KILKENNY is filled with green and winding roads, such as this one (oppo-site) leading to Kells Priory, a majestic medieval ruin. This page, clockwise from near right: The author on her quest to validate family memories. The god Hermes, in stone, guards one corner of Kilkenny Castle. Daffodils carpet a country hillside. The main drag in downtown Kilkenny is lined with shops and colorful pubs that extend a warm Irish welcome to anyone who stops by. An angel stands on the grounds of the Cathedral Church of St. Ca-nice, home to Irish worshippers for eight centuries.

PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATHERINE WOLKOFF

PUTTING THE PAST TO REST IN

IrelandTHE SETTING WAS IDYLLIC, HER CHILDHOOD VISIT ANYTHING BUT. THIRTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, NELL CASEY RETURNS TO SPECTACULAR KILKENNY TO GAIN PERSPECTIVE ON THE REVELATION THAT BLEW HER FAMILY APART

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restaurants concentrated in just a few blocks, and with local pubs announced by signs displaying the ubiquitous shamrock sitting alongside good Irish names like Lenehan and Ryan. Front doors are painted bright red or blue or green or yellow—a famous Irish custom reportedly begun in Dub-

lin in the 18th century as a way to distin-guish one identical Georgian row house from the next. They are so joyously per-sonable, you can’t help but fall for their charm. We arrive at Butler House, the hotel where we will stay for a week. It was once the dower house of the town’s main attraction, Kilkenny Castle, a 13th-century mansion that sits alongside the river Nore with a lush stretch of land reaching out behind it. This castle was the principal home of the noble But-ler family—earls and marquesses of Ormonde—for almost 600 years, until 1967, when it was given to the people of Kilkenny in return for a token payment.

T WAS THROUGH A connection to the legendary Butler clan that my family came to Kilkenny in the first place. Hubert Butler, a celebrated Irish writer, began a long friendship with my father,

also a writer, when they met here in 1979. His daughter, a dear friend of my parents’ in Virginia, where I grew up, suggested that we rent a vacation place near her family’s home. And, inasmuch as time can spiral away only to snap suddenly back in on itself, her daughter Suzanna now lives in that same family house.

I call Suzanna once we’ve settled into our hotel, and we fall into an easy, funny conversation, though we haven’t seen each other in more than three decades.

“You remember that field where you used to ride the horses with your sister and those twins?” she asks. I draw a blank.

“You don’t remember? Well, it’s funny to call them twins, really—it makes them sound as if they were kids. They were actually about 100 years old. You and your sister would sometimes ride the ponies with them in the afternoon.” I

look out my enormous bedroom win-dow at the hotel’s walled garden—eight precisely trimmed hedges encircle a tiny stone wishing well—and wonder what it means that Suzanna possesses this memory from my life that I do not.

So much of what I remember about our time here, about my entire child-hood, is fragmented. I do not have a forward-marching memory of my youth, in which recollections line up like good soldiers and tell my story in an orderly fashion. Instead, my memories stop and start, appear and dissolve; they evoke

THE TOWN OF KELLS, near Kilkenny, is the site of one of

the most important monastic ruins in

the country.

a

i

THE TWO OLD men sitting across from us—one possibly in his six-ties, the other maybe in his late eighties, elbows lightly touching, suggesting the humble tenderness of a father and son—ought to have their picture taken. They have as much character in their lined faces as you see in a Walker Evans pho-tograph, and they tell as much of a story: These two frail men make a moving por-trait of the inescapability of family.

There is, I confess, an element of pro-jection in this observation. I am on the Irish Rail with my son, Hank, heading southwest from Dublin to Kilkenny, hurtling back through memory, revis-iting a time and place where my family—my mother, my father, my older sister and I—lived for a month 34 years ago. I was eight then, only slightly older than Hank is today. And at 42 I am roughly the same age my parents were then. This family echo has spurred a rest-less tug-of-war within: Sometimes I feel more sympathetic to my then struggling parents; other times, I’m more protec-tive of the child unwittingly caught in their crossfire. This trip to Ireland holds the promise of letting me walk into the past—when my parents were trying to keep their marriage together, when I was filled with the engulfing anxiety of a child in over her head—and try to see us all through the eyes of an adult.

S WE DRIVE INTO Kilkenny on High Street, I am not, as I’d hoped, thunderstruck with recognition upon see-

ing the small city’s main drag, where my mother once bought fisherman’s sweaters for my sister and me. And yet the place quickly feels familiar, o!ering itself eagerly to visitors, its stores and

broad emotion more often than they of-fer a detailed chronological narrative. Much of what comes to mind has an oth-erworldly, uneasy quality: My mother and father loom as powerful and unpre-dictable figures, whereas my presence is shadowy, as if I were only lurking around their lives, not actually creating one.

Now that I am steadier on my feet—which is to say, deep into adulthood, with a family as well as hard-earned friend-ships with both of my parents—I want to revisit, perhaps revise, my notion of the past. Recently, for example, I was

distracted by a work dilemma, feeling fraught and put upon, sweating in the summer heat, when my three-year-old daughter began to pull at me and scream. Something in me snapped, and I shrugged her o!, ordering her to stop grabbing me. It wasn’t a devastating rev-elation, but it was enough to send a small flare of forgiveness across the years to-ward my own mother. A series of these demystifications led me to want to go one step further, to go back and find the reality of a time that had become grandly mythic in my mind. Doing that,

I hoped, would help me release some of the unhappiness that I had come to feel over the decades since then.

HE MONTH I SPENT in Ireland with my parents and sister was, as it turned out, a pivotal one. It would be the last vacation we four would spend together, and it would also become the axis

on which our family narrative has since turned. During our stay, my mother resolved that she would confess to my

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father that she had started a relation-ship with a woman who was not only a close friend of theirs but also the fi-ancée of a man in their circle. Because events unfolded from there—my par-ents split up the following year; my mother dated men again briefly before finally moving in with her girlfriend; my father remarried and spent the better part of a decade writing a novel about a woman leaving her husband for a woman—our month in Ireland came to be known as the starting point from which we rocketed eccentrically forth.

When my mother told me some months after our return from Ireland that she and my father were getting a di-vorce, I immediately “burst into flames,” as she put it, and demanded to know why they’d even given birth to me if they were going to do something like this.

“Your fire was justified by the awfulness of the moment,” my mother now recalls,

“but I also thought it showed how long you’d been worried about it coming.”

My mother’s secret—vibrating not only in her thoughts but also in my fa-ther’s premonitions as well as our vague perception of their problems—did hold sway over the household for much of the time we spent in Ireland. A mute an-guish pressed down on us, occasionally surfacing in the expressions on my par-ents’ faces. I can clearly see my mother lying across the end of my bed as I de-scribed a nightmare I’d had the night before. The people I loved had turned into ghosts and come to me with this sinister promise: “You will be in our time.” But even then, sweetly draped at my feet with concern in her eyes, my mother seemed far away.

“I knew that what I was about to do would play out for years in our fam-ily,” she told me recently. “But I also wanted to hold on to our countryside idyll a little longer. I felt you and your sister seemed happier and freer in that landscape. I was aware of how extreme and strange, even shocking, the news of my a!air was going to be and that once it was out in the open, we would be taken up in a current of destruction that would just drop us where it would. I hoped that we’d be OK eventually, but I was terrified to think of what we were going to have to go through to get there.”

Meanwhile, my father—who at that time had just buried his godson and his favorite dog and would soon do the same for his father—had hit the hard grind of midlife only to sense that things had gone spooky in his marriage as well. “I knew that some-thing was up. I just didn’t know quite what,” he recently recalled. “The idea was—well, a friend mocked me for it. He said, ‘Oh, that’s right. That’s the bourgeois remedy for marital trouble: Take a trip to Europe.’"” This was an attempt to stop time, to create a tem-porary escape, but as the saying cau-tions, wherever you go, there you are. And there we were—my sister and I, as immaculately young as my own son—about to be flung into the maelstrom of our fracturing family life.

N THE SECOND day of our mother-son trip, Hank and I drive to the house my parents had rented all

those years ago in Thomastown, about 20 minutes south of where we are stay-ing. (Kilkenny was the place we had frequented for grocery shopping and dinners out.) We pass wide, open fields with cows blinking slowly and gnawing thoughtfully on grass. This part of the country reminds me a bit of Rhode Is-land, where I also lived as a child, with its low stone walls and swaths of land running alongside the narrow roads.

The plan is to speak with our former landlady—who still owns the property and is a talented artist—and then tour the grounds, ending with a visit to the house of my childhood memory. She is admirably breezy about being drawn into this adventure, especially given that she doesn’t recall our family ever having been here. Hank has also been a willing companion, happily traipsing across Ire-land with me. I haven’t told him the back-ground details of this trip—mostly out of an instinct to preserve his innocence for as long as possible but also because it seems like history that I need to return to alone.

DOVES settle on the windowsill of a

house that has been in Kilkenny’s

fabled Butler family for generations.

o

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SEEING KILKENNY FOR YOURSELFGETTING THERE From Dublin, we took Irish Rail from Heuston station to Kilkenny’s MacDonagh station. Round-trip tickets cost $28 at most.

WHAT TO SEE AND WHEN To avoid the rain—as we did not— it’s best to visit Kilkenny after April. This compact medieval city can seem a bit sleepy to a big- city dweller, but county Kilkenny is a true artists’ enclave, home to a warm group of masterly sculptors, potters, jewelers and textile mak-ers. There’s no better place to !nd them than at the Kilkenny Design Centre (kilkennydesign.com), a com- pound of stores selling handmade crafts such as ceramic bowls and vases, jewelry, knitwear and lovely brushed-mohair blankets.

To get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the skill and technique required to make some of these products, visit the Cushendale Woollen Mills (cushendale.ie) in Graignamanagh. A shop in the front of the mill sells blankets—those from the local company Zwartbles Ireland (run by my friend Suzanna Crampton) are espe-cially gorgeous—and scarves, among other offerings.

EATING AND SLEEPING The restaurant at the hotel Zuni is one of the more upscale dining options in the center of Kilkenny. It serves “modern Irish” food made with local trout, salmon and Angus steak. (zuni.ie).

Café Sol, a laid-back restaurant, offers locally sourced food with a Mediterranean twist. There is also the Sol Bistro in Thomastown (restaurantskilkenny.com).

Food Hall of Kilkenny Design Centre is a relaxed place that is good for lunch or afternoon coffee. A shop sells local artisanal food products (kilkennydesign.com/Restaurant.aspx).

Butler House, a guesthouse fashioned from a former residence of the Butler family, has rooms that are spacious, if a bit corporate, and the location is as convenient as it gets. Behind the hotel is an immaculate walled garden with a path leading to Kilkenny Design Centre and Kilkenny Castle. 16 Patrick Street (butler.ie).

Pembroke Hotel, just steps from Kilkenny Castle, looks a bit like the Ikea catalog come to life. 11 Patrick Street (kilkenny pembrokehotel.com). —N.C.

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revelation, but it wasn’t sustained. Other people lived in the house now; we were in the way. My stomach hurt. Hank’s shoes were wet from the rain. In the smoky corridors of the mind, such realities are excluded; memory is exalted.

Later that week, we go for a drive around county Kilkenny—the region that includes both Kilkenny City and Thomastown, among other places along the river Nore—and come upon the most spectacular views. We pull the car over and look out at the great patchwork of green sloping down the hills and across the rolling land. Some of the surrounding tiny towns—Knocktopher, Bennettsbridge and Graignamanagh—are age worn but still have those defiantly optimistic, brightly colored doors.

We go to the ruins of Jerpoint Abbey, a Cistercian monastery of the 12th cen-tury. It’s raining again, which makes ev-erything more beautiful; the weathered gravestones scattered higgledy- piggledy across the vibrant grass glisten. As I walk among the dead, I think about the disappointment of my return, its stub-born refusal to yield more.

But then, slowly, over the course of our last days there, disparate thoughts come together to offer meaning. I’d hoped to use memory to travel back-ward through life. I’d wanted another chance with myself as a child with young parents; I’d aspired to some kind of reconciliation. Instead, I learned that I could not provoke or manipu-late my memory by revisiting its actual l andscape—and also that I needn’t have tried. This place holds far more power, and promise, in the grainy footage of my mind than it could ever o!er simply by my seeing it in the world again.

NELL CASEY edited The Journals of Spald-ing Gray. She lives in Rome with her husband and two children.

Hank and the landlady sit together, drinking fruit shakes and listening gamely as I try to unravel why we’ve come. I explain how this place made a dramatic impression on me—a super-ficial version of the truth—and I am curi-ous to find how it strikes me now. I recall some of the happier scenes: My sister and I gathered eggs from underneath the chickens in their coops every day, o!ering an anchoring sense of routine during our stay. We played often in what felt like our very own forest, with a row of trees creating a shady roof of leaves.

The three of us wait for the rain to subside—there have been daily downpours, living up to the Ireland stereotype—and then venture forth. Nothing feels familiar enough to hang on to as a guidepost. I see hens and geese in a fenced-o! part of the prop-erty, but I can’t tell where we might have gone to gather the eggs. There is no forest either, although we do walk across a field with a scattering of trees that o!ers a caress of familiarity.

When we finally arrive at the house, however, things start to come into fo-cus. We walk into the dining room, a long, narrow space with large French doors opening out onto the garden, and I feel a flush of recognition and relief. This is the room of my memory—where we sat for dinner, where I greeted my cousins when they came to visit, where I ran through the doors to play.

In my mind, though, the rest of the place had been all white walls and sharp angles, stern and sophisticated in the way that modern houses arrange themselves. But as we walk around, I realize that’s not quite right. The house is as bright as I remember, with sun-light pouring in, but is not as architec-turally severe. We go upstairs. I find my old bedroom. I stand at the spot where my mother and I once huddled together in my bed, both of us trying to allay our anxieties. I think about my dream again. You will be in our time. There will always be a ghostly beck-oning toward the past.

Is there value in re-encountering places from your history? I feel the experience fell short of what I’d ex-pected. The flash of recognition in the dining room had o!ered a moment’s

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The aftermath of surgeryWhat are the pros and cons of sur-gery? “On the plus side, mastectomy and reconstruction techniques have improved—and it’s easier to create symmetrical breasts if you do both sides at the same time,” says Attai.

“Many of my patients voice concern about the symmetry issue.”

The minuses: The surgery is major—most women can’t return to work for six to eight weeks. Reconstruction, if performed, brings a host of potential complications, including infection, leaky implants and capsular contrac-ture, a condition in which the tissue around the implant becomes hard and painful. “I tell patients they have a 40 to 50 percent chance of needing a fol-low-up operation,” says Attai.

If a doctor recommends surgery, it will probably be covered by insur-ance; if not, you may have to pay out of pocket, and if you have both mastec-tomy and reconstruction, the cost will be substantial—upwards of $50,000. Moreover, when surgeons perform the nipple-sparing version of the pro-cedure, the reconstructed breasts will look natural but will still lack sensa-tion. “That can be a blow to both your body image and your sexuality,” says Susan Love, MD, founder of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation and author of Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book. When researchers at the Mayo Clinic followed up with breast-cancer survi-vors who had chosen to have a double mastectomy, a quarter of the women said the surgery had had a negative im-pact on their sexual relationships and their feelings of femininity.

Still, a number of studies show that most women who have preventive mas-tectomies are happy with their choice.

“They may feel reassured by the fact that they’ve been aggressive about try-ing to fend o! a recurrence,” says Tuttle. Then again, those who opt for lumpec-tomy and radiation say they’re satisfied, too. “The key factor seems to be feeling as if you made an informed decision,” Litton says. “That matters more than which option you chose.”

GINNY GRAVES’s last article for More was “The Pills We Can’t Kick.”