- Share This Post
- submit
- 8
-
Sparkle (0)
Father Guido Sarducci explains the meaning of life and the forgiveness of sins while I recall my mother and mourn her absence this holiday. We each have our own way with grief.
I'm not sure why Father Guido Sarducci is hot on the web suddenly. When I first saw him pop up in Google trends, I thought perhaps Don Novello, the actor who plays Sarducci, had died, but he's alive. And it can't be this IReporter linking Gov. Sarah Palin's geopolitical skills to Fr. Sarducci's school of thought because the reference is obscure and Palin's moved on to pardoning turkeys.
So, I was tempted to say, "Never mind" as Emily Litela, played by the late Gilda Radner, did frequently on vintage Saturday Night Live, sometimes even in the presence of Fr. Sarducci himself, but I can't. Even his name, Father Guido Sarducci, makes me smile.
I associate the dear father with not only my youth as a 1970s Saturday Night Live viewer, but also with my mother, Fannie Naomi Adams, who died on Nov. 12 of this year at age 81. Surviving stomach cancer, which had been in remission for more than five years, she lived past life expectancy, and our lives were enriched to have her longer. However, in her later years, she was not the mother I knew. She suffered from Alzheimer's and possibly dementia due to a series of mini strokes. In the last two years of her life, she did not recognize me as often as I hoped she would, but she knew me in her last days.
As she lay in the Intensive Care Unit, I held her hand and she looked at me with what I feared was the farewell gaze, that startling, intense stare through which the dying impart a gift to the eyes of the living, and she said, "I love you."
I knew she knew me as she had known me a few days before transfer to ICU and asked, "Where's your daddy?"
If she saw me and recognized me as her daughter, then she had a husband who was also my father. Otherwise, I was a friend, perhaps, or a "nice lady," and she'd ask her husband's whereabouts using his first name or wonder aloud, "Where's my husband?" At other times I was some stranger's "pretty child," and he was "that man" she didn't want in her room.
This last visit to the hospital was about my mother's fourth since I moved back to Louisiana in the summer of '07. In the winter of '08, my parents moved in with me and my two older children. So strange, it seems now, to write of her passing and know she will not be with us for Thanksgiving or Christmas. You know your mother must die yet think she is eternal.
Neither did she linger to celebrate her and my father's 60th wedding anniversary, which would have been later this month. A few days ago my dad began to grasp her absence. He stopped putting out two plates for breakfast and two plates for lunch and dinner. Yesterday we dragged him to a family dinner at my aunt's house, the home of one of my mother's sisters. He surprised himself and enjoyed the visit, and some of us told amusing tales about his wife, their aunt, a sister, their grandmother, my mom.
At the funeral Saturday before last, I watched him. He weeped briefly. Today he left the house on his own for the first time since her death, a short distance to the dollar store in search of cookies and to stretch his legs. When he returned, he told me that he's sleeping through the nights better, not waking to check on Mom or making sure she's not up and wandering.
I have weeped in short fits, mostly unseen by others. Mourning's been my loss of years with her when she lost memory of me. I don't know that wild fit of sorrow, but moments of sober reflection and the dry heaviness when waking. During the funeral, I almost released that gush of grief for which church ushers stand on guard, a daughter's sobbing or collapse as the coffin shuts, but my heart was disinterested.
The congregation sang "Blessed Assurance." I saw my mother and I riding in our family's
