One Year

Homily at Mass on the 1st Anniversary of My Mother's Death, Paulist Fathers' Motherhouse Chapel, March 5, 2021. A video recording of the Mass will be posted later today on Facebook.

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 fourscore and ten. 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 warned as a somewhat sickly child that she might not even make it to 16. Well, what do doctors know, anyway?

A person’s tombstone 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 in the dash between the dates. And 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, while being firmly rooted in the promise of opportunity which had enticed her parents and so many others to uproot themselves, like Abraham of old, and to put down new roots in a land of promise.

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. But it was not an easy time. It was a struggle, as she used to say, just to make ends meet. 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 their home in Westchester and then after my father’s illness and death a whole new life for her in California. It was a difficult challenge at her age to move across country. But how happy she was there, being near her daughter 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

My mother struggled, as we all must, 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.

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, extended to my mother as it has been to each of us, makes everything different from what it might otherwise have been. Having blessed my mother’s life, it now imparts new meaning to her death as, with confident hope and trust in God’s promises, we commend her forever to the new life of the Risen Christ.