"The Life in the Years"

My mother, Camille Franco, would have been 98 years old today. She died after a brief illness on March 5. A Funeral Mass in her parish in Walnut Creek, California, was planned - to be followed later by interment in the family plot in New York. But all that then had to be indefinitely postponed because of the pandemic. Grieving apart without the traditional ritual comforts of wake services, funerals, and burials is one of the many sad side-effects of this pandemic. Since my mother has not yet had a proper funeral Mass, her birthday seems an appropriate day to remember her liturgically at least until such time  as a proper Funeral Mass is possible.

So here is my Homily from the Memorial Mass for my mother at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 21, 2020. The entire Mass may be viewed on the Immaculate Conception Church Facebook Page and later on the parish website icknoxville.org.

Abraham Lincoln famously said: “in the end, it is not the years in a life, but the life in the years.”

My mother was blessed with both. She outlived her siblings and in-laws, surpassing the psalmist’s famous saying: “The sum of our years is 70, and if we are strong 80, and most of them are toil and trouble, for they quickly pass, and we vanish.” We are so used to people getting old now that we forget that until recently people did not automatically expect to reach such an old age. My mother’s generation generally did not begin life expecting to live as long as so many of them did. Certainly my mother didn’t, having been assured as a somewhat sickly child that she might not make it to 16. Well, one thing we all know is we don't know the future!

A person’s tombstone may be fancy or plain, but it always features a name and two dates – the deceased’s date of birth and date of death, separated sometimes by a little dash. More important than the years, however, as Lincoln reminded us so tellingly is the life lived over the course of those years. It is that life - lived in the dash between the dates - that imparts purpose to all that “toil and trouble” and continues to have meaning even after “we vanish.” Above all, it is in the life one lives that one becomes the person one will forever be in eternity.

As the only American-born child in a family of Italian immigrants, she inherited the heritage of the old world, reinforced by a brief but memorable sojourn as a child in the kingdom of Italy in the 1920s, while being firmly rooted in the promise of opportunity which had enticed her parents, her husband-to-be’s parents, and so many people’s parents to uproot themselves, like Abraham of old, and to put down new roots in a land of promise.

From her 20s through her 50s home was New York’s borough of the Bronx – often with typical New York hyperbole referred to then as the “Beautiful Bronx.” And beautiful it was – from the natural beauty of Pelham Bay Park and Orchard Beach, where as a young family we spent so much of our time in the summer, westward along the great commercial artery that was Fordham Road, where she did so much household shopping, to our typically pre-war apartment building, where we lived, and the great gothic parish church across the street, that set so much of the tone for that life.

But, before the Bronx, there was Macy’s! My parents were both employed by Macy’s in 1946 when they met there at the first big soap sale after the war. For my father, it was love at first sight. Soon he was taking my mother on their first date – to the Radio City Christmas Show. While they waited in line, my father serenaded my mother, singing the then popular song “All the Things You Are.” They were engaged before Christmas, and married two months later. And, as Macy’s employees, my parents sat under the lights for what seemed to them like forever as part of the background crowd for the cafeteria scene in the famous 1947 film, Miracle on 34th Street. Who knows how many miracles of love Macy’s made!

From a distance, we look back on that life we shared with her and all the people that were a part of it, so many of whom are themselves gone now. It was not always easy. It was a struggle, she used to say, just to make ends meet. My father held two jobs, and my mother continued to work part-time in Macy’s. Both he and my mother were “Saturday only” Macy’s employees, which did indeed mean that they worked all day on Saturdays but inexplicably also meant that they worked Monday and Thursday evenings! Those were long, hard days not getting home until almost 10:00 p.m. Since my mother had the same Macy’s hours, they could at least commute home together on the subway those late nights and back and forth on Saturdays.

I often think back to how much my parents had to work. And so I think it a special blessing that she got to enjoy as many years as she did – first, together with my father in the home they finally owned in Westchester and then after my father’s illness and death a whole new life for my mother here in California. It was a difficult and challenging decision at her age – 82 – to move across country. But how happy she was there, being near Linda and Nick and Claire and Laura. And all the friends she made there, so many friends, whom she treasured.

At my parents’ wedding, the priest would have instructed them about the life they were committing themselves to, in these once familiar words “That future, with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and its failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows, is hidden from your eyes.” No longer hidden but fully lived, all those hopes, disappointments, successes, failures, pleasures, pains, joys, and sorrows accompany her now to the throne of the living God and his all-purifying grace and mercy.

We all struggle in life with the contradiction between who we are now and who God created us to become – until united with him in his kingdom we can finally see all things from God’s point of view and so experience the full effect of God’s patient, life-long transformation of us by his grace.

For my mother, that process began in a parish church in New York’s Little Italy where she was baptized and first brought into relationship with the One who is the resurrection and the life, a relationship that he has continued to develop with her for almost a century now, flourishing in her final years in Walnut Creek's Rossmoor community and Saint Anne’s, Parish, which my mother cherished so much.

In their earthly lives, Martha and Mary and Lazarus had all responded to Jesus’ invitation by committing to him as to their own family. That invitation was extended to my mother at her baptism, as it has been to each of us, an invitation that makes everything different from what it might otherwise have been, and that, having blessed my mother’s life, now imparts new meaning to her death as, with confident hope and trust in God’s promises, we commend her to share forever in the new life of the Risen Christ.