Yesterday I went with my 88 year old mother to the funeral of her oldest friend, a woman she had known since grade school. I was sad for my mom, of course, but I knew that my tears — and the sense of desolation I felt in the church that morning — weren’t for her or her lovely friend.
Our families spent time together, so my sister and brothers and I knew Dorothy too (although we weren’t raised to call our parents’ friends by their first names — she was “Mrs. M…..” to us, and she still was yesterday when I sat with my mother and her friends.) She did not have an easy life. Her son Michael was born with a twisted leg and walked with difficulty, although he possessed every ounce of her generous spirit and her amazing smile. He became a skilled violinist and a Vincentian priest, and died much too young of a pulmonary infection. Her younger son developed juvenile diabetes, and endured a difficult divorce. Her husband has been in ill health for years and she cared with him with grace and devotion.
She had the most beautiful face, not a pretty face but a face so luminous with the joy of her love for her family and her friends that it took your breath away. I have not seen the woman in over 10 years, but her smiling face retains every wave and particle of her bright light in my memory.
My mother met her friend Dorothy when they were not yet teenagers. She knew her longer than she knew my father, whom she met in her late 20s. Dorothy knew my mother as a skinny girl with dolls; she knew my mother as a girl with an older brother in the war in the anxious times in the early 1940s when it wasn’t clear that the good guys would win.
I have never seen my mother dance, with my father or with anyone else. But my mother told me in the car on our way back from the funeral that she and Dorothy used to go to dances together. She was smiling when she said, “Oh, we had a good time at those dances!” I’ve seen photographs of my mother as a young woman, but I’ve never seen a picture of her dancing. I have no image in my mind of my mother dancing, never have and never will. But Dorothy did.
She knew my mother when she was a new mother, when they were both new mothers — Michael was born the same year I was. She knew my mother when she had four children in five years and a husband who was away for the bulk of six months every year. She knew my mother with an empty nest and as a new widow with grief so raw she couldn’t even speak.
My mother said yesterday, “After your father died, I would go to her house and she would let me in and I would just sit there in her living room or at her kitchen table. Just sit. And she would give me a cup of coffee or a little lunch and she just let me sit.” My mother said, “I don’t know what I would have done without her.”
My sister and brothers and I spent plenty of time with her then, of course. We worried about her, the four of us, and we talked a lot about what we should do or what she should do — move in with one of us, move to a senior living complex, invite my aunt to live with her. I remember talking a lot to her, talking and talking to her and I remember how she just sat there looking at us with dark and sad and empty eyes. I listened to my mother talk about Dorothy yesterday and I saw how all our words and our well-intentioned worry just banged around her like a loose shutter in a storm.
I don’t feel guilty about that. My siblings and I didn’t know anything 20 years ago about the unfathomable ways you miss a spouse of over 30 years, the way the pieces of you that meshed with the pieces of him get smashed and tumbled and broken so that you don’t know who you are anymore. None of us has lost a spouse, thank God, but we understand things now in the ways you often regret you didn’t when you were younger.
My mother’s friend Dorothy hadn’t lost a spouse then, either. But Dorothy knew my mother in ways we never could. Never will. And in ways that no person now living knows her. It seems selfish to admit that that’s what I cried about yesterday in church, but it’s true.
It must be hereditary, because my sister and brothers and I all, now in our 50s, have friends who have known us since we were children. Friends who knew us before we became the self we hoped to be, or became the self we prayed not to be, the self we became, the self we settled for. Friends who can see the whole arc and who know the beginning that we might forget or try to.
There were six priests on the alter at Dorothy’s funeral Mass, which I guess is how it goes when your son is one, and one of them said something that is a great comfort to me. (It’s fashionable to mock the Catholic Church, or even loathe it, and I know why that is and I won’t defend against it except to say that it is part of who I am and that, like many other parts of me and parts of everyone else too, if they’re honest, it’s a balm and a thorn and sometimes both at once.) He said that love never dies, which I know to be true but is one of those things that you should always be reminded of.
And he said that human beings do not belong to each other, but to God. He said that every person is a gift to us, and that we should treasure the people in our lives for the gifts that they are. But, he said, they are not our gifts to keep. They are only on loan to us.
And so I said a prayer last night for Dorothy, who surely got on the fast train to any heaven there might be, and for her family and friends, whose loss will surely live in their lives as brightly as her smile lived in her face. And I said a prayer for me, for the gifts that I did not treasure and for the ones I do and for the terms of the loan.
30,000 Days 