Gently They Go
In the final weeks of my mother’s life, I took long walks along the creek near my house while talking on the phone with a childhood friend whose own mother had recently died. As I wound through the woods, we unburdened ourselves of bewilderment and grief. “It’s awful,” Katy would warn as sunlight flitted through the leaves and the creek gurgled. I pictured my mighty mom now frail, and she, silent on the other end, pictured hers. It’s been fifty years, but I can still see Katy’s childhood kitchen, her mother handing us glasses of Kool-Aid and peanut-butter sandwiches. “I loved your mom,” I told her. “I loved yours,” she replied.
We grew up in a Catholic village in a big city. The priest was the mayor. The dads were the ushers. The moms were the shepherds, herding us along as they greeted neighbors, delivered meals to the elderly, filled out forms, and spoke a mysterious language to fabric-store clerks who would then flip, cut, fold, and hand over chunks of cloth that our moms would turn into blouses, slipcovers, First Communion dresses. I can still see the women of my childhood seated at dining-room tables, pins between their lips, pulling fabric through sewing machines. They were teachers, triage nurses, camp counselors, activity directors, peacekeepers, lifeguards. “Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely,” writes the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind.”
I recently attended the funeral of one of the best of them—Corky, who was ninety-three. She’d raised twelve children and served as carpool driver, field-trip volunteer, Great Books leader, and adoptive mom to an immigrant family. She’d volunteered with Catholic Charities, Hmong Refugee Resettlement, and Meals on Wheels. In the later decades of her sixty-plus years of service to the parish, Corky headed up the prayer line, gathering prayers for an ever-replenishing roster of the sick and dying. And all this while carrying the heaviest sorrow a person can endure—the death of a child.
Fifty years ago, our grade school was playing for the Catholic school championship at a local high school. The sixth-grade game had ended, and the eighth graders were nearing halftime when an explosion ripped through the air. Fans, players, officials, and coaches looked up. A fifty-five-gallon drum of duplicating fluid had somehow ignited and was hurtling skyward. Suddenly, three figures appeared—whirlwinds of smoke running from the loading dock.
“They’re on fire!” one of the dads shouted, and we took off—moms, dads, brothers, sisters, all sprinting across the field toward the smoldering boys. We kicked dirt on them to put the fire out as ambulance sirens sounded. All I could recognize in the boy I tried to help were the whites of his eyes. Corky’s eleven-year-old son, Phillip, with burns over 90 percent of his body, was the first to die.
In 2016, Pope Francis met with Hebe de Bonafini, an Argentinian woman whose two children were disappeared by the Argentinian military in the 1970s. A fierce critic of the Church and of Francis when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bonafini was a controversial figure. Asked what he would say to her, Francis replied, “Before a mother whose son they have killed, I go on my knees; I do not ask her anything.”
I expect the deaths of women like Corky and my mother to level mountains and, as Auden writes, “dismantle the sun.” Deceased popes and cardinals lie in state and the world mourns, but when a ninety-year-old Catholic mother dies, a man who’s been at the parish for fewer than six years puts on a robe, says a few words, and then we go home. And every time I think, you have no idea who you had here.
I recently attended a First Vows Mass for the Midwest Jesuits. Ten young men dressed in clerics lined the first two pews on one side. Six or seven older Jesuits in robes sat on the other. Five more men—among them the novice master and the provincial—presided at the altar. It was a beautiful ceremony under vaulted ceilings with gorgeous music and sincere prayer. But the moment that struck me most was likely the least remembered: at the offertory, ten women, each holding her son’s vow cross, carried up the gifts. This small tribe of mothers processed up the aisle and handed the bread and wine to the priests. Tears filled my eyes. I wanted to stand and applaud. Each woman set her son’s vow cross on a small table and returned to her pew.
Though often overlooked, the Catholic mother is one of the Church’s superpowers. When I was a child, I’d watch my mother as she prayed, her butt resting against the pew. From my spot down the line, I could see that there was a presence more important than us here, that it was familiar to her, that it brought her peace.
I often encounter people whose childhood image of God is harsher than mine. They recall a judgmental, demanding, crabby old man “in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files,” as writer Anne Lamott puts it. When my children were small and asked me who God was, I wanted to set them up with an image that was real to them, that would balance out the male metaphors they would be bombarded with for the rest of their lives. So, thinking about their grandmother, I said, “God is the mother of all mothers.” They nodded their heads in complete understanding.
I sometimes discuss the topic of women in the priesthood with a Jesuit friend of mine. His response is always the same: the Church is not ready. “Really?” I ask. “Why is it such a leap of the imagination?”
In our mother’s final weeks, my siblings and I took shifts caring for her. We had a schedule up on the cupboard to relieve each other, but we rarely took breaks. Stunned by grief, we were tender with each other, moving about our childhood home, sleeping in the rooms we’d slept in as children, trying to get our arms around the looming loss. People visited, dropped off food or flowers. We made a chart for medications. Across the top, the days stretched optimistically into the future. Along the side, the meds dwindled from a hopeful list of daily vitamins to two methods of pain control.
Near the end, I would sit with Mom on the couch listening to Irish ballads on a Bluetooth speaker. She, who’d quoted Kipling and Yeats with a twinkle in her eye, was now silent. My heart was broken. I’d said all the words that now seemed small—I love you. We won the jackpot with you as our mom. Let us know what heaven is like and please be obvious about it. It seemed there was nothing to do but let God and Mom have their meeting. I held her hand and studied her face, her eyebrows, her nose, her lips. Sunlight slanted through the window, down her body, and stretched a path across the floorboards we’d been walking since 1964.
Like Corky’s, Mom’s funeral filled the church. Grandchildren came from all over, great grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends from our childhoods, parishioners from way back. In the very church where Mom was raised and where she’d raised us, we sang and prayed. We were led, as required, by a man, but we all knew in whom Jesus had been most manifest to us.
“More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world,” Millay writes. “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
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