Catholic

The children’s and young adult area of the Wallingford, Connecticut public library, where I spent a lot of time as a kid, was a basement with stone walls where I was able to sit in peace and look carefully through the books on the shelves to decide which ones to borrow. It felt private, calm, secret: you entered by a potholed alley along the side of the building, through a peeling wooden door, down some narrow stairs--and there you were, surrounded by low bookshelves and stone. It was the perfect quiet place to hunker down, pretend nobody else could see you, and figure out if whatever books you’d found on the shelves were any good.

I was drawn to mysteries, the covers of which would be recognizable to anyone of my generation: groups of kids shining flashlights into mysterious holes, girls in dresses stealthily approaching dimly lit houses at night. I also read ghost stories as well as Gothic novels, those in which a plucky young woman uncovers a secret in the family of the man she’d wind up marrying. I trusted that all these books would take me to the pleasantly dark imaginary place promised by the library’s gray walls and tiny windows.

The Catholic church my family went to then was dark and quiet too, mostly brown, the stucco walls a dull pink and the floors hard, uninviting slate. When I would kneel as required during various times of the Mass, all I could see was the back of the mahogany pew and the shelves underneath for prayer books and hymnals. I found church excruciatingly dull, especially during the week before Easter, when my mother made my sister and me go to Mass on three separate days and listen to the story of Christ’s Passion. Good Friday service was three hours long, and sad.

I did, however, enjoy Easter Vigil Mass, the night before Easter Sunday when the lights went off in the entire church and we lit candles so it was dark and light at the same time. Easter Vigil Mass also involved trumpets blowing when the candles went out and the lights flew on to announce the escape of Jesus from the tomb. I didn’t care as much about the resurrection as I did about the trumpets, because I had never heard such loud noise in the building all year, and for a change the church seemed happy.

****

In April 2019 my mother died, 95 years old and ready to leave: the day before, she’d told a hospice nurse that she had talked to my grandmother, who told her it was time to come home.

My sister Donna and I went to clear out her apartment the day after the funeral; when we raised the shades to let sunlight into the living room, I was struck by all the religious iconography. Our house didn’t have much when I was growing up—though there was some--but upon moving into assisted living, my mother went full throttle. Though there were a number of photos of my kids, her only grandkids, you had to wonder who had pride of place. Or maybe you didn’t: a painting of the Virgin Mary sat on a table in the entryway, so it was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door. Elsewhere hung other pictures of prominent religious figures, notably the famous one of Jesus Christ bearing his bleeding heart in his hand, extending it toward the viewer as if offering a drink. A crucifix I remembered from my youth hung on the wall; the top slid open to reveal tiny candles and empty vials for holy water, to be set up and used for last rites. There were Bibles, prayer books. Donna and I were superstitious about throwing these away, though neither of us had been a practicing Catholic since college. We donated them to the assisted living facility.

We also found, in a dark corner of a desk drawer, an old school photo of my son Nick. He was a favorite of my mother’s: she related to him because he too was reserved and shy, but when I told her Nick wasn’t just reserved and shy but had bipolar disorder, she had a hard time understanding that. Maybe it was just too scary. Maybe she didn’t know what bipolar disorder was. She certainly didn’t know about the speeding tickets, the therapists, the hospitalizations, the medications that didn’t work well enough, the voices in his head saying he was worthless. When Nick took his own life, Donna and I debated whether to tell her and decided not to; my mother’s Catholic upbringing would’ve made her think Nick was in hell, because “suicides go to hell” was church doctrine for many years. She died four months after he did. I’m still glad I never told her about Nick’s death, because I always would’ve wondered if the knowledge had killed her.

***

To my mother’s great displeasure, I stopped going to Catholic church when I was twenty. Though my parents had sent me to Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, and Catholic university, I eventually decided that any 2,000-year-old organization that had once burned heretics at the stake wasn’t really Christian. Then there was the problem of women not being able to be priests, as well as that of the Trinity: one God but three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I still don’t understand that, but the Catholic Church says you’re not really supposed to, that it’s a mystery, that you’re supposed to have faith. I’ve never been satisfied with that answer. There’s also “Why do bad things happen to good people?” which I’ve pretty much stopped asking.

***

When someone dies by their own hand, police treat the death as a homicide until the medical examiner’s report comes back. It took only a few hours to rule Nick’s death a suicide. We were then able to plan the calling hours and the funeral. The funeral director asked if we wanted the casket open at the calling hours. No, I said, absolutely not. “Are you sure?” she asked, as if I were going to be sorry about that decision eventually. Yes, I said, yes, I’m sure. I hadn’t even been able to muster the courage to see Nick’s body after my husband and our oldest son, Sam, found him in the darkness of our unfinished basement. Though my psychiatrist says it isn’t a problem, I had one friend who looked at me, concerned, when I told her I hadn’t been able to see Nick after he died. “Well,” she said, “that’s something for therapy.” I try not to think too much about that comment, though it’s difficult not to. I’ve made a note to remind my psychiatrist of the Pietà, Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding her crucified son in her lap.

***

In addition to the religious paraphernalia, Donna and I found my mother’s album photos from our first house in Wallingford in the depths of her dark closet. I can describe these photos from memory, particularly those of my mother herself. She had short, curly chestnut hair and green-blue eyes—when I was young people told me I resembled her. She was never as happy in real life as she appeared in her wedding pictures: huge smile, open arms. In the later photos she is sadder. I remember one in particular: she stands with my sister and me next to Niagara Falls, near one of those viewers you could put a quarter into and see the Falls up close. Donna and I are laughing. My mother is looking unwillingly into the camera, trying to smile but looking tired and unhappy.

This was probably because she’d recently lost a baby who was two months premature. In 1962 or 1963 it was hard to save a newborn with underdeveloped lungs. As my mother told us many times, the baby, whom my parents named Mary, died after 18 hours. I was no older than five at the time, and so don’t remember particularly well, but I do remember that for what seemed like forever my mother slept a lot during the day, the blinds in her room drawn to keep out the sun, and would scream at Donna and me if we made too much noise.

After she recovered, she took us to visit baby Mary’s grave every Sunday, making us get on our knees and pray: Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her… I liked the rhythm of that prayer, not so much the kneeling in the grass. On one occasion I had seen, perhaps appropriately, a praying mantis, which terrified me. “She’s a little angel,” my mother would say of Mary; I had some difficulty seeing an infant as a person who suddenly, upon death, translated into something more. Angels, as I thought of them, had agency. It struck both my sister and me as odd that when asked in old age how many children she had, my mother would say “three.” After losing Nick I thought this was perhaps less odd; then again, Nick had been nineteen. When my father died at 92, my mother’s last words to him were “Say hello to Mary for me.”

***

We held Nick’s funeral at the old New England Congregational church on the green of the old New England town where I live now. Except for weddings and funerals, I hadn’t been in any church for 40 years. The pastor, Jeff, was the chaplain the police and EMTs brought to our house when Nick died, and he offered the use of the church for the funeral. Church members were good to us, even though they’d never met us. They baked cakes for the post-funeral reception; they picked up the reception sandwiches at the grocery store; they made coffee. I decided I wanted to be one of those people who does things like that, who helps people she doesn’t know, so I started working with Jeff to get a mental health awareness effort going at the church. I’m still agnostic, but the church doesn’t seem to care. Women are ordained. I don’t have to call the pastor Father. There is no such thing as heresy.

The Congregational church building is light, light, light: huge clear windows, no stained glass, no dark pews or slate floors. Noise is tolerated and even welcomed: people use everyday voices to greet each other and mingle in the center aisle before services start; Jeff has to raise his voice to be heard when he calls the assembled multitude to worship. At Nick’s funeral he told the large crowd that he wouldn’t offer false consolation, wouldn’t tell them that Nick was an angel in heaven or that his death was God’s will: “No God I believe in would willingly wrest a 19-year-old man from this earth.” I wondered what my mother would’ve thought about that. Was she a better mother than I because she believed that praying every Sunday, beside a grave, in the grass, would make her child live forever, somehow? That filling her apartment with pictures of Jesus would make the sorrow go away?

I don’t know. I do know this: last night in my dream, the Congregational church was having a tag sale and I was planning to sell some old household stuff, but I had forgotten to bring it. So I went home to get it as the tag sale started. The house I found when I got there was small, dark. Nick was home; he had come back to life and was being given a second chance. I wanted to stay with him to keep him alive--to bring him out of the dark and into the light--though I knew I was supposed to get back to the tag sale. But then all at once my surroundings disappeared, and I couldn’t find Nick, and I was completely lost, and I knew I wasn’t going to solve some mysteries, ever.

Rita Malenczyk is a writer, English professor, painter, and printmaker living and working in eastern Connecticut.