Sometimes you need a reminder that life is fragile
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- November 23, 2018
- 1172
My mother, years and years before her own death, had a favorite saying she used when someone died.
“Now,” she’d say, “he knows the secrets of the universe.”
It didn’t matter if the person was famous or family. Mom harbored a deep and abiding faith in the belief that the end of one’s mortal existence was a gateway to the infinite.
Beyond that she believed the most enviable and eternal aspect of the afterlife was knowledge.
Of course, even before she became a college professor, Mom was already a teacher, having infused each of her three children with the thirst for knowing more.
She read to us in a soothing voice before bedtime, often choosing passages from Dickens or Melville, though she didn’t shy away from “The Secret Garden” or “Alice in Wonderland.”
Her mom-ness, if you will, was always a balancing act, equal parts scholarship and serendipity, and we grew up quite sure there wasn’t any other way to do it.
Faithful readers may recall this handful of her most memorable quotes, all of which have found their way into my musings:
“If there’s enough blue in the sky to make a farmer a pair of overalls, it won’t rain.”
“Cakes are done. People are finished.”
“Upper lights are gauche.”
“College isn’t a job factory.”
Every year around this time I cast my memory back to that Friday in November, 55 years ago, when President Kennedy’s life ended in a fusillade of murderous gunfire in the streets of Dallas.
I was in the third grade, a quiet boy who listened better than he spoke, an 8-year-old with a fondness for music and sports, a boy who liked school more than he let on and didn’t really mind doing his homework.
Mom was taking care of her daughter and younger son, both of whom had stayed home sick that day. Never one to avoid multi-tasking, she also was touching up the paint on the living room bookshelves.
Not having been there, I can only picture the scene in my mind: Mom with her paintbrush, my brother and sister on the couch, sniffling and sipping beef bouillon, watching TV, just another fall Friday in suburbia.
And then, well, you know what happened.
I don’t think Mom ever truly got over JFK’s assassination.
A lifelong Democrat, a Roman Catholic, a political activist who remembered how momentous an occasion it was when women finally got the vote, she was never the same after Nov. 22, 1963.
Something essential in her shattered, and those pieces of pain and loss calcified into something hard and angry and bereaved.
She and the president had a bond, something well beyond sharing the same age and the same religion and the same party. Like so many mothers that Friday afternoon, her faith in acceptable norms was threatened; what had seemed so right with John Kennedy in the White House was gone, suddenly stolen away, never to return.
That weekend, like most of you, I watched television for hours on end, though I did go to 11 o’clock Mass on Sunday and walked over to a friend’s house afterward to mess around with the electric train set in his basement.
So I missed seeing the execution of the alleged assassin on live TV.
And that’s probably just as well.
In years to come I’d be less and less liable to feel shock, having been inured by what went down when I was 8 years old. It was as if I’d grown a second skin, one that was more and more impervious to mendacity and mayhem.
Oh, there were still moments when I came undone, almost unable to cope with something so evil, so malicious, so heinous that I felt myself torn in two, one part knowing, the other disbelieving.
Dec. 8, 1980, comes to mind.
When I heard the news that John Lennon had been murdered, gunned down in New York City, I did what most of you did.
I listened to the Beatles, I called my friends who’d moved from my hometown and I visited those who were still around. There was comfort to be found in the simple communication of shared loss.
As it happened, Mom had less than a month to live, her battle with cancer nearing its end. I remember sitting with her at the kitchen table, not saying much, just sharing the same space for a little while, death lingering, still outside the door, but close, very close.
“I want to show you something,” she said that December afternoon, reaching into her apron pocket. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these since you were in school that day.”
She pulled out a pair of glasses and handed them to me.
“OK,” I said. “What about them?”
“Look closely,” Mom said. “What do you see?”
And there, on the lenses and the frame, were paint spatters, a few flecks of white that brought everything into focus.
I understood.
“These are the glasses you were wearing,” I said, “when President Kennedy was killed.”
Mom nodded.
“I never wore them again,” she said.
“But you’ve kept them all these years,” I said, handing them back.
“Of course I did,” she said and tucked them snugly into her apron.
Again, I understood.
Sometimes you need a reminder that life is a fragile, wonderful, difficult, bittersweet, miraculous gift, one that you never asked for but one that ought to be cherished and nurtured and shared.
Mom died on New Year’s Day, 1981.
Ever since she’s known the secrets of the universe.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page.