It was the summer of 1992, and I had just joined the Catholic Church. Unlike my father, my mother delighted in my conversion. She was a devout Christian, a Moravian, who prayed daily for the souls of her children. Some of us, including me, had taken some wayward paths in life, and she was happy to see me find a spiritual home.
On the Sunday I was received into the Church, I remember thinking that now I could be strong no matter what life hurled at me. Because of their faith, some of my Catholic friends faced life’s trials with great courage, and I hoped to do the same.
Two weeks later, we discovered that my mother had inoperable liver cancer.
On the Sunday I was received into the Church, I remember thinking that now I could be strong no matter what life hurled at me. Because of their faith, some of my Catholic friends faced life’s trials with great courage, and I hoped to do the same.
Two weeks later, we discovered that my mother had inoperable liver cancer.
My siblings and I sprang into action. We took turns being with Mom and her husband Don in their home in Winston-Salem. In a desperate attempt to stave off the cancer, my brother Doug and my sister Becky devised a macrobiotic diet for mom. The diet didn’t affect the cancer, but the brown rice and vegetables so carefully prepared by these two did, I believe, bring Mom an easier death. We read scripture to her, prayed with her, helped her walk into the little garden space outside the house. One afternoon some Boonville friends visited her, and I can still see her there in the garden, entertaining them in her nightgown, laughing and telling stories about the old days, a lady to the last.
Her dying brought occasional friction and frayed nerves to the rest of us. Once, for example, I took my two oldest children to Old Salem, where we walked around taking in the sights of that miniature Williamsburg. In the bakery I bought some Moravian sugar cake and carried it home to share with the others. I put a piece of cake the size of a pea into my mother’s mouth, and her face just lit up. She’d been eating rice and bland food for a month or more by then, so you can imagine how that tiny nugget of sweet cake might explode in her mouth. When some of the others heard of what I had done, they acted as if I had just plunged a knife into Mom’s heat. It wasn’t a part of the diet, and they claimed I’d thrown off her nutritional balance.
But we made the journey, and when it ended we stepped ashore still loving each other.
We were all by my mother’s bedside on that last morning. Here some strange events took place. One of my sisters who had kept vigil with Mom during the night reported seeing a man in dark clothes walk through the bedroom and vanish through the door. She swore she hadn’t dreamed up the man, though as we all know, fatigue and shadows can delude us.
The next morning, Mom’s last morning on earth, I had just stepped out onto her deck to catch some fresh air when I heard a loud screech and an enormous owl crashed from a tree in the patch of woods behind the house and swooped across the yard in front of me. In all my years of traipsing through the woods as a boy I had never seen an owl in the wild. From my college studies of ancient history I dimly remembered the owl was for many ancient cultures a symbol of death, the keeper of souls who escorted the dead to the underworld.
Then there was the matter of my mother’s last words. She was lying on her side, holding my brother’s hand, and hadn’t spoken much when she suddenly whispered, “What I wish for….” She paused and then said it again, “What I wish for….” It was as if she was responding to someone who’d asked her a question. I’d give half of what I own to know to whom she was speaking and what she was wishing for.
Strangest of all was the religious medal. Nearly thirty years before, when my youngest brother Chris was born, the elderly Mrs. Stammetti from Boonville had given Mom a Saint Christopher’s medal. Mom wore a Saint Christopher’s medal the rest of her life. When she somehow lost the original medal and chain, she bought another in the Catholic store in Winston-Salem.
Before the undertakers arrived, I thought to ask Chris if he wanted the medal. He said yes, and so he lifted Mom’s head from the pillow while I removed the medallion and chain from her neck. I glanced at the medal, then did a double-take and really studied that little round disc, turning it over in my fingers and reading the inscription. This was not a medal of Saint Christopher, but of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
This discovery shook me a little. Mom died on September 8th, which for Catholics is a major feast day, the traditional date recognized as the Birth of Mary. For the past few weeks, I had prayed the rosary daily for my mother, gone to Mass three or four times a week, and asked for the intercession of Our Lady. Now there she appeared on the medal instead of Saint Christopher, a sign to me she had heard my prayers.
Here I must add I am a skeptic about this sort of thing. People who claim to have witnessed miracles make me uncomfortable. I’m not the sort of person who would find Jesus’s face in a casserole dish, and prayer for me rarely involves asking God for the impossible. When my wife lay dying in the intensive care unit at Mission Hospital, my children prayed the rosary at different times at her bedside. A nurse who saw them praying pulled me aside and said with concern, “They do know she’s not going to live, don’t they?” “They’re not praying for her to live,” I said. “They’re praying for her soul.”
At any rate, my inner skeptic would say that when Mom replaced her St. Christopher she just picked the wrong medal. For three years I operated a small Catholic store in Asheville’s West End, and those medals, though separated into different trays, were always getting mixed up. Buying the wrong medal would have been easy.
Yet I still see the hint of a miracle here. That medal could have depicted St. Jude, St. Rita, St. Francis, or a hundred other saints. But there she was, Mary, Mother of the Church.
When I dust Mom’s secretary, however, or fiddle with some of the papers stored inside, I don’t think about Mary, but I do think of my mother and her last great lesson.
Mom taught me how to die.
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