Islam on Hollins Street

I never really know if I want to talk with Eugene until it actually happens. Eugene is a kind of friend of ours, if you can call a homeless, crack smoking black Muslim your friend. Which I guess you can. And we do.

"Well, well, well," he said when he saw me from half a block away. I'd been avoiding him for a few days. He caught me leaving my house taking the dog for an afternoon walk. It was soft and warm and sunny out.

"King Richard, King Richard. You been sick or somethin?"
"My mom died Gene."
"Oh, Rich. My condolences. I'm sorry, if I knew I would'a got a card or somethin."
"It's okay, Gene. Really."
"When did she pass Rich?"
"Last day in March. March 31st."

Gene looks like a thousand bad alleys. His eyes are red, he stinks. He's carrying a bag full of god only knows what.

"In the Koran, you know, it say, "We each come from God, and to God we'll return. And in the same chapter, "Every soul should know the taste of death."

"How's your mom?" I ask him. "She still in the hospital?"
"She was but she back home now. I gotta get up there. I keep saying I'm gonna go, but I ain't made it there yet. So anyway, like I said, in the Koran it say, 'Every soul should know the taste of death."'

"How old's your mother Gene?"
"Seventy-four. She got diabetes, she legally blind...all kind of problems."
"How old was your mother?"
"Eighty-three."
"That's a good life, Rich. She wasn't young."

"I gotta go Gene."

"Ok, Rich. I don't know what to say. I'm sorry Rich. I don't know what to say. In the Koran, Allah..."

"Gene. It's okay. You've said enough. I'll catch up to you later."

"If I'da known I would'a gotta card or somethin," says Gene as he drifs away.

With Gene you never know who you're talking to. The man is broken but somehow he endures which makes you wonder... By which I mean when Gene comes into our house or our day, so much of the time we stand in amazement...he's smart in a street smarts sort of way, he's a scream a lot of the time and he pushes you up against yourself in ways that drive you crazy...Should I help this guy? Is he a prophet? A bum? If I help this guy, which I sort of want to do am I collecting chits on my way to heaven? Is he just a manipulator? A homeless street guy who's a little better than most? Who is he?

Gene's rap sheet: Thirty years in prison. Murder. Arson. Short stints in Central Booking for parole violations.

Last time he was in, he sent me this handwritten letter, gorgeous handwriting by the way, NO spelling errors. The short version? Send money.

Stairway to Heaven

I am back. St. Anne's Church... Baptism. First Communion. Confirmation. Death. I have hit for the cycle.

Our convoy pulled up to the front of the church and I wanted to not watch my mother's casket being carried up all these stairs because I'm afraid my relatives and the two guys from the funeral home will drop her.

A memory. I am all of nine or ten. Maybe eight. Who knows? I'm in the pew, most likely on my knees, for when are Catholics not on their knees and I can hear this amazing cacophony of voices above and behind me. But I can't see anyone. And these voices are, you know, orchestral and feminine and well, heavenly and they are most likely singing in Latin and I whisper to my mother who is kneeling beside me, "Mom, are those angels singing?"

I'm fifty-two now. It's April 4, 2006 and my mother is not beside me, but is being pulled out the back of a silver hearse and I am watching my relatives haul my mother's oak casket ("The heaviest casket we have") up these fierce, steep steps, and the day, as if on cue, was funeral weather; sunny, cold, blustery.

All the aunts and uncles and friends who are older now must find a way to get themselves up those stairs and inside... I watch my friends Lynn and Anne Marie help Lynn's mother Dot, a good friend of my mother, up the steps. I see my Uncle Renee helping his wife, Estelle. I see Aunt Lou, at 91 making her way alone, ahead of everyone. I steal a glance and my relatives in their dark suits have not dropped my mother, have made it to the top of the frigid steps and are moving inside.

We are the last ones in...The survivors. The husband, the daughter, the son and his wife and the last remaining sibling, Annette and her husband. We make our way up those windblown stairs, pull open the massive wooden doors, enter the vestibule, negotiate a few more steps and we are in and it is very nearly overwhelming, a kick in the stomach...

They have met us right at the door, like a trauma team racing to apply paddles to a recalcitrant heart. The priest is here right in front of us and my mother is in her closed casket and there is a cream colored fabric draped over her and those voices, those orchestral voices, they are above and behind me again, and they are filling this knave only now I know who they are: they are the choir we hired from the funeral director.

But they are still angelic and orchestral and moving and they are signing "Amazing Grace" which I had requested, because I love it, and because the nurse kept calling her that on account of the fact she wouldn't die, even after what seemed like forever without food and water.

And I want so badly to fold myself into Amazing Grace. I want to sob, to just let go and to touch my mother's casket and let those voices wash over me and give my self over to this moment. I want to cry like a goddamn baby.

But I have to deliver the eulogy. And I'm not going to fail.

I will deliver my mother's eulogy in this place, will deliver on my promise as her son, will honor her in front of her legions of friends and family. I have returned to this place where I'd spent a lot of time as a lost and befuddled kid who was flailing about in life and I am here to tell whoever is here to listen that I've arrived intact, in one piece and that I am put together pretty well, thank you, and I have written this eulogy and I will deliver it. For my mother. Who believed. Who never stopped believing.

And I have told myself this for weeks and so I don't give over. I close the door but leave it open. A crack.

And here comes the priest, and he is walking around my mother's casket, and he is waving his incense and he has these two altar boys with him and everybody has found their seat and they are waiting for us to make our way to the front. To the altar where my mother and her draped coffin will sit while we hold Mass and do the Liturgy, and listen to the priest tell us that "those who have faith will be far more able to absorb the loss than those who do not" and at his utterance, I check under the hood and find myself utterly, irrevocably without faith.

In fact I have less faith in these quarters than I would just about anywhere else.

My cousin's children. Rachel and her sister Michaela. They each deliver a reading, one from the New Testament, one from the Old (don't ask me what they were, don't know..we were just following orders) and they read perfectly. Beautifully. If you were their mother you would cry at the site of them, never mind everything else. Talk about faith. Anyway, my mother, who had no grandchildren of her own used to babysit those girls.

My time came and I took the long walk forward. I looked out at everyone and they seemed tiny and distant, too small for the space.

I unfolded my sheaf of papers that Linda had helped me edit to half the original length the night before.

"Good Morning," I said, my voice cracking. "Thank you for being here with us today."

When it was over we left our pew first and headed slowly to the back of the church and the doors... My sister, my wife, my father and me...a trail of tears in our wake.

My father could barely walk, his face a river.... My sister was on one side of him and I was on the other and we held him up and moved down the aisle. When people got a look at my father, they broke.

Outside my father-in-law found me on the stairs as we left. I went to shake his hand and instead he pulled me to him and I buried my face in his coat and sobbed. "It's a tough business," he said.

A Sense of Where You Are

Say what you will. I share your skepticism, believe me. I was having a massage yesterday. I was on my back, the masseuse was standing behind my head and she was holding my head in her hands for a really long time. She held me really still. Then all of a sudden I started to smile and almost burst into laughter. I felt weightless, as if I'd sort of taken a brief vacation from my body.

Now don't get excited.

I wasn't "looking down at myself" from somewhere else in the room. I was both on the table and sort of not on the table... I felt as if gravity had removed itself from the equation. And strangely enough, I then began to feel that I was on the same plane, sharing the same space with my mother. Not that she was there mind you. She didn't pop in for a visit or anything like that. It's just that I felt as if I'd slipped through a seam into some other place or more precisely, some other sense... Like I'd magically entered the back door of an odd house and didn't know how I'd got there. And it was utterly different from anyplace I'd been before. And I couldn't help but sense that I was sharing that place with my mother; as if she were somewhere else in that house...

The masseuse told me later that she felt my mother's presence too, although I think for her it might have an overdose of sandalwood oil.

Excellent massage with liberal use of sandalwood oil accompanied by "all time favorite" tunes of massage therapists everywhere: $60.00. Out of body experience with Mom: Priceless.

Reeking of sandalwood, my eyes burning from crying and incense and oil, I headed out the door and with my ever lovely wife, headed straight downtown for the Afghan takeout joint on Lombard Street.

The Luncheon

My father with his great niece, Michaela Gagne, Miss
Massachusetts for 2006.

Some years ago I sent my father a Father's Day
card. The cover had an illustration of a person
standing on one foot. Beneath, it said, "Life is a
balancing act."

Inside was a Gertrude Stein quote that captured
my father's fancy. Somewhat inexplicably, he
held onto the card and for years repeated that
quote to anyone who would listen.

As I try to reconcile the irreconcilable,
Gertrude seems more apt than ever.

There ain't no answer.
There ain't gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
That's the answer.

-gertrude stein

Christmas 2005

"How do you find your mother," asked my father. We were outside on my sister's deck. It was unseasonable warm out. "I don't know, she seems ok, not great maybe, but ok," I said.
"No," my father said. And he just shook his head, as if he didn't exactly know what words to put up. "She's not right," he told me.
"So what's the deal? What's wrong?"
"Hell if I know."

Three months later she was dead.

Eulogy

Good morning to everyone... Thank you all for being here with us this morning. You all have been so incredibly good to my family and we thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.

I should first say that no one would appreciate more the irony of my standing before you in a church pulpit than my mother. I’m not sure whether I should thank her for this or chastise her for putting me here...

Before I begin, I want to remember a few of my mom’s friends. My mother never forgot her friends and I think the best way for us to honor her memory is to remember her friends for her. Some couldn’t be here with us today because of their health, or they live too far away and some are no longer with us. I want to briefly mention their names and then I’d like to talk to you about my mom a little bit.
We’d like to remember
Eleanor Comeau who came for a visit recently and lives in Virginia.
Ethel Norton who lives in Ohio and has been a friend of my Mom and Dad for nearly 60 years...
Rita Laghasse who is at South Point nursing home and is a friend of my mother.
Friends of my mother that are no longer with us are:
Connie Mercier
Rita Gendreau
Amelia Geary
Connie Charet

It’s a great privilege to talk with you about a woman that so many people loved so very much. My mother’s too early passing is as shocking as it is painful. It is profound and difficult and life changing for all of us. As painful as this has been, the outpouring of love, affection and kindness expressed for my mother over these last weeks and months has softened our pain and been nothing short of miraculous.

As we try to understand our loss, I feel as many of you must feel, that we should pay our respects. But we also might simply pay attention: To who my mother was and what her life taught us.

My mother received the news of her disease and faced her death with a level of dignity so great I will carry it with me for the rest of my life. After her doctor told her that her disease was inoperable and that chemotherapy would help, but not cure her, she didn’t cry, or rail or ask “why me?” She simply said, “I understand.” She then asked her doctor where he had gone on vacation, if he had enjoyed himself and if his whole family had been with him. She finished her visit by asking if she could still take Tylenol PM. In these past weeks and months my mother did not issue a single complaint. Not even one.

I think that people feel about my mom the way they do is that she was a deeply caring person who was curious, funny and light-hearted. She connected. Even on her deathbed – my mother was a person who created deep connections with others...She understood a well known truth, that love is the fundamental human experience; it pervades all our actions, and is the deepest motivating force in life.

Her life was a great gift -- a lesson in how one person can carry the hopes and longings of other people -- and her dying has been a profound example of human dignity, in how we can take our leave with courage and humor... My mother was never as funny as she was in the weeks before she died. In her last days my mother taught me more about courage and life than any person could hope for.

One of my mother’s lifelong lessons to me was simple and powerful: She used to say, “You can be anything you want to be in this life as long as you want it bad enough.” I can attest to the power of that lesson.

My mother liked tea, wine, chocolate, scrabble, books but above all she liked people. She liked to work out. She was charming, smart and devoted. She was cool. She loved Book TV on CSPAN. When I was growing up, she was wild about college basketball, yelling at the TV... She loved small portions of good food and loved it all the more if someone else had prepared it.

My mother seemed able to change with the times but one thing never changed. She always remembered to care.

If someone’s mother was in the hospital, my mother remembered. If someone’s mother’s third cousin’s uncle was in the hospital, my mother remembered. If you changed jobs, moved to a different state, remarried or lost a spouse, she carried your sorrows, your dreams and your hopes around with her like a necklace.

My mother never wanted to impose on anyone for anything and it is no stretch to imagine her feeling guilty for having gotten sick.

A lot of you know that my mom was a maker of beautiful things. I have this picture in my mind when my sister and I were young... my Mom would be on her hands and knees, a dress or coat pattern laid out on the floor of my sister’s bedroom. She’d be holding a bunch of pins in between her lips as she pinned cloth to pattern for a dress or a coat or a suit. Later came these very beautiful tablecloths, Afghans and blankets made of patience and love and talent and more patience. You look at one stitch and the next one and the next one and soon you see the pattern of a whole life come into focus. One stitch at a time, one row at a time, one blanket, one friend, one niece or nephew at a time, she carefully, patiently and lovingly stitched together a beautiful life for herself and the people she loved and cared about.

My Mom was a world-class listener with a million stories – stories of kindness, of struggle, of triumph. Funny stories and sad ones. Every friend, niece, nephew and acquaintance was a story and every story was instructive.

My mom’s most impressive quality – her caring - was one that may have given her some trouble. My mom didn’t know how to detach so well.... It’s no small trick to know how to care deeply for people and to let go a little at the same time... The other side of caring is worry, and worry has a way of becoming a constant companion.... Like a lot of Mom’s my Mom was a championship worrier, and all that worrying took its toll...

Even though my mom would tell you she wasn’t assertive enough and had a tough time standing up for herself, she had an extraordinary and powerful will. I think my Dad can attest to that. Like many women she underestimated herself. She was far, far stronger than she gave herself credit for.

There are moments from these last few weeks that I will never forget.

My mother’s hospice worker was Mary Jo. She and my mother bonded on a very deep level. One night she told us, “Your mother is so strong it’s unbelievable. In all my experience I just don’t see this. After this many days, I just can’t believe it.” At the time, my mother hadn’t had any food to speak of in eighteen days.

Quite a bit later when my mother was barely speaking at all, Mary Jo came in to bathe her and she leaned in close to her friend’s ear and said, “Hi. I love you.” My mother whispered to her, “I love you more.”

Anyone who knew and loved my mother can only feel a deep sense of gratitude and relief that her suffering is over. I can tell you that the rest she has found has been deeply earned.

No one can presume to speak for others in a moment like this. But I know how much my father loved my mother and I have seen him struggle to cope with the loss of his wife of nearly 60 years. I have seen him cry and I cannot begin to imagine how he feels right now. He will need our love and support. My sister is as close to my mother as a daughter could possibly be. They are bound together – the way mother and daughter should be. She has stood beside my mother through very difficult days and long nights, holding her, lifting her, comforting her, making her beautiful... I saw in my sister’s devotion to my mother a deep well of love that was a crystal clear reflection of my mother’s being...When you leave here today, I ask you to hold my father and my sister in your thoughts and prayers...

We say goodbye today to a strong woman. A kind, lovely and gracious woman. I am proud to stand here today as her son. My mother made it her life’s work to live and love well, to make beautiful things, to make this world a better place, to love her children and her husband and her extended family day in and day out. My mother was a woman who never, ever stopped trying; to stretch herself, to keep learning, to stay healthy, to keep in touch, to nourish her own humanity and the humanity of others...Those are the lessons she leaves us.

I’d like to close with a brief and beautiful poem. It appears in the very last book of a very great writer. I never dreamed I would read this work at own my mothers’ funeral. It’s called Late Fragment, it's by Raymond Carver, and it goes like this:


And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what was that?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Our friend Jean was born on June 20, 1922. She was 83 years young on March 31, 2006, when she bade us farewell on a beautiful, soft spring day. Mother, you were truly and deeply beloved on the earth...We loved you more.

Had I the Heavens

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-WB Yeats

March 31, 2006

The sister, the daughter, the son, the husband, the daughter in law, the hospice worker who was as beloved as anyone...

The blue sky was blue, the March wind was surprisingly warm and her breaths came slower and slower and slower and then, as we all knew they would, they stopped. It was morning. 10:50 am or so. A Friday. TGIF. We had laughed hard right at the end. She, my mother that is, my mother who is dead now, was breathing but there were long, long pauses and we knew that one of those pauses would be eternal...And we were sure that this pause, this long, long pause that we stood taking in, the pause that made us hold our own breath, we were sure this was it, and so we waited and watched her and then poof!!! one last breath and the tension had built up and we just all laughed really hard because again, she had defied all the odds...no one had expected her to live this long, this many days after not eating...what was it now, fifty days or more without food, yet she hung on?

Every day the nurse came and every day, she'd say, "I probably won't need to come tomorrow," but the next day she'd be there in complete amazement. "I'm going to call you "Amazing Grace" said the nurse to my mother.

For at least ten days we spoke in whispers. We whispered in the kitchen. We whispered in the dining room and above all, we whispered across the bleak terrain of my mother's deathbed...at night, during the middle of the day, whenever. "She seems quiet now." "I wish we could move her head." "I don't blame him for everything." "This can't be happening." "I can't help thinking this is all a mistake and we'll nurse her back to health." "I asked her to give me a sign."

We stood for a while and Mary Jo, the beloved hospice worker - the one who said urgently, "It's happening," - quietly left the room to make the call. The nurse who'd left only minutes ago, was back. She placed her stethoscope onto my mother's stillborn chest and listened. Nothing. She filled out the pronouncement...

I found myself in the kitchen. Out the window, a half block away, was the schoolyard filled with running, playing children on lunchbreak. In the backyard, on the clothesline in the late March sunlight, wafting in a strong warm breeze: my mother's beautifully crocheted tablecloth.

It fluttered and flapped on this dreadful and beautiful day - the death of winter and birth of spring. "Remember me," it said. "I was beautiful once and I am your muse. Remember me."

I ran outside and took pictures for the first time in ages. The hearse was parked at the curb and two burly men waited in the front seat waiting for a sign; a sign that it was time to come inside and take my mother away from us.