When my mom turned 100, I wrote these words in this column:
Old, old age is something else entirely. Friends and spouses may be gone. Memories too. There is something beautiful in the resilience of the human spirit even after a century of life, yet it is characterized more by patience than rage. God’s will and time have not yet allowed my mom to put off her burdened flesh and ascend to brighter heights. She waits with good humor the destiny her faith tells her will come.
God allowed my mom to “put off her burdened flesh” on Feb. 21 of this year, two months after her 101st birthday. Mary Casilda died peacefully in her sleep. That itself was an answered prayer. This faithful woman simply slipped away. Almost as one rolls over in bed, she turned into her new life, one she had looked forward to for decades.
We don’t know what heaven looks like. We mortal beings cannot really fathom eternity. But we know God is relational. Hence the Trinity. Jesus had friends, went to weddings, wept at Lazarus’s death. He knows the human heart and its absolute passion to connect with another. This must be some component of the life to come. This is why my family chooses to believe that if she is now with God, that in some way mom is also now with her husband, Ted. She is with her son that she lost 68 years ago to a brain tumor. She is with her brother, a Trappist monk, who died 14 years before her. In other words, she is home.
Now she knows. Now she knows what before she could only see through a glass darkly, what we can only see darkly now who have been left behind.
As I wrote more than a year ago, mom bore the indignities of age with grace and good humor most days. She was bedridden, but watched the Mass on television. She never forgot the words to the Our Father and the Hail Mary, even when she might forget our names or not recognize our faces.
In our family lore, we will now recount the many comments she made out of the blue that seemed to suggest that during her last year the membrane between mortality and immortality was becoming porous, transparent. “The two men told me that I can’t bring anything with me,” she told us at one point. A dream? Angelic travel advice? She took it in stride, as when she recently started talking about her brother, who she hadn’t spoken of or apparently remembered in several years.
As a mother, as a wife, my mom lived her faith daily and simply. She was generous and caring, and her faith animated everything. She didn’t fear death, and when the Lord was ready to take her, she was ready to go.
When someone who is 101 dies, her survivors are both happy for her and yet still grieve. She had been through a lot. She had paid her dues and then some. We are grateful that we had her for so long and sad we could not have her still. We will miss hearing her say, “I love you madly.”
Yet even in this winter of sorrow, joy like a crocus reminds us all is not loss.
For as we prepared for her funeral, we were also baptizing our newest grandchild and her eighth great grandchild, Peter Francesco, into the Faith. (Can there be a more papal name?)
In a beautiful, old, creaky church in Pittsburgh, Peter’s parents and godparents renounced Satan and all his works and affirmed their faith in Jesus Christ on his behalf. We crowded around the baptismal font and participated in an ancient rite welcoming little Peter into our company with great joy. I like to think my mom was there too. She would appreciate the symmetry: A great grandson gaining entrance into our community of faith just as she was moving on.
And when we said we believed in “the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting,” mom was there as a witness.
Peter never met his great grandmother, but God willing, her spirit of faith, her joy in life, her appreciation of family will be evident to him in the witness of his grandparents and parents. Mom’s witness will remain, like some Catholic DNA passed on to the generations to come. This mystical body, this communion of faith, will continue to grow and thrive, bearing witness to what we’ve received in faith and handed on to the best of our ability. Amen.
