A Healing Testament

This is not meant to be a criticism of the religion I was born into, but Catholicism never was “my bag.” My dear, departed grandmother would be crushed to hear that, but even when I was a small child, I remember thinking that “The Church” just didn’t make sense to me.

Mind you, I’m not going to tell you that this is how the church teaches everyone, but the lessons I learned in church were baffling. From telling my best friend I was better than her, because she was a Lutheran, to having to go to confession and make up lies to tell the priest, because no priest was going to believe me if I told him I didn’t sin (and if I hadn’t sinned, why was I at confession?) the experience of being Catholic was simply mind-boggling.

I did love most of the nuns, though. When Mom got sick, they were always there for us. On the weekends, we would have nuns stop by to clean our house and do the laundry, not that we really needed that, as Daddy and I, and sometimes my older sister Lily, took care of the house pretty well.

The nuns were awe-inspiring. I wondered, were they born different, or did they just grow up and choose to be so good that most people could not compare? I knew that as a Catholic girl, I only had two choices to look forward to, as a career choice: I either had to be a mother, or a nun. I was overwhelmed by that. I couldn’t imagine having babies, but I knew I’d never be good enough to be a nun. Thank goodness, I figured out somewhere along the way that I did have other options as well.

The nuns did more than cook and clean for us, though. They taught me to pray. “Pray for healing for your mother.” They would tell me, Sisters Lois, Brigid, and Ann Patrick.

So that was what I did. I prayed for my mother to get better. Heal my mother, I begged. (Not that we couldn’t handle the chores without Mom, but the heart and soul of our family was gone when she was away.)

Years went by. Mom didn’t get better. Every time we thought she was better, she came home from one hospital or another and got sick again, usually within weeks. For a few years, she had spent more time away than at home.

Our family fell apart, over the next few years. First, Lily moved out. Then Jim got in trouble and went away to reform school, for two separate stints. Then, he went to the penitentiary. He was later offered a deal, whereby he could join the military in order to get out of prison. He did, and went away to San Diego in the Marine Corps.

The year I graduated from high school, Dad moved out of the house and went away to school, as part of a State Vocational Rehabilitation program he qualified for by his “disability.” He was missing an arm, which had never seemed like a disability to anyone who watched him work, but the program promised that he could qualify for a better job than the public school custodianship that he had held for most of my lifetime, if he went away to school in another city. When he graduated, Mom informed him that she wanted a divorce, and she whisked my younger brothers away to Montana.

While Dad had been away, Mom and I had a falling out. We didn’t speak for more than two years, and she made no attempt to reach me, either before or after she moved away.

It felt very much like a fractured family, and I lived in my own dysfunctional home. Jim would visit from time to time, and we would talk about our childhood and how unhappy we had been, as if it was something we needed to acknowledge to one another. Jim and I had always been bonded by something which defied explanation. Both of us were left with an enormous anger and sense of betrayal, regarding our mother.

Mom stayed predictably in her cycle of sickness and wellness. She went back to work for the first time in nearly two decades, but it was a life she struggled with, and she was still hospitalized frequently while she raised the youngest two of her children, on her own. Evan went away to college, and during his freshman year, met a girl and got married, against Mom’s wishes. Adam finished high school and moved away to college, then joined the Coast Guard, leaving Mom alone.

She lived alone for a time, and she made friends with her neighbors and those with whom she worked, when she was able. She seemed to be all right, as far as any of us could tell. None of us was close to her any more, except for Lily, who lived nearby.

I’d turned my back on her for two years and shut her out of my life, but once I became a mother, we began talking again. I rarely saw her, but when my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1981, Mom had moved “home” to stay with Grandma. She kept her home in Montana, but took an indefinite leave from her job. In March of 1982, Grandma died, and Mom went back to Montana.

It was Christmas of 1986, when my mother and I were finally able to find some sense of peace, just before my son was abducted by his father. It was the first time that we had time alone together, and we used it wisely, talking at length about even some of the tough subjects we’d never dared to broach. I went back home, and when I called her, the very next day, to tell her that my husband had disappeared with my son, she was devastated with me; so devastated that when she asked what my plans were and I said I didn’t know… she said, “You cannot come home.”

She was being my mother, and not being cruel. She knew as well as I did that if I were to go back “home,” it would be a disaster. When I mentioned those words to anyone else, they thought it meant she was coldhearted. I knew better. My mother wanted what was best for me, and that meant staying and fighting for my life in Virginia, where I’d made my home.

Three years later, Mom was again living in my hometown when Jesse was finally found, there. I stayed with her while I fought for custody and got to know my son again. She and Dad came together for the first time in a decade, over me. Less than a year later, Mom would be gone.

My whole family came together, to be with her as she left us. It was during those few tarnished days, spent taking shifts at her bedside and in the ICU waiting room, that I felt my family was one again for the first time in a very long time. I knew that any of my four brothers would be there for me, no matter what. Lily and I clung to each other, the only women in the family. Even Dad wept, when Mom drew her last breath.

Three days later, I was surrounded by more people than I’d ever seen attending a funeral. After the Mass, I stood with my siblings, as strangers, one by one, approached and introduced themselves.

“You don’t know me.” Many of them would say. “I met her in the hospital in 1970.” Only the date was changeable, from one to the next stranger. Each of them would tell me what a wonderful friend she had been to them, from that day on.

When the service and burial had been done and my siblings and I had reluctantly sorted through her belongings, claiming small trophies we didn’t really want, as a substitute for the mother we had only begun to know, I got on a plane to return to Virginia, all by myself.

I felt my mother’s presence with me and I cried on her shoulder as we lifted off the ground. Through all the tears shed that day, in the airports where I had extended layovers and then staring out the windows of the plane at the wing slicing through the fiberglass cloud structures… I came to realize that, though my mother had been taken from us far too soon, my prayers for healing had finally been answered. It wasn’t the kind of healing I had prayed for, but it was wonderful and kind.

My mother had helped to “heal” so many people, in the course of her short lifetime. She wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do that, had she not met so many of them… in the hospital. She had to be sick, in order to help heal them. Not only that, but at the time of her death, she had a good, strong, loving relationship with her entire family, healed for the first time, at least in my lifetime.

She was sixty years old, with more friends than I could have counted. Even my father, her ex-husband called her his dear friend. As for her children, we lost a woman who we finally believed would lay down her life for us.

It was, indeed, healing of a most amazing kind.