Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Prologue: Encomium

August 30, 2002. I thought: Everything that is good about me is because of my mother.

I was in a church for the first time in forever. The church where I served its first-ever mass as an altar boy. The church where I received the Sacrament of Confirmation. The church where my parents celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The church where my sister got married. The church where I almost got married.

My father had said: Obviously you'll deliver the eulogy.

Question: How will I get through it?

How did you get through it, friends and family asked.

Answer: I don't know.

Everyone who cares about my mother, or cares about one of us who loves her, has had a certain heaviness in their hearts these past five years, as she has bravely battled this illness that ultimately claimed her body-only to ensure that her spirit could survive, like a million small fires inside of all our hearts.

It had been half a lifetime since I'd experienced this vantage point. Standing on the altar, looking down at a church filled with somber, expectant faces. All those years as an altar boy, hearing the words and receiving the ritual on its austere terms, the practiced movements and mannerisms that sought to convey the meaning-and purpose-of existence in sixty minutes or less. Carefully studying the priest who presided over the congregation, routinely looking up at those stained glass images that looked down at us, filling the room with an inexpressible piety and approbation.

Periodically I would be called on to serve a wedding and less frequently a funeral. Weddings were preferable for both obvious and selfish reasons: happy events, pretty women, and typically a few extra dollars for my time. The funerals were, in practically every sense, the opposite. I'd only been to one funeral before becoming an altar boy, and while I'd been old enough, at ten, to remember it, I mostly recalled how surreal it was to see my grandmother in an open casket, and the way my mother, her siblings, and their father wept; not being able to console them or fully grasp the depth of my own sorrow.

"Listen to the words," my father had told me, sensing my ambivalence before I prepared, at age twelve, for my first funeral mass. "It's actually a very beautiful service." I listened to him, and I listened to the words. I listened to everything, then. The passages and prayers-some familiar, some not-were carefully chosen, and went a considerable way toward impressing upon my adolescent mind how communal, and inevitable, this rite of passage was for everyone who drew breath. Someday each of us will watch a loved one die, and eventually all of us will pass on from here to there. That's where the meaning of the words-and whether or not you believed them-came into play. I believed the words; I believed everything, then.

The time was World War II, and like so many others of her remarkable generation, the baby girl her parents named Linda came into the world while her father was half a world away, honorably doing his duty for the country his own father had only recently learned to call home.

The first of seven siblings, she became in many regards a mother long before giving birth, a preparation that would serve her well when she became a young mother, suddenly several thousand miles from the family she lived with and then left, along with her husband, having the courage and conviction to make their way and create a life of their own.

She said: I'll never leave you.

Neither of us realized, then, that in addition to comforting me-like she always did-she was also preparing me for this moment.

She knew what it was like to leave. How, she must have wondered, did I end up here? First in the dry expanse of Arizona, and later just outside the nation's capital, while the rest of her family-brothers and sisters and all those nieces, nephews, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law-remained just outside Boston. All the questions she learned not to ask. Or, rather, she came to realize there are no good answers for. And more, if we're lucky in life, we don't need to ask after a while.

The reason I can confidently proclaim my mother is still around is because of the obsessions that infuse my identity: the passion for art and expression, the advocacy of justice and tolerance, the unending pursuit of honesty and compassion. These are inexorable imprints; they are, in fact, the essence of my mother, and her soul is in my soul, as it always has been, as it always will be.

Looking out, all my familiar faces: my father, my sister, her husband, my nephew and niece, the two aunts-my mother's sisters-who had been with us for those awful, awe-inspiring final two weeks, and behind them the confidantes, colleagues, childhood friends, grown-up acquaintances, friends' parents, and all the less recognizable faces I hadn't seen in so many years. This is the closest we come to witnessing our own funerals. The same people there to support us, smile and cry with us, becoming part of the moments that become memories; an event that connects us and brings us closer, no matter how far away or disparate our lives might otherwise be.

Looking out at my family and understanding that they helped shape me, that I wouldn't change anything even if I could. We learn to put away childish things and earn the chances we've been given, the responsibility to carry on the work that has already been done on our behalf. Equal parts fate and good fortune, we look at those familiar faces and understand what they have done, and what we need to do.

What will I remember? I'll remember everything. The things I've expressed and the things I saw, the things I still see in the eyes and actions of those around me. I will remember her as my first teacher and first friend, the woman who brought me into the world and allowed me to help her leave it. I will remember that soft, sweet silence, just like she had gone to sleep. Only more.

I think: Everything that is good about me is because of my mother.