Brexit could once again divide Ireland from itself. What is now a porous border between the Republic and Northern Ireland could become instead a guarded, passport-required wall. In Northern Ireland the unionists voted to leave, wanting to take England and their own country back to a place of xenophobic isolation that will work to keep the two Irelands separate. The Remain voters were in the clear majority (56-44) but, like Scotland, which was similarly out-voted in its desire to remain in the EU, both Northern Ireland and the Republic must now deal with the consequences of an England gone mad.

The best outcome would be that the Border Poll being called by Sinn Féin would unite Ireland, but the likelihood of that happening without factionalism or worse is remote at best. Ireland has just finished marking 100 years since the Rising of 1916. The Republic itself was only fully brought into being in the 1930s–such a new nation. The northern unionists have fought fiercely to keep Northern Ireland separate, and won’t easily let that go now.

July is marching season in Northern Ireland, culminating on July 12^th in a celebration of the Battle of the Boyne, William of Orange’s conquest of the Irish. This is typically the tensest time of the year in Northern Ireland, with the Orange Orders insisting on parade routes that take the marchers through predominantly Catholic, nationalist neighborhoods. These parades can turn ugly and violent, defiant rather than celebratory.

In some Belfast neighborhoods the walls which have separated Catholics and Protestants into segregated neighborhoods are still present. The gateways through them are propped open but the walls themselves have never been knocked down. This situation seems like a tinder box. If Ireland is miraculously able to find its way to unification as a result of Brexit the ultimate outcome would be spectacular. At what cost might this happen?

On this terrible day, when Americans can now claim ownership of the worst mass shooting in our history, when 50 people are dead because of who they love, how do you search for hope, or joy? This tragedy stems from prejudice and hatred, and is given permission to unfold by the NRA and by the politicians who refuse to stand up to them.

The history of Ireland is not immune from violence, of course. The British Black and Tans were brutal actors in attempting to tame the Irish ‘rebellion;’ in just one of many unthinkable acts, they drove a tank into the midst of a packed sports stadium and opened fire. The IRA and other revolutionary groups’ use of violence is more difficult to discuss: How could a republic be won without the brutality of war? Echoes of these times—the Rising, the civil war, the Troubles—are seen in certain practices today. When an armored truck comes to collect money from the local bank, it is surrounded by men with assault weapons poised. This is a grim and frightening reminder that the young country has suffered profound distrust and the warring of neighbors.

But today in Ireland the gardai, the police, do not carry weapons. What seems so casual in the U.S., a blue-uniformed cop strolling into Burger King for lunch with a weapon around his waist and several more stashed in the car that is idling in the parking lot, is unthinkable in Ireland. The term garda comes from the phrase an garda siochána, protectors of the peace. For all the reputation of Ireland as the country of outlaws, the Irish recognize, as Americans do not, that peace begins with each person, most particularly those assigned to defend it.

In November 2015 the Republic of Ireland became the first nation in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. This happened despite the vehement campaigning of the Catholic Church. Catholicism claims some 85% of citizens in the Republic, which a visit to any town in the country on a Sunday morning will confirm. Whatever Ireland has been through, even just in the past hundred years, and that is quite a lot, the lessons of war and intolerance have left a legacy not of hatred but of inclusion and peace, lessons it does not seem possible, on a day like today, for America to grasp.

My daughter and her wife are on the road this week. As they move from campground to campground, will they need to practice extra vigilance about where they are settling for the night, who is next to them, who might be watching, whose truck has a gun rack? Stay safe, I text. Stay safe.

Colm Tóibín was in Berkeley over the weekend as part of the Bay Area Book Festival. I missed the Saturday panel but was there for his conversation with his friend, U.C. chancellor Nicolas Dirks, on Sunday morning. The subject, loosely, was censorship and the state’s role in suppressing writers’ voices (Freedom to Write, Perchance to Dream). Tóibín has a big following in the Bay Area; many of us in the audience (learned through overhearing chance remarks or in conversations in the bathroom line) had heard him speak before. Even so, the woman giving the introduction, one of the founders of the festival, struggled over Tóibín’s name. Most Irish people say the word film as a two-syllable word, fil-um, so the name Colm becomes Col-um, but for anyone without an Irish accent the name would be one syllable, Colm. Tóibín is pronounced Toe-BEAN. At least as far as I know. It’s a puzzle why the introducer didn’t ask Tóibín how to pronounce his name (she tried Cahlumn, Cohlum, Toybin, Toybean and a couple of other variations in the course of her five-minute introduction) before getting up in front of a few hundred people, but I imagine the Irish are long-suffering about any non-Irish attempt to say anything Irish correctly.

Tóibín’s part of the conversation began with Lady Gregory and her role in establishing the Abbey Theatre in Ireland in 1904, as Irish nationalist fervor was escalating. For Tóibín, Lady Gregory seems an odd hero, just as she was an unlikely hero in the Irish nationalist movement. She, like her partner in the Abbey Theatre, W.B. Yeats, were Anglo-Irish, part of the Irish ascendency whose history in Ireland was one of land-ownership, not tenancy, Protestant not Catholic, ancestorily loyal to the crown.

Her friendship with Yeats began in 1894, two years after her husband (who was 35 years her elder and a staunch loyalist) died. Their friendship and working partnership lasted until her death in 1932, during which time Lady Gregory displayed contradictory attitudes about a nationalist Ireland, both embracing and shunning it. This ambivalent position was not at all atypical of many Anglo-Irish, who were often torn between what they perceived as the inherent unfairness of a system that so brutally exploited its indigenous population while retaining loyalty to their own families and their right to the land they had occupied for generations. Tóibín quoted Lady Gregory as saying, in response to why she was so passionate about the Abbey Theatre: ‘I just want to give dignity to Ireland.’

Tóibín also talked about his gayness, his teaching, Irish censorship of books and particularly film, which went on into the 1970s, and the Irish love of literature and books. He claimed (wrongly) that every town in Ireland has its bookshop, but it is true that every bookshop in Ireland has a prominent section at the front of the store that features books about Ireland or by Irish writers.

Afterwards a very long line formed for his booksigning. I’m not normally given to caring about having a signed edition of a book, but I was upset that I hadn’t thought to bring my copy of Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, his small biography of the woman whose life and motivations Tóibín continues to explore so deftly.

Wandering through the book festival afterwards, I ran into an old friend of mine. She had just come from Lacuna, an open-air library filled with 50,000 free books. She had three of those books in her hand, odd only because it is her husband’s enterprise, Internet Archive, that furnishes the books. She therefore at any given moment has access to any book she could possibly desire. How charming that she demonstrated her love for her husband and his work in this particular way.

Lacuna is billed as the largest free bookstore in the country. Who can dispute that?

Nodlaig welcomed us into her little house, the one she and Charlie built, on my very first visit to Ireland. Charlie was still alive then, and Nora and I visited with them in their sitting room, with Nodlaig and Charlie in their chairs on either side of the fireplace. We must have had tea, and Nodlaig must have asked gentle, prodding questions: Had we come far? Did we like Ireland? Did Nora enjoy living in Cork? Why was she there? Was the university a good place to study? I remember warmth and kindness and signs of sardonic humor. I would find out on my next visits that the sitting room was reserved for company most of the time, and that the life of the house was in the kitchen.

Nodlaig died today. Her death was hardly unexpected. She was 95, and had been in Sancta Maria Nursing Home for nearly four years after a couple of falls. Two or so weeks ago she had a mini-stroke from which she subsequently made what was reported as a miraculous recovery; one of the nurses called it Lazarus-like, I’m told.

I visited Nodlaig many times in the nursing home. She would be in one of the chairs lining the perimeters of the two reception rooms. Even though her bedroom was just down the hall, her pocketbook would always be nearby, usually on the arm of the chair, and she would be wearing a sweater no matter how stifling the temperature.  She would be dozing, and her head would have fallen forward. Sometimes she would stay that way, her chin resting on her chest, for the entire visit, answering questions but never looking up. More often she would sit up when I touched her on the shoulder, kissed the top of her head, and said hello. On my first visit each summer, each time soon after I returned to Ireland, she would say, Kathy! And then she would lean toward the people sitting in the chairs near her and say, This is Kathy. She has come all the way from America to see me. Always she did this, every summer.

We would talk about what I was doing in Ireland, where I was living (in the same place, the gate lodge at Ballindoolin). She would ask about my children. I would show her photos of my grandson and last summer, my granddaughter. When Nodlaig had the energy, I would ask her about her childhood in Mylerstown. These memories were still with her, although the short-term memories were completely gone. I would need to respond again and again that I had come from California, that it was very far away, that it took me a long time to get to Ireland. Nodlaig never left Ireland, not even to go to England. She was one of the lucky ones of her generation; she didn’t need to emigrate. As a young woman she found work in Dublin, and, in her 50s, she married a neighbor she had known since she was a girl, my cousin Charlie.

I will miss Nodlaig. Since she had to leave it, I have missed dropping in to her little cottage for tea and talk and Scrabble. I have missed the trips to the bookmobile and the lunches at the local pubs. Now I will miss the nursing home and her humor and her sweaters and her soft white hair and the chance to put my arms around her one more time.