I know you are not supposed to say things like this, but I am really mad.  How on God’s green earth do good people like Clem Taylor die of cancer while absolutely horrible people recover? Or never get cancer?  Or never drop dead of a totally unexpected heart attack?  Or never get run over by a drunk driver? Who’s sick and twisted plan is it that a smart, decent, hard-working, loving and compassionate husband, father and friend should die before bitter and selfish people without a kind bone in their bodies or idiots with loaded guns? 

A million years ago, when I showered and put on mascara on a daily basis, a colleague of mine — a very good man — died suddenly and unexpectedly.  I was working at the time as an attorney in a law firm in Washington, DC., where goodness and kindness did not then, as they surely do not now, follow anyone all the days of their lives.  A friend of mine pointed out to me that the firm included many unpleasant people whose death one would certainly never actively wish for, but for whom, if they should happen to slip their earthly bonds, you would not mourn long.  So why, he wondered, did one of the good guys die first?

Clem Taylor was one of the good guys.  Our hearts break for his family — and for ourselves, whose world is less of a good place without him in it. 

I made kind of an effort for St. Patrick’s Day yesterday, which is unusual for me.  I certainly don’t object to it — what’s not to like about beer, parades, and shooing out snakes?  I’ve celebrated it, of course, but I’ve never had any particular affection for the day.  I’m not Irish and while there were plenty of Irish folks in the town in which I grew up, the ambiance  of my home town (if my home town can be said to have “ambiance”) was more Eastern European and Italian.

But my mother-in-law was Irish, child of Irish immigrants and a product of New York’s lower East Side.  She was very proud of both of those things.  She wore a lot of green and she taught her sons those old Irish songs, all of which sound so sad to me.  At her funeral in January, they sang “Danny Boy.”  Everyone cried.  How could you not?

It was not an unexpected death, although it’s always sad to lose a parent.  And it’s funny how you know someone for a while and you think of them as fully formed when you first met them, even if it was over 20 years ago.  You don’t know how they grew up or what kind of young person they were, you don’t know what is was like to be the child of an abusive father or a single mother or the Depression.  You don’t know how they came to be strong, or charming, or how they found the resilience to take their first trip out of the country to India with two small boys in the 1950s when international travel was a real adventure and not just eight or ten hours in a full-flat seat in business class.

After my mother-in-law died, my daughter and I spent an afternoon in her apartment going through her photo albums and looking for pictures of her to put on a poster board for her funeral.  We found her high school graduation picture, her wedding picture, pictures of her with her sister during WWII.  We found pictures of her with Warren Beatty and the pope.  We found pictures of her in India, Poland, Switzerland, Rome, on ocean liners and airplanes. We found pictures of her with her grandchildren, and her friends, and her mother.

It occurred to me that we think we know the people we see every day or every week, the people we grow up with who are as familiar to us as our own faces in a mirror.  But we don’t.  The poster board with the pictures of my mother-in-law is still in my living room and every time I pass it I am reminded that we really don’t know people at all, even the people we love the most.

So yesterday I bought soda bread and green bagels for my children.  I braised chicken with a nice porter  and I made my version of colcannon — mashed potatoes with cabbage and onions I sauteed in butter.  In honor of a woman I thought I knew but didn’t.

I know it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here, and I wish I had some wild and shocking reason to use as an excuse:  I broke my leg!  I accepted a new job in Paris!  I won MegaMillions!

Except I don’t .  Nothing but life happened in the almost six months since I’ve posted.  Holidays and Northeastern snow storms, sick cats and my son’s senior year in high school, my husband’s (largely unsuccessful) back surgery.  My mousepad has a quote from Chekov — “Any idiot can face a crisis.  It’s the day to day living that wears you out.” And so it does.

When I don’t call my mother for months at a time — something that happens more often than I care to admit — I always tell her, “I’m so sorry I didn’t call.  But I’ve been thinking about you!”  But I know when I say that that just thinking about someone really doesn’t count.  It only counts if you pick up the damn phone and call them.

So, with all the best intentions, here we go again!