During Lent, we look behind the pleasant facade of order and address what lies behind it.
Oy.
Great Lent has begun. In the Orthodox Church, the first week of the fast is called “Clean Week” as we begin by abstaining from meat, dairy, eggs, and even fish, and we “clean” our lives from the secular distractions which encumber us. However, I didn’t know until I was an adult that some families also have the custom of cleaning everything in the house this week.
This is the week to remove wax from your favorite black dress, to mend the sofa cushions to address blatant and latent messes, and to set aright all that is in disorder. (Um, see above.)
My husband is a clergyman and I sing, so the linen closet will not be set aright this week. The services are more important. But just as we root out the sins that have stained our souls for so long that they feel like decor, we pick away at the things that defile and distract. I recently visited family in California, and I wore the woolen jumper with wax stains because I knew the hotel would have an iron and I would have the time to work on it. When I came home it was wicked cold and I accidentally left my coat at the hotel, so I was glad to have brought the dress and was glad to have had the chance to fix it.
Just are our homes have the stalagmites of things we had hoped to put in order, our lives have similar “drop and dash” places — the friend we need to call, the visit we need to make, the unwritten thank you notes. There are offenses we need to lay aside and things that we have done wrong and need to try to address and, if God grants, remedy. The Forgiveness Sunday vespers are only a beginning.
So. I made peace with a friend, my husband and I brought the boxed Christmas ornaments down to the cellar. I swept and mopped the stairs, and we skipped “Tasting History” and “Jeopardy” till next week and we spent the time together. I started re-reading spiritual books I had abandoned and made arrangements to fill all my prescriptions and set my medicines in order. These are the little things that turn out to be big.
Also, I prepared the kitchen for Lent following the rules of the church and now am preparing it for Pascha. Before Lent stars, we eat everything the week of the Publican and Pharisee to remember not to be proud of our fasting but to reach out to God in repentance for our sins. The next week is the last normal week for two months. Then we have a week where we can have everything but meat, all week long, to use up all the eggs and dairy. Then Lent begins in earnest. But during the weeks of preparation for Great Lent, I also prepared the pantry, buying less or no meat, and purchasing pantry staples and vegan treats for Lent a little each grocery trip. I comparison shopped for lentils and beans, made sure we had guacamole and Vegenaise, and bought potatoes to boil for the first day for my husband, since when he was in seminary all they had the first few days of the fast were boiled potatoes and black tea.
But now while we are keeping vegan, we’re also getting ready for the Feast. So tomorrow’s grocery order will contain sugar free beef jerky for our Easter baskets and a pound of butter, both on sale. I made sure to buy onions so I will have onion skins to dye my eggs. The mesh bag held to the refrigerator by magnets will fill gradually over the next six weeks.
This is the time to notice what we have overlooked. It is a time to brave the mildew in the dishwasher and the disorder of the towels. It is time to sort out our thoughts, discarding those that are unworthy and unkind. It’s time to clear the counters and throw out the expired sauces and foods.
But it is also time to anticipate the feast of feasts. Mothers quietly look at their children’s clothes to figure out what to buy for Pascha. Talented people embroider basket covers, while those of us who can’t do that are content to go look for and dust off the baskets.
In our lives, things accumulate. Things we meant to do. Things we meant to fix. Things of which we had hoped to rid ourselves. Great Lent is our chance to do this.
More important, of course, is to be in church and participate in the cycle of services that repeats each year. At the beginning of the fast, it is cold and dark. We trudge to church and stand even though everything hurts from Sunday’s forgiveness vespers, with people bowing and asking and granting forgiveness to their neighbors.
As the fast continues, the earth warms, the flowers appear, and our bodies adjust both to the change in diet and to the physical exertions. We hope to approach our Lord’s Resurrection leaner and cleaner, relieved of the burden of the resentments and judgements we had carried around with us.
But, it’s like we’re butterflies. A butterfly cannot see its back, doesn’t know that those itchy things it cannot scratch are emergent wings. The caterpillar is in a stinky dark place that seems like it will always be home.
If we do this right, we will be free. We might not know it, but we will be able to give joy to others through our lightness and beauty. And we will be able to soar, at least in our hearts, taking in the sweetness of flowers and flitting to kiss each other sand say, “Christ is Risen!”
But today is cold and bleak and church will take place after dark. We wear black. I am getting old, my legs get cold, and I have been wearing leggings and even sweatpants under my black skirts and dresses so I don’t shout, “Leg cramp! Leg cramp!” during the service. It looks like I’m praying in goth Salwar suit. But that’s okay.
I am convinced (and this took years) that God loves me anyway.
As the we near Pascha, the fabrics will become lighter, I will lose layers, and on the Feast itself, all the colors that have been suppressed will be freed, as we have been also.
Come to church, as you can, when you can, as often as you can.
Be part of the trek.
Make yourself a joyous space in mind, soul, and body, for the joy of Christ’s victory over death. The individual steps are not exactly fun. But they produce joy in the long run.
What a joy it will be, to behold the resurrection of the Lord!
My beloved dermatologist no longer takes my insurance, and at my March check-up she informed me that I had to see someone who was in our plan about what I had thought was a skin tag on my back.
There are not enough dematologists on my insurance, and the only way I could get an appointment this year was by signing on with the younger sister for a dermatology practice. The sister would be joining the practice in the fall and they could fit me in on November 10.
She was very young, very blond, and asked if it was okay if she had an even younger medical student observe also. It was fine. Someone has to break in the next generation. Both of them agreed that the skin tag was actually basal cell carcinoma, and what was that thing on my face?
The thing on my face was new, and I assumed it was from my CPAP machine. The doctor and the student agreed that it probably wasn’t, and asked her older sister to come in and verify.
The sister, also very young and blond and enthusastic, agreed that it also was probably basal cell and they biopsied both places and without so much as a “by your leave” took out something that looked (and felt!) like a small blowtorch for making, say, creme brulee, and froze what she said was a pre-cancerous spot on my arm.
I asked how hard it would be to treat these. About the thing on my back, she said, “Oh, that’s easy. We’ll scrape it and burn it three times and it will be gone!”
Um, okay. And the face?
“For the face, you will need another MOHs procedure, but it’s a much smaller spot and you might not need a skin graft. We can just pinch it shut and stitch it.”
Easy peasy lemon squeasy, if it isn’t your body.
The biopsies both confirmed that the doctor was right and on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving they will do the thing to my back. This could have been a disaster, but one son and daughter-in-law are coming to drive us to the home of another son and daughter-in-law for a multi-family feast. I will not have to do anything but be there, and while I probably won’t be able to lift for a while, there will be many people who can drape the grandbabies over me as I sit and observe meal prep.
I find out about the face next week. I’ve asked to work with the same doctor as before, because she was thorough.
As cancers go, this is probably the easiest. It’s in places that I can discuss, the treatment is swiftly forthcoming, and I trust this doctor and the ones I had before. As I have said so often about other matters, worse things have happened to better people.
I feel like I had to explain because I’ve been walking around with a bandage on my face and my clothing options post-procedure might be, um, liberating. Frankly, I had noticed that, now that I am sixty-two and a half, the skin on my face hangs looser than I would like. So, a subsidized partial face lift that also rids me of cancer sounds like a Very Good Idea, indeed.
I am grateful that it was found, I am grateful that there is something that they can do about it, and I am and ever will be grateful for your prayers. Good thing there is so much of me that they can cut!
Please swallow your beverage and put the cup down before reading.
Thank you.
(For those who don’t know, my husband is Fr. George. In the Orthodox Church a man should be either married or a monastic prior to ordination. When I went to see my brother his first year in seminary, I met his friend George. My brother, before his repose, became a monk. And my now husband joined the ranks of the married clergy. He wears hearing aids. I use a CPAP machine so I can breathe at night. Usually, this is a good thing. We have adult children and adorable grandchildren but they live in their own homes, and our house is quiet until I am awake and have had coffee. At one point I had been a choir director, and I still sing. You are all caught up.)
Well, glory be to God for all things. I survived waking up this morning. I had been up late working on something and needed to sleep some more after morning prayers. Fr. George came to wake me at the time I had requested, but I was having a really beautiful dream in which we owned a dog and I was drinking tea on the beach while the dog was doing dog frolicking things, and I fell back asleep again. On the third attempt, Fr. George spoke a little bit louder (not shouting) and I startled so badly that I sat bolt upright, knocking the CPAP machine to the floor. The mask and hose hung from my face. Not my first rodeo (yes, I have done this before, sometimes while singing “Do, la, fa” for an invisible choir), and so I knew what was going to happen next.
My husband does not wear his hearing aids when I am not nearby, as it is more comfortable to function without him. So when I said, “Oh, no, water is getting into the hose! I’m going to have to take it off and shake it over the tub so the water doesn’t go into my nose,” he heard, “Please help me and pick the machine up high.”
Which thing he did.
Water from the chamber went up my nose (I was looking up in horror, so the water was running down but my nose was turned up. My parents were right. Never turn up your nose at people!). There was a sort of lavage effect. Frankly, I had been a little congested from the leaf meal and pollen outside and the dust we are fighting inside. So, when I whipped off the mask and poured the water from it onto the floor, I also had to empty the water from my nostrils Handy box of tissues to the rescue.
My husband was frozen in silent horror at all this until I began laughing and he began apologizing.
It was time, really, to clean the machine, and boy howdy am I awake now. And I am no longer in any way congested.
I don’t recommend this treatment to everyone (always check with your doctor first), but my late brother was an advocate of the neti pot, and now, all these years of skepticism later, I have to admit that he may have been on to something after all.
Good morning, dear world full of beautiful leaves and people.
“A little nonsense, now and then, Is relished by the wisest men!”
Horace. Carmina. Bk. iv. Ode 12, 1. 27
“Annie,” my husband said, “if you don’t mind me asking, why did you order thirty rubber flying dinosaurs?” I had been very excited about my discovery, and showed him the web page from which I had ordered.
“The question,” I told my him, “is not why I ordered thirty flying rubber dinosaurs. The question is why I did not order sixty.” And so I changed my order.
My husband had been perplexed by both my choice and my enthusiasm. But, life has been challenging (and beautiful) with deaths and illnesses and problems (and miracles and trips to see people we love and beautiful gifts from unexpected places), and I just needed a reset.
Adding to this need was that between church feasts and school vacations, we had gone several weeks without Sunday School. Further, my husband and I were both sick for the annual Yolka, a Christmas pageant cum celebration for all the youth of the parish with songs, dances, and gifts. Watching the Facebook videos from home was both a comfort and a sorrow. On the upcoming Sunday, we would be back at church again, all healthy, and there would still be no Sunday School, because of school vacations, and it was going to be too cold to go outside, even for our Russian kids, who dress for the weather, and our American kids, whom we have to remind to wear shoes and a coat.
Test Run
My order arrived and I was rather excited to open the pouch and try the new toy. My husband came into my office to see what I was laughing about and I handed him one and showed him how to use it. He shot one up to the textured ceiling, where it stuck, briefly, and then landed on my head. He was utterly delighted and understood my pleasure but asked, “What are you going to do with that many of them?
I have many relatives, and many godchildren, and many grandchildren, so surely I will send some to them. But the most obvious answer was to bring them to church to share with the children, which is where the bulk of them went.
“BBNB”
In this latter portion of my life I have developed an acroymn which saves me from some (but surely not all) trouble — BBNB. It stands for “bez blagoslovenia nje budu,” meaning, “without a blessing I won’t do it.” Also, you can’t slip sixty flying rubber dinosaurs into church without somebody noticing. So I asked our rector for a blessing to bring the dinosaurs to church and share them with the children. I had planned to get them for the Yolka, but we had been sick that week, and besides, that was joyous and rauccous enough without this. Each day deserves its own blessings. Fr. D. may have been perplexed but he blessed me to bring them to church the following Sunday.
It was the perfect day for this. Most of the local young adults who had started college were still home for the break, and most of the big families that were temporary reunited were in church. After the Liturgy we have trapeza, a family style meal, and usually we have Sunday School and even adult Sunday School after. One of the things that I love about our parish is that the children are loved and have many things to do. There was a playground on the blueprints for the church. Our children stay in church for as long as they can and when they need a break their parents can take them to the hall, where the service is livestreamed. After church, many of them help with cleaning the wax off the floor. We have Sunday School once the teachers have had lunch, and after, the children are free to play. In good weather, the cbildren can go out to the playground and the older children can walk to the larger park behind the church property, where there are several playgrounds and a zip line. That allows the adults to talk, either in peace at the table or while watching their collective children. We often have Adult Sunday School in both Russian and English after the children’s lessons are launched.
But this week it was bitterly cold. The young adults went up to the choir, where the littles are forbidden as they have been known to eat all the cough drops. The youngest children played with toys and the oldest of the young boys were huddled in a corner discussing Guy Stuff. I took two of them aside to show them what I’d brought and how to use it. The older kids in our parish sometimes come volunteer to help my class, and I love having them. Two of the boys came to see what I had. I taught them how to launch the dinosaurs, and soon we had a crowd.
The Rules
“Okay,” I said, “we aren’t going to point these at each other and we aren’t going to point them at the icons. But they should stick to the door, and they should stick to the walls.”
About half a dozen children ages two to twenty. still in their church clothes, launched their dinosaurs, some of which stuck to their targets and others of which did not. Then someone launched theirs into the ceiling, where it stuck and hung. Soon all the dinosaruces were stuck to the ceiling, and some of the youngest children cried, because they were not falling fast enough.
One of my helpers got the broom and dustpan and tried to reach and scrape the dinos down that way, but we all agreed that it would get the ceiling dirty. Another boy got the spaghetti tongs, and tried those, but he was too short. They tried boosting each other, but no one was tall enough to reach the dangling dinos. One or two fell to our feet, but the others were still hanging.
Then a group of the older brothers home from college for winter break came bursting into the connector. The younger siblings revere their older siblings, for the most part, and the young men were asked to help. They are all fairly athletic, and many have done Russian dancing. So they gleefuly lifted each other and flung each other in an arc toward the ceiling. The dinosaurs were being rescued and so far no one was hurt.
Two of the families have a large gap between the older children and the youngest, and both of the youngest sisters asked to stand on their siblings shoulders so they could help. They looked like angels at the top of a Christmas tree, but also like a chicken fight waiting to happen. They got down the rest of the dinosaurs and the child among us with the most sense pointed out to me that these toys now were embedded with dirt, and were no longer good for the children to play with. I quietly snuck back into the hall where the adults were still talking, the way adults do.
But one of the adults tried launching a dinosaur, and it stuck to the ceiling.
Fr. D. asked me to get one of his sons to bring the broom to knock it back down. “That won’t work,” I explained. “The ceiling here is too high to reach, and the broom will get the ceiling dirty. But I promise, it WILL fall on its own.”
He gave me the side eye but agreed to wait, and I was relieved not to see it on the ceiling the next Saturday.
But, there is an epilogue.
One hears the strangest things….
A priest from Russia who visited our parish in Texas in the nineties and arrived in civilian clothes was astonished when I told him that we didn’t realize he was Orthodox, as he had come with ministers from a local Protestant parish. “I have learned that in the Church, one hears the strangest things about oneself,” he said.
And now it was my turn to learn something new.
This is the time of year when we have the priest come bless our house with holy water. My husband is an Orthodox priest, semi-retired, so he shares in the task o blessing all the houses in the parish. He coordinates with the families, settles on a good time to come, and sometimes he goes on his own, other times I am also invited and generally there is a festive meal after. It’s really a nice way to get to know people better and to spend time with them. This year we went first to a friend’s house. She has a teenaged daughter, and so I brought both an appropriate hostess gift, a cross that attaches to the window with a suction cup so you can see it when you look outside, and something else. On a whim, I also put a dinosaur or two into the gift bag.
After the house was blessed, after supper, after dessert, our hostess opened the bag and when she saw the dinosaurs she was amused. I taught her how to shoot them and was going to tell her the story of shooting dinosaurs at the connector ceiling, but she said, “My daughter has these in the car and she told me the whole story! She said that the teenagers said that you and Batiushka like to lie in bed and shoot these at the ceiling and laugh!”
Um, we had not tried that yet, although now I most certainly do want to give it a shot.
A legend is born?
Great Lent begins very soon, and it will be time to be serious about our salvation and examine our lives and put away foolish things. Lent starts when it’s dark and cold and ends when Spring has arrived and flowers are blooming everywhere, and it seems the same with our souls, we start dark and learn to seek out the Light.
But for a little bit, it was just the season, just the weather, just the time, for a little foolishness, to be not just like the children, but among them.
It is important to remember that, in this life, all separations are temporary.
Tomorrow is the fortieth day after the repose of my sister Suzannah, and I miss her in death as I have often missed her during her life. Like any work of art, our relationship was marked by negative space.
We siblings come in two clumps of three. One is Joseph, me, and Danny, the first three, by my mother who died when I was eleven. Dad remarried when I was twelve, and the younger three – Jenny, Andrew, and Suzie – are much younger. Jenny was born when I was in seventh grade and Andrew when I was in twelfth. But we were part of their childhoods and they were part of ours, or at least our adolescence. I was no longer home when Suzie was born.
She was born after my husband and I got married. I was in Ann Arbor at a family funeral when she was born, and I missed her baptism because I was home for the first forty days of my own daughter’s life.
We lived downstairs from my family for a while, though, and Suzie was like a sibling to my daughter (though an aunt to my son, only 15 months younger). The three toddlers shared a double stroller, which they rode like a bobsled. When my husband became a priest and we were sent from Boston to Houston, I saw very little of Suzie but we kept up to date by our siblings (there were once six of us) and our parents. They told me how she related to a cartoon character named Webby Fairy. Her dance recitals and Yolka performances, her plays in school and out were the subject of letters, phone calls, and photographs. Fr. George and I had two more children, and we sent the same – school papers and photos, letters from the children and anecdotes.
Everyone knew Suzie was special. She was able to visit when my youngest was born, when she was 8. My Boston baby son turned seven while they visited, and all the children put on a performance in the yard and enjoyed a pinata and chaos. Suzie cried as they left, as did we all. When I went home to Boston see my father before his death in 1995, my oldest Texas baby sent a gift for her. I told her the story.
“Mom!” he said, “We have to get this for Auntie Suzie!”
“This??”
“Yes!” he insisted.
“Why?”
“Because it was the most beautiful thing in the whole store.”
I handed Suzie the package, at our family’s dining room table with Dad still at the head, and she opened it. It was a jade green feather duster. She seemed as perplexed as I had been at the store, so I explained.
“I asked what you could possibly do with it. And he said, ‘Well, if she’s ever sad, she can tickle herself with it. She can take it and go, “Doodly, doodly, doo!” and tickle herself in the face.”
Suzie smiled and cried simultaneously, and dutifully ran the feather duster over her face, singing, “Doodly, doodly, doo!”
I was able to come to Dad’s funeral some months later but there was little sibling time. Still, when I called, she had met many people in our Texas life and we had things we could discuss. Those were difficult years. Mom was going to school to get her teaching degree and was working while raising children in elementary school, high school, and college. Mom got a job at a Charter School that taught Mandarin Chinese, and Suzie was a member of one of the first few classes. The people at our favorite Chinese restaurant were amazed that this blue-eyed blond child could chat them up in their own language. Her favorite thing on the menu was beef on a stick, and whenever anyone from the family ordered take-out, then sent some home to Suzie as a gift.
By that time we were transferred to Connecticut, and I could see my family more. We came every year for Thanksgiving and every summer we all went to St. Seraphim Camp, the kids to be campers (and later counselors) and me to work in the kitchen with my friends from all over, though mostly from Albany.
I didn’t realize how our family traditions diverged until I showed up in Roslindale with my husband, four kids, and a dish of green bean casserole. Green bean casserole was my favorite food. When I was in fifth grade and we made a classroom cookbook, my mother cried when I asked for the recipe, because what I thought was a secret family heirloom dish was really a recipe from the back of a can of soup. My stepmom had been a Weight Watchers lecturer when she married Dad, and nothing from the recipe had ever entered the house. But in Houston I spread my wings and embraced all my heritage, and I could not picture Thanksgiving without it.
My siblings loved it, and it became That Thing that I brought every year.
Suzie invented traditions involving Christmas. I was there one year when they finished decorating the tree. Everyone held hands and called out, “Five!” I was perplexed. My brother Joseph explained that it was Suzie’s tradition – everyone holds hands and yells the number of days till Christmas, both when the tree is decorated and subsequently each night before bed. She also had certain things that were the right of The Youngest (always her) – putting on the final ornament, announcing when to open presents, etc.
Suzie could be demanding, but mostly the things that she demanded were good. One Thanksgiving she took me aside and said that yes, I may be close in age to her kids, but she was not my child, I was her sibling, and I should treat her as such. I thought for a moment, taking this in, and said, “Okay, Shortie.”
I was the shortest of us except for Suzie, and so she made her Kermit Face. My siblings were much better at teasing Suzie, having had more practice, and one thing they would say is, “Make your Kermit Face for us, Suzie!” This was the face that she made when displeased, and it did indeed make her look like Kermit the Frog when he was irked. Worse, when they taunted her about it, she always made that face, even when she tried not to.
At St. Seraphim Camp, Suzie and my brother Andrew were old timers, while my family was new. The camp is in Pennsylvania, and usually the school year in Texas started the same week as camp, plus we could not afford the trip. But the kitchen staff were mostly friends of my brothers and me, and our children soon became part of the life of things.
“Capture the Flag” was the highlight for campers and the nadir for most adults. After keeping the groups apart and having the campers go places in pairs or under supervision all week, on Thursday night the oldest groups tried to infiltrate each other’s campsites to gain flags without being caught. Yes, hilarity ensued, but there were also injuries as children in disguise (the boys wore headscarves to look like girls and the girls wore baseball caps to look like boys, plus they all wore black) ran into trees, tripped over rocks, and generally found ways to sprain and break body parts.
The year Suzie was sixteen, she won a scholarship to spend several weeks in Beijing, because her Chinese was just that good. She came home and went straight to camp, and she had a slight cough. She fell during Capture the Flag, and as I was her oldest relative at camp and had a car, I was assigned to take her to the hospital. Another camper had a wasp in his ear, and we were to travel to the hospital in a caravan.
But Suzie wouldn’t get into the car until she saw who won.
The camp nurse told me that there was a four hour window of opportunity to sew Suzie’s knee, after that they couldn’t do stitches. But we agreed that the boy with the wasp should be seen first. I had been up since five to go cook, and I started to doze. “Ann, wake up!” Suzie shouted. “You’re supposed to take care of me and keep me entertained!” I managed to stay awake until the doctor came. He said the cold was just a cold, but gave her an antibiotic to go with the stitches. Suzie was ambivalent about the scar (are we not all?). But at one of her friend’s weddings, I saw the bridesmaids all hiking up hems and sleeves to point to scars while trading Capture the Flag stories.
Suzie spent her senior year of high school in Beijing on scholarship. We were able to stay in touch through a friend’s internet there. Suzie and my daughter both chose to go to my alma mater, Wellesley College. I had purposely never pressured either of them to do so. I went to Wellesley because they could afford me and they had a good English department, plus a Russian department. Suzie and my daughter chose never to room together or take the same classes (except Russian 101) so they could stay friends.
My daughter plunged into music, and Suzie into campus life. Nobody was surprised when her class made her Song Mistress for step singing. My brother Joseph, who was teaching Slavic Language and Literature, was quite proud that Suzie had the highest Chinese placement test score of any Caucasian student in Wellesley history. But she chose to go into Drama rather than Business, and there was mourning in Roslindale. Still, drama was who she was and what she did. Her friends called her a Lighting Goddess, and besides driving up to Wellesley for my daughter’s concerts, I drove up also for Suzie’s plays. Once one was in the orchestra pit and another on stage for the same performance.
Graduation was beautiful. We missed Dad more than we could say (and we said a lot), but all my siblings and all my kids came. Suzie tried many, many different jobs after, teaching in Albany, working in downtown Boston, translating for a company that ran a technical contest from China and so much more. My daughter stayed in Boston, working various places. When Danny got married they were bridesmaids, and again when Andrew married.
As my children grew and moved out, Suzie and I both pursued Masters degrees. I got an MFA in Creative Writing and Suzie went to Emerson to get a degree in teaching drama. I joked that we were having a contest to see who could get the most useless degree, but both of us found the nourishment we needed for our differing muses.
When our oldest brother became a monk, Suzie and my daughter delighted in all the expensive sweaters and jackets he gave them. We gathered before dawn at Jordanville for his tonsure, and some months later we gathered again to see him ordained. He fulfilled all his dreams when he was sent to the Holy Land as head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem. We planned on making a pilgrimage to go, and to see him. But his first summer visit home, he had cancer.
Mass General Hospital became the new hip hang out. We siblings and Mom took turns sitting with our brother, and saw each other in passing. When Fr. Joasaph died, something inside each of us did, too. We are all missing an appendage we cannot describe.
Jenny got married shortly thereafter, and I was able to go to the wedding but was stricken with Swine Flu not long after. My body does not react well to loss.
Suzie and the Camp Kids were part of a pack, a generation. My first time at camp, my friend Tassia, who runs the distaff side of the kitchen, called out to two teens. “The garbage is filling up. Could you please take it out and put in new bags?”
I looked at her, surprised that she would call a camper for help so casually. “Those are Albany Kids, they’re all very good, they help a lot.” She was right. Over the years, the Albany kids took over the running of the camp. And Suzie married one.
Greg and Suzie had known each other for years. Greg’s mom is close to my age and we were both redheads, so when she visited her brother at seminary, people thought instead that she was Fr. Joasaph’s sister. He even called her Sis. Both of them had dated different people, but in between, they always spent time together.
Our late brother had helped form the Synodal School of Liturgical Music, which was originally held in Jordanville. All but one of us have spent a summer there. Suzie went after the wedding of my middle son, when she had just broken up with a boyfriend. The school is difficult and at one point she was quite downcast. Greg had been working for the monastery bookstore, and took her out to cheer her up, once, and again, and again.
On her way home from the school, Suzie visited us in Connecticut and showed us the book that Greg bought her when they went “bookstoring,” William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. I had never seen her eyes so bright.
“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “R2D2 is the villain, and when he’s alone on stage he addresses the audience in human speech, but when he’s with anyone else he just beeps and boops. But he beeps and boops in perfect iambic pentameter!”
She told us how she and Greg did this, and how she and Greg did that, and when everyone else had left the room she said, “So. What do you think of Greg?”
“Well, I’ve always liked him, and he certainly seems to know you well!”
“Then I don’t have to give back the ring?” she asked, and showed me her engagement ring. It gleamed. Her eyes sparkled more, but just barely.
It was a beautiful wedding. Everyone cried – bride, groom, family, clergy. The camp kids were the choir, and at the end they sang a piece from the Music School that had also, for other reasons, made each of us cry. The reception was at the waterworks in Brookline, with a steam punk theme. Our baby was launched, and soon had a baby of her own.
We moved to Ohio, to Cincinnati, shortly after the baptism, and forged a new life, me working with the Press and Fr. George translating as we settled into a parish that he didn’t have to run. It has been respite, and our time here has been productive and healing.
Suzie also was all about new beginnings. Greg found work at MIT, they bought a house in Methuen, and she wanted a change for the better. She started her own business as a life coach, in part so she could spend more time with Ella, and she decided to have another baby.
That’s when things went south for us all, as she became first disappointed and then alarmed. We learned more sad facts about endometriosis than I thought possible to learn. It had spread through her body and grew like kudzu in places it didn’t belong. Doctors scraped it from her lungs and microwaved it from her liver. Then like something from a horror movie, it turned from endometriosis to cancer. She fought it with poison and surgery, radiation and chemo, and it just kept spreading. Her doctors formed a team. “I’m not a Zebra, Ann, I’m a unicorn,” she said.
“You, my dear, are SPARKLY unicorn.” And she was. Despite her treatments and pain, she wrote, she worked, and she helped young women become confident and find the things they truly want. She worked when she was in pain and when she wasn’t, with and without hair.
But there were brief victories that she celebrated with panache. She and Genevieve went to Austria and had a “Sound of Music” tour. Suzie visited our parish here in Ohio, and we spent the day at a farm stand and ice cream parlor. As often as the cancer attacked, she fought it.
She had just finished a hideous course of chemo and was waiting for the results. First it was bad – the cancer had spread. Then it was good – they had isolated the thing that was making it grow, and formulated a drug to treat it with. She was supposed to begin soon.
But she got sick, and died (in the same hospital as my mother and in the same hospital as our brother) on my nameday. We had been planning to see each other the next Sunday. Her last message to me was, “I love you too, and looking forward to seeing you.”
I missed her memorial service in Boston, with family and church and Wellesley friends, as I had missed her baptism, because I couldn’t get there in time from duties here. But the Albany kids met her body at Jordanville for the funeral, and took turns reading the Psalter. Her friends who had sung her wedding, many now choir directors themselves, sang her funeral, and the procession of people walking up the hill from the church to the cemetery stretched all the way down, people still climbing when the family arrived.
My heart is melted by all the kindnesses shown to Suzie and to our family. Friends spent weeks with her, people gave more money than they could afford, people have driven Suzie to treatments and Ella to school. We spent an extra two days at Jordanville, fittingly enough for the Elevation of the Cross. I short circuited my phone when I spilled water in the guest house, and after that I also lost my voice. When we came home, I came down with Covid, because my body does not like it when people die. But friends rallied around us. The Sisterhood sent flowers, people brought food and eggs and paper towels and diabetic friendly cake. I am once again numbered among the living. The new phone works, my voice is returning, I can taste things and have no fever. It is time to be healed.
I have a turkey roasting for a mercy meal at church here tomorrow after the Liturgy, since the meal we shared most often as a family these past years always featured it. We will have a memorial service here. People will be gathering also at Jordanville and in Boston and everywhere. I know a lot of words, I use a lot of words, but I don’t have enough words for how moved and grateful I am. She might not have been a “love child,” but truly she was a child of love.
One of the things Suzie made me do was write her a poem each birthday.
Here is the last one, from when she was facing yet more surgery.
