Watching the World Cup I’ve begun to feel sorry for the children of soccer referees, especially when they try to pretend they’re too sick to go to school.
I was talking to a friend recently whose mother immigrated to the States from Tras-os-Montes, the province in the far northeast corner of Portugal. He said that when she goes to Portugal now, particularly Lisbon, she speaks English, as it's more advantageous for her to come across as a foreigner than as a hick.
My first birthday without the woman who made them all possible.
My mother’s funeral was held Wednesday at Trinity Episcopal Church in Easton, PA – the church where, after meeting my father, she gave up Methodism and joined the Episcopalians. In attendance were mostly family members: Her brother Jim came with his children from Lancaster; unfortunately her sister Jo’s health made it impossible for her to make the trip down from State College. But her niece Joanie flew in from California, as did her granddaughter Eileen.
It was the traditional Episcopal funeral service. Father Harbort spoke in his homily of mom’s kindness and graciousness, her faithfulness as a Phillies fan and as an Episcopalian, her insistence on wearing a hat to church years after it was no longer a requirement. Smiling, I looked down at my tie, one of my collection of Roosters that mom always called my “chicken ties.”
After the service the casket was taken to the cemetery in Phillipsburg, NJ – her life ending, as my brothers’ and mine began, with the crossing of a border. Then everyone gathered for lunch at Flynn’s.
Afterwards, Joanie drove north to see her parents and tell them of the day. Jo remembered that when mom became an Episcopalian she had announced happily, “My funeral will be just like the Queen’s!”
Yesterday I received a message from my old college friend Jerry, who remembered my mother, and my father, from Parents’ Weekend our freshman year. His note reminded me of a trip we took to Martha’s Vineyard one year after graduation. My mother had sent me off with some grapes, wrapped in a paper towel – to absorb the moisture – inside a plastic bag.
In the car, Jerry pulled out a snack his mother had prepared for him. It was a cluster of grapes, wrapped in a paper towel inside a plastic bag. Jerry wondered if there had been a training school in the ’50s that all mothers had attended.
My mother died yesterday, a month and a half short of her 97th birthday. You’d think it would be relatively easy to accept the end of such a long life, but the accumulated decades are precisely what make it so hard. Halfway into my 60s I had never known life without a mother – the sweetest, kindest, most supportive mother a son could have. All of which makes me extremely lucky, though I don’t feel it today.