that trip that yielded discovery of aspects of my own personality, my relationship to my family and its past along with John’s ancestry artifact targets: a baptismal record here, a ruined ancestral cottage there., the bridge our mother walked to convent school.
And then I let that sprawling document lie for years. Was that want of action to get published because one brother refused to read it? Did another’s main takeaway that he and I had very different relationships with our father give me pause? Or was my necessary return to the world of corporate conturbations so much of a drain on my energy that stuffing the pages into a drawer alongside other stalled projects was the only option then? I don’t remember, What does stick in my mind was the enjoyment of writing Chasing shadowed by a feeling that the story as written then was only half-told.
I didn’t stop writing. I was a Chief Learning Officer for a billion dollar company; that meant writing all the time even if the recipient of my words was no more than a brace of cubicles down the hallway. Besides blogging and emailing, my PowerPointing proved prolific. My employer paid me handsomely to write screeds and rebuttals into the organizational force field even if they failed to persuade my fellow C-Suite caperers of their folly. Other institutions published my writing on my straight job specialties of knowledge, learning, innovation, and my general frustration for what passed for the study and practice of leadership in enterprises of all sorts. I didn’t say it was good writing, but it was writing.
More effective and satisfying was the crafting of plays again as I had in the 1970s and 80s. This return happened first with Joe Queenan (Alms, Grudges, Genealogy, and The Oracle) then solo (Keeping Right, The Jester’s Wife, HONOR, and Retrospective) These projects were significant tests and in the best way: they were for learning; each effort forced me to not only refine the skill of ‘wrighting’ a theatrical text and then turning it into a stage event, but also instructing me as to what I wanted to create. The more lines written for actors to say, the less willingness to spill words on anything unimportant. And Chasing The Dead, that account of bird-dogging the ghost and secrets up my line seemed more and more important, but I wasn’t exactly sure why.
Then in 2015 Jim dropped dead (yes, literally, this toppling thing is a thing with my people) suddenly just days before his sixty-ninth birthday. (Another brother, Mike had already passed in his sleep the previous year, but that’s another story to hold for one of many digressions lurking on this tale’s horizon. Don’t say you weren’t warned.) Three years ago, John toppled over in a Doctor’s office when his brain tussling and thrusting as if trying to escape his skull threw him to the floor with such force that he broke his neck, convulsed his heart, and died a few days later. The elders of our clan were gone.
At their funerals, stories of that trip to Dublin, Monaghan, Armagh, and Donegal surfaced repeatedly in conversations with relatives and friends perhaps because those unusually sunny August Irish days were the most time I had spent with my brothers since my teenage years. While Irish wakes are filled with remembering the stories told there also are proof of how we have to struggle against the second law of thermodynamic reminiscing. Unless we raise them again and again our memories lose heat, the entropy of recollection softens and eventually dissipates all but a blurry contour of your time with those who have died. I would open the Chasing The Dead doc on my phone to serve as a sort of aide-mémoire. And I could both feel the qualities of that time and realize what was missing in my original attempt at capturing the experience, illuminating that journey into our past.
It was then even as the ashes of my brothers were still warm that I started to add to these field notes on men who had so influenced my life. But my scribbled ideas or hastily dictated emails to myself soon revealed that Chasing was also and perhaps mainly about explaining myself to myself. That our six of Elliott kids was now halved motivated me, but my father held that our family motto was ‘Don’t kid yourself’ and obviously my interest in the meaning of that quest to connect the dots of our descent to the present day was also about me.
No shame. That writers write to explain themselves to themselves or just for themselves has become a commonplace with expositors of that claim ranging from Helen Vendler to Pat Conroy, from John Banville to Gertrude Stein, from Cyril Connolly to Frank O’Connor. That they all feel the need to say this about their work should not surprise anyone. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 850 hyphenated compound words starting with ‘self’ from self-abandon to self-yew. Self is where every story begins even when the narrative concerns brothers, countries, memories, and the Dead.
The poet Stephen Dunn expands that self-assertion usefully: “I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people’s versions of experience didn’t gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself. I’ve since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance for others.”
To get any writing right is a test, of course, and I believe in tests. (Yes, my motto — ‘Everything is a test’ — expressed often in this blog/Substack still obtains no matter the upbraiding received from my children for what they take as a severe sentiment NOT to be said to their children.) What is being tested? Fortitude, inventiveness and conscientiousness, and luck. Can I finish before I die? Hey, lets’s be real about life expectancy given the record so far. So, there will several chapters posted every week.
But the bonus question on this perhaps final exam is whether the writing will endure. Writers like other artists long for their work to resonate whether they admit it or not. For this account to resonate for my grandchildren (and we just added another to that brood this morning — Welcome to the clan, Archer Thomas Smith), for them and theirs to find something here that matters in their lives, that aids their getting the world right for themselves is the extra credit sought by me.
Let’s find out. Pencils up. Start that clock.
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