A year ago Saturday was the funeral Mass for my Mother, with her body laying in the coffin my family and I had built for her on the other side of the country. Her death was sudden and unexpected. Although 88, she’d driven on a Saturday afternoon to visit some friends who were under covid lockdown in their retirement community. Arriving home she’d fallen at the base of some steep steps while walking up to her apartment from her car. She had a minor fracture and was going to need a little rehab. After a few days in the hospital, she developed sepsis and was dead the next morning. “88 good years and one bad week,” was how my brother summed it up.
It was true that she had 88 good years, despite being married to a man who couldn’t keep it together and having to single parent two boys while working as a secretary. How could that be? My mother was an incredibly positive person who only digested what she sowed even if it did not always appear to be a happy harvest from the outside.
She wrote my brother and me a goodbye note a few years before she died and stashed it with her important papers. Within it, she instructed me that she’d like the words “Be Not Afraid” carved in her casket.
I used to think she was gullible or naive and, God help me, I exploited it when I was young. But no, she was something else entirely, she was good. She was not afraid because her perception of how the world worked was formed by how she worked, and the evil that is a part of our pilgrimage could cross her path – monstrously sometimes – but it could not corrupt who she was; it had no hospitable medium within her in which to grow.
My mother did not need to whistle when she passed a graveyard and I am eager to see her again.