She was Italian, intensely Catholic — did the rosary ever day. The church was breathtaking, really. Modern. Spacious. Filled with natural light, even though it poured rain outside the entire time.
The priest did a really moving ceremony— he knew my stepmom really well and so was able to really give of himself in a personal way. And he was extremely considerate of my dad’s being Jewish among all those Christians.
At the last moment, I took the priest’s blessing rather than take the Holy Eucharist. I don’t believe in transubstantiation. I was going to just consider it “Communion” but then changed my mind right when the priest was handing me the blessed wafer — I knew he considered it Christ’s body and I didn’t. I didn’t want to be disrespectful. But being around all the icons of Christ today and knowing His presence was there for my stepmom made me feel just really, really blessed and at peace.
A long, long day though. My dad is exhausted. He assumed I was staying another night and leaving in the morning, so I guess that’s what I’m doing!
It’s been an extremely intense time for me, for reasons I don’t want to blog about, but I wouldn’t have missed the funeral for anything. She was a wonderful woman and always really good to me.
Here’s the Lord’s Prayer Mass card for her and one of the stone angels from the corner of my stepmom’s casket. There was an Angel on each corner of the casket. Each of the (adult) children got one.
Yesterday was an intense day. That spiritual midway point, where my stepmom has already died but the funeral hasn’t happened yet. That process of closure hasn’t begun yet, and the huge change brought on by her sudden absence from the world is still raw.
But my dad is doing very well, all things considered. All of the families arrived yesterday — from California and Alabama, and of course me, too. So that kind of commotion is very healing, I think. The only real rough patch for him was that we had to go out to the cemetery and choose the headstone.
It was a very curious sort of feeling for me, personally, because now I’ve seen where my dad is going to be buried. And now I know what the headstone looks like that will have his name on the other half of it.
And I was also thinking, wow — could you have found a more remote cemetery? How on Earth will I ever find this place ever again?
Its a really pretty place, though. Old. Very arts deco.
The dinner last night was magical. There was that sort of happy, blessed feeling. There were 14 of us. Ranging in ages from 4 to 90. All of my stepmom’s children were there and her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren. And her husband and her stepdaughter. It was the only time, ever, that all of us were in the same room together, having dinner at the same table. I know for sure that the spirit of my stepmom was there with us,, feeling her own joy. The sense of bliss that was at that table last night was pronounced.
Today will be more difficult, since it’s the actual funeral. But the main part that will be overwhelming for my dad is that 2 special buses of people are coming— the nursing home where she lived for the last 11 years had to rent a bus to accommodate the amount of staff and patients who want to attend my stepmom’s funeral. She was so loved there by everybody. And all her friends from high school (!!) also rented a special bus. And my stepmom would have been 80 in a couple weeks, and it still requires a bus to accommodate all her friends from her girlhood who want to come to her funeral to tell her goodbye.
She was just so loved. She really was just the most caring, happy, loving woman.
I don’t know yet if I’ll head home later today or wait until tomorrow morning. Still playing it all by ear. Waiting to see if my dad will just want to be alone tonight or not want to be alone, you know?
Oh, and loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall that I’m not a big television watcher and so the TV set that I have in my family room is a 20-year old digital set, not a flat screen TV. I’d been thinking lately that I need to get a modern TV but the very last thing I want to spend money on is a television… Yesterday, my dad gave me my stepmom’s flat screen TV. It’s a really large one. It takes up the whole trunk of my car!
Okay, I’m gonna scoot. I hear my dad puttering in the kitchen. Have a good Saturday, gang. Thanks for visiting.
Naturally I’ve already had to make a rest stop, since I managed to drink 3 cups of coffee before I left. But here in the public toilet stall in the middle of nowhere, I of course checked my email!!
An excerpt from my novel Blessed By Light has gone “live” at that new literary zine out of Wales— The Finest Example.com! It’s a slightly different version of Chapter 18, titled “The Guitar Hero Goes Home.” I see that it already has some “likes” and a nice comment! As soon as I’m not in a public toilet stall, I will post the link to it!!
And I see that Nick Cave has also posted a Red Hand Files thing!! It seems to be about music and Kanye…
I woke up this morning and everything felt just a little bit better. I had a lot of complex dreams during the night, although I don’t remember any of them. But I just felt on firmer footing, emotionally, when I woke up.
It’s still dark out here, but I’m getting ready to go. Remembered to pack my high heels and stockings at the last minute, I won’t have to wear Skechers to the funeral, with my pearls and my black dress…
I leave you with the song that was in my head when I awoke at 4:30. I got the feeling the man was visiting me in spirit again. It wasn’t as pronounced as I felt it the other day, but I felt him and he made me smile. So I played this song at the breakfast table, and watched the cats eat happily, and I thought about life.
And for me, there’s also a lot of anger in it — in grief. I hate having to “work shit out”. In my brain, I mean. In my heart. I’d rather just, you know, go along my merry way.
I don’t like to be angry. And I also don’t like to feel crippled by grief. I’m guessing I’m the only person on Earth who feels this way…
Well, very early this morning, even though it is nearly freezing outside, a bird was singing outside my window. I knew it was connected to my stepmom. I just knew it. She was a very intensely spiritual person while she was alive and I’m guessing she hasn’t changed since yesterday, when she died.
I don’t know if she was telling me she was all right, or telling me to get my ass out of bed and stop crying. Maybe a little of both? But I know it was connected to her — that little merrily singing bird in the dead of winter, in the maple tree right outside my window. So I am going to try to make the best out of this day somehow. Then first thing tomorrow, I’m leaving to go be with my dad. Then the funeral is Saturday.
And I will make every effort not to shoot myself, because it would be so intensely inappropriate.
Meanwhile.
Here are a couple things that might be of interest to you.
If you are an American artist of any kind — writer, visual, etc. Please join the Copyright Alliance. It is free to join. Copyrights are once again coming under attack in the USA and you need to stay informed about what is at stake for the copyrights of your work in the age of the Internet. Join here. It takes 2 minutes.
On Instagram this morning, Stefanos Rokos announced that his art exhibition in Antwerp has been extended by popular demand. It will run again from January 22 -February 9th. These are the incredible paintings inspired by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ No More Shall We Part album. If you live in Belgium or will be traveling there, the details of the gallery and the exhibit are here.
Which reminds me, that it is now almost two weeks since there was a Red Hand Files thingy from Nick Cave!! (Perhaps the bird outside my window today was telling me to find a reason to go on living anyway. I guess we’ll see.)
All right. I need to go. I’m not sure my writing will yield anything productive today. I’m not sure if I’m going to even try. Yesterday was all about sitting at the kitchen table and staring; calling my dad every few hours to make sure he wasn’t falling to pieces — although he was.
I have no clue what today will be about. I’m so angry and I’m just so fucking sad. I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with life, you know. But I’m guessing that will change. Everything always does.
Have a good day, wherever you are. I love you guys.
She was my dad’s 3rd wife, but they’d been married a long time — over 30 years. She was a really sweet, charming lady. She’d been sick a long time, though. This last year was really rough on her.
Some sad and very stressful stuff going on with my stepmom (she’s been immobilized in a nursing home for 11 years due to MS). And my friend who works for NASA who is dealing with advanced cancer finished his chemo and radiation treatments yesterday, so now we wait to find out if it was effective or not. I also have personal things on my mind that I don’t want to blog about (if you can even imagine me not wanting to blog about something personal).
Anyway. It’s getting me off to a slow crawl around here today, even though I’ve been awake for hours already.
Yesterday, though, I took another stab at some of those TV shows that I wish I could learn to like — Mrs. Maisel and Good Omens, specifically. But I’m still not connecting. However, I jumped in at Season 2 of Fleabag and I loved it. So I’m just going to bypass the rest of Season 1 because, for whatever reason, I wasn’t connecting to it, even though I really wanted to. But I’ve already watched most of Season 2 already — it’s just great.
I also bought a copy of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens because everyone in America seems to have read it or is currently reading it and saying it is the best book they’ve read, ever, and that it is painfully beautiful. (God knows, I need a whole lot more beautiful pain in my life, but anyway.) So that arrived and I read the first page, but am not connecting yet because I have the revisions of Tell My Bones at the forefront of my brain right now. Plus, I’m still in the middle of reading my friend’s travel book about the Netherlands.
The new book has come to rest on my kitchen table for now. But this morning, as I was passing through the family room with my cup of coffee, one of the bookshelves in there caught my attention. And like a little light leaping out from a familiar dimension far, far away, Thoughts Without Cigarettes caught my eye.
Thoughts Without Cigarettes is the 3rd book from the left there. The red and black one.
I’ve read all the books in this particular row except that one. It is Oscar Hijuelos’ memoir. I have all of his books. I adore his writing style, his eye for passion and detail. (He died rather suddenly in 2013 at the age of 62.)
When I bought Thoughts Without Cigarettes, I was in Divinity School and could not make any headway in the book because I had to write so many papers every week for school. I usually had to write 4 or 5 intense academic papers a week, literally. Every week. Except for when I was taking that dreadful math class that I barely managed to get a low “B” grade in. During that class, I would spend each week trying not to shoot myself. Otherwise, though, Divinity School was all about writing papers (and reading a ton of academic books about the Old and New Testaments, Christian ethics, faith, devotion, Discipleship, etc., in order to write the papers). And I wanted to really just take my time and enjoy Oscar’s memoir, so I set it aside, waiting for the perfect time.
I have always had this dream that one day, I would have the perfect reclining chair, and the best reading lamp known to man, and I would have time to just sit there and read. Maybe even have a working fireplace, but that’s low down on the list.
For whatever reason, though, I have terrible lighting in this house. And no comfortable chairs at all. I either read at the kitchen table or upstairs on my bed, because both rooms have a lot of windows so there’s plenty of natural light — which also means that reading at night is really hard on my eyes.
So, even though I love books and I love to read — this dream of me and simple, joyful reading becomes so elusive. Also, when you factor in my dysfunctional relationship with Time itself…
Well, as I was passing through the family room before, I stopped and stared at the spine of Thoughts Without Cigarettes and I remembered how much I wanted to read that memoir. And yet here it is, years later, plus I’ve also gone and bought yet another book.
Plus, I had made this weird sort of sudden and inexplicable vow to myself that during the holidays, I was going to finally read Bertram Cope’s Year. (Published in 1919 and written by Henry Blake Fuller. A hundred years seems long enough to wait to read a book…)
I shouldn’t make these weird vows to myself, though. It just adds more pressure, right? Of course I did not read it. I seem to recall being very busy angsting all through the holidays, or something like that. I don’t know. (And, yes, “angst” is an active verb for me.)
But me and books. Aaaarrrrgh.
And now I have this vow for 2020 wherein I’m trying to have at least some sort of new inflow of ideas into my brain. Or perhaps “culturally current” is more the idea I’m aiming at. So here I am again, with limited time and at the crossroads of new vs. not-so-new: Thoughts without Cigarettes (2011); Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) — vs. the Crawdad one, which has already been out since 2018 but counts as culturally current because everyone is still reading it.
Well, I don’t know. I guess we’ll just be like Enya and see what Time eventually tells us about where we’re going and everything else under the sun. (Actually, I can remember clearly, walking home along Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan one chilly & grey afternoon, back when that Enya song was popular, and it was going over and over in my head, and I was thinking how much I really wanted a divorce and I didn’t know what I was going to do about that. Well, Time has indeed told us what I did about that, now that it’s 20 years later…)
But on that note, let me add — I am really loving Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary. (2008). But each episode is nearly 2 hours long, so I can’t exactly binge watch it. It’s going to take me a while to get through it. But it’s so interesting.
Okay. I’m gonna scoot and get this day underway over here. Have a great Wednesday, wherever you are in the world and to wherever the day takes you. It’s a strange sort of foggy, chilly day here. A good day for feeling moody and creative. (But keep in mind that it’s “Only Time” and it sure does gallop away.) Thanks for visiting, gang! I love you guys. See ya.
“Only Time”
Who can say where the road goes?
Where the day flows?
Only time.
And who can say if your love grows
As your heart chose?
Only time.
Who can say why your heart sighs
As your love flies?
Only time.
And who can say why your heart cries
When your love lies?
Only time.
Who can say when the roads meet
That love might be in your heart?
And who can say when the day sleeps
If the night keeps all your heart,
Night keeps all your heart?
Who can say if your love grows
As your heart chose?
Only time.
And who can say where the road goes?
Where the day flows?
Only time.
