Those Who Mourn

My mother died in 1990. Well, what can you say about that? I was a long time ago and I still miss her. I was a young adult living in Pittsburgh; I was cleaning a closet in my new apartment. I had a bucket of water and Murphy’s Oil Soap and scrubbing the floor in the tradition of Polish women everywhere. Then the phone rang, as it does when tragedy hits.

Because I had just moved, no one really had my phone number yet. These were the days of land lines, before everything moved at the speed of a blind snapping shut. A friend from my hometown was on the other end, telling me that my family was trying to reach me, that my mom had passed, that he didn’t have any other information. I should go home.

Well, that simply couldn’t be true. Couldn’t be: she was only fifty-seven. Yes, she’d been in a car accident recently but she was recovering. She was fine.

Then the police were at the door. Someone back home had thought to call them; they had my address but not my number. The police had the same message. You need to go home.

And I went home in a surreal flurry as obviously there was some mistake. But no. At home, there was my brother, holding my mother’s ring in his hand. My Aunts and Uncles were there, solemnly silent. Then the busy blur of plans and choices and caskets and clothing.

But let me tell you about Simeon Stylites. He went up on a platform sometime in the 400s AD, in Aleppo. He’s now venerated as a saint because he stayed up on his platform for thirty-six years. His living space was sixty-five feet in diameter and he did the usual saint diet: bread and water. He was besieged by visitors he didn’t want and had to endure their staring and pleading for blessings. But he had developed that knack for stoicism; that yearning for being alone with thoughts that very few of us can muster. We’re not philosophers. We’re no saints.

What takes people to such places of solitude? Who could endure it? Being alone for so long with nothing but thoughts? What must have come to him unbidden—it couldn’t have been ecstasy; I refuse to believe that. Surely there were demons, for what else is there for a saint to endure: demons, shadows, fears, the whispers that emerge from the soul’s depths?

Anyway, one of my uncles pulled a Simeon Stylites. He went down into the cellar; he had already gone down there by the time I got home. My mother had been his youngest sister; she was the youngest of them all, really, and he was twenty years her senior. He’d watched her entire life move past him.

There was a couch in the cellar. The washer, the dryer, the ironing board, shirts hanging on a makeshift clothesline. He kept the lights off. He just lay there, silent and ascetic. Cloistered in grief. Who knows what memories, images, voices, thoughts, came to him? He stayed down there until the day of the funeral; he could not be moved. We all tried in our various ways to nudge him: come and eat. Come see all the relatives gathered. The neighbors are here. But no. Simeon Stylites was driven to his monk-like existence by his rapture of the Beatitudes:

Blessed are they who mourn for they will be comforted.

Was my Uncle comforted down there amidst the laundry and clothesline and half-finished craft projects? Was he listening to us above, the good Polish women, readying the house for the wake, scrubbing, cooking, sweeping, trying to keep on living while he lay there in the dark, wanting us to go away, wanting to mourn in a silence sixty-five feet above ground. There was nothing like joy in God’s presence there for him, though.

My. mother had made a casserole the night before she died and my Aunt saw fit to serve it at her wake. There it sat on the table with all the other foods. And my Uncle finally came up the stairs. He sat in silence with the look of a saint’s resignation, the look of one who must continue to endure the world while knowing all the goodness and innocence is on the other side of it, and he ate.