A Black-Bordered Day

I woke with a snort this morning, and shuddered, and nothing much made sense. I hadn't drunk last night, why was there a ringing in my head?

The fact that d swung out of bed with an early-morning elegance that still blows my mind convinced me in a blink that the ringing was actually outside my head. Oh, the phone.

It's a truism that good news never wakes you up in the middle of the night.

It was The Call. The Call we've essentially been waiting to hear, and hoping not to hear, for at least five years. Certainly for the last few weeks, since coming back from the States this time.

My mother-in-law, Rita Bova, had passed away.

The Call was relatively kind - they'd had her favourite staff sitting with her as she went to final sleep, and, as we learned later in the day, Larry, d's brother, had had the chance to go and sit with his mom last night, as time ticked out. She'd woken up, and recognised him, and closed her eyes again...

It's funny - she was a more complex human being than most people realised. Most people, you and I included, only knew her in the last handful of her years on the planet, and what you knew if you remember only that was a kind of Miss Marple figure - frail, and elderly, and kind, and very, very gracious. She was also in pain, and more than that, in chronic discomfort, and trying to make sense of the tragedy that had devastated her family and ripped the golden heart out of her life. That was some of who she was - the grace was the legacy of old-fashioned Scarlett O'Hara style Southern gentility, in which tradition, if not in which circumstance, she was raised. The trying to make sense was the product of her strong Catholic faith, which got stronger, not weaker, the more disaster life threw at her. But you had to be with her at just the right moments to find the nuggets of sweet brilliance of the woman - having heard the story of my step-dad's famous nautical ancestors, she looked at me sideways, and a little wry smile played on her lips, and she said "So you're a pirate?" It was a name that stuck, and she always asked after The Pirate after that. Before I knew her, she was already so many things - she'd looked after her own mother for years, and repeated history has her meeting her husband in a local diner where she worked. She raised a family, raised roses, made a life as you do. There's more than that to tell, but to be honest, her story is not really to be told by a Tony-come-lately in a blog about losing weight. It's not in any sense the right place to do her justice, or the right voice to do it in. I miss her already though - there's something about her voice that will resonate with me for the rest of my life, and without her, I would never have met my wife. So I'm thankful for her life, and will miss her in her passing. It is perhaps the simplest mark of her way of living that those who knew her better will miss her more and more.

We spent the day doing what you must when this hits you - talking to undertakers, letting people know, being consoled, holding each other when the consolation, as it must, doesn't quite work. Our friends Lori and Dominic, with whom we stay when in the States, were en route to Minnesota for the graduation of Dom's daughter, Tori. Aurie, Larry's guardian, is en route back from Michigan, the Arcadipanes and hospicefolk are on the case (though we were sad to learn that Josie Arcadipane has had another heart attack since we left). We went to our local Catholic church this afternoon - an interesting experience for this atheist, mingling everything that might be claimed of a church in one moment. The priest was keen to find out if we were Catholics, and if so, why he hadn't seen us at Mass, and whether we had children and the like, but still, he offered condolence and consolation to my girl when most she needed it. So this atheist has nothing to say. Yeah, you can say this is how the mainstream churches play and win their converts at their most vulnerable, and I probably wouldn't argue with you, but the point is, when people are most vulnerable is precisely when they give, and what they give may not be true, but it is indisputably valuable in those moments. As an aside, en route to the church, we passed the usual band of shouty, you're-all-going-to-Hell street preachers, and this, surely, is the difference. These people offer nothing but punishment if you don't believe/obey them, and some putative joy if you do. Our quiet, vaguely acquisitive priest on the other hand, like many faithful people, offered to put himself between a human being and their pain. For that at least, I'm happy to salute him and his kind.

This evening was slower, less immediate and dramatic. There was Who, there was - oh yeah, did I mention - another salad (iceberg and carrot tonight), there was a moderately unfortunate Xenical incident and some associated laundry. And, so far, there have been seven miles of cycling. There's about to be another unfortunate Xenicalling, and more miles of mindless pedalling, before we try and find some sleep in a world without one of its more gracious pillars. Good luck is a weird concept of course, but we'll happily take any wishes for it as we try to move from today to tomorrow...