Obituaries
About once a week, I buy a newspaper from a street vendor. Usually I aim for Friday because of the magazine insert, but we’ve had so much snow recently that prevented vendors from making sales I decided to pull out a dollar yesterday, a Monday.
When I got home, I glanced at the front page and noted a name in the obituaries that looked familiar. I turned the page and indeed Manuela’s smile in a fine color photo greeted me.
She was a friend of a friend, an elder from Latin America, who reminded me some of my father. She could talk nonstop, mostly of laments. My father’s laments were reduced in later years to coyotes, rye in the wheat, and one other that I no longer remember. Manuela had different ones, plus her love for Jesus and the Virgin Mary. And, like with my father, I saw her deep love of life expressed in her stories. Take away the stories, and these were simply two people who had adventures and great engagement with life.
The obituary, of course, doesn’t mention the laments. It celebrates her life differently--travel, exquisite embroidery technique taught to her by the nuns in the orphanage where she was raised, the bounty of knitted goods she donated to charities, the children she helped raise in two wealthy families. And, in her own words, how she considered her “true mother” to be the Blessed Virgin.
For a few years some time back, I worried how my obituary would read. I come from a family who did things--president of this, on the board of that, organizer of these other things. Mine, I feared, would say, “She liked to garden.” Or, “She liked to read mysteries.” A sort of flat representation of a life that has been used particularly to describe women who were seen in the role of mother, aunt, sister and not much else.
I knew at the time it was a reckoning with the choices I’ve made. Have I done all that I might have done? Have I fulfilled my “potential”? Buying into that tricky concept that comes from school report cards--“not living up to his/her potential”.
I’m glad to read this sparkly representation of Manuela’s life without a long list of offices filled or organizations supported. I like to think of an orphan from Latin America who chanced to travel the world and embroidered altar cloths and claimed the Blessed Virgin as her true mother. It opens up new ways of describing a life.
Manuela died on January 1, Feast Day of the Mother of God. I’m glad to think of her gone home into the arms of the True Mother. May she, and all beings who have come and gone, rest well from a life well-lived.
When I got home, I glanced at the front page and noted a name in the obituaries that looked familiar. I turned the page and indeed Manuela’s smile in a fine color photo greeted me.
She was a friend of a friend, an elder from Latin America, who reminded me some of my father. She could talk nonstop, mostly of laments. My father’s laments were reduced in later years to coyotes, rye in the wheat, and one other that I no longer remember. Manuela had different ones, plus her love for Jesus and the Virgin Mary. And, like with my father, I saw her deep love of life expressed in her stories. Take away the stories, and these were simply two people who had adventures and great engagement with life.
The obituary, of course, doesn’t mention the laments. It celebrates her life differently--travel, exquisite embroidery technique taught to her by the nuns in the orphanage where she was raised, the bounty of knitted goods she donated to charities, the children she helped raise in two wealthy families. And, in her own words, how she considered her “true mother” to be the Blessed Virgin.
For a few years some time back, I worried how my obituary would read. I come from a family who did things--president of this, on the board of that, organizer of these other things. Mine, I feared, would say, “She liked to garden.” Or, “She liked to read mysteries.” A sort of flat representation of a life that has been used particularly to describe women who were seen in the role of mother, aunt, sister and not much else.
I knew at the time it was a reckoning with the choices I’ve made. Have I done all that I might have done? Have I fulfilled my “potential”? Buying into that tricky concept that comes from school report cards--“not living up to his/her potential”.
I’m glad to read this sparkly representation of Manuela’s life without a long list of offices filled or organizations supported. I like to think of an orphan from Latin America who chanced to travel the world and embroidered altar cloths and claimed the Blessed Virgin as her true mother. It opens up new ways of describing a life.
Manuela died on January 1, Feast Day of the Mother of God. I’m glad to think of her gone home into the arms of the True Mother. May she, and all beings who have come and gone, rest well from a life well-lived.
posted by Forgive the Dream at 3:26 PM
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