Friday, November 18, 2011

Lost in the landmine


January 18, 2008


This picture was taken at a centennial celebration of the 20th Century Literary Club to which Mama and I both belonged for a number of years. At the end of last year (we meet from October - May) Mama tendered her resignation, citing my father's health and her fear that he might have even greater need of her tender care when meetings resumed this year.

The first meeting of the new year was on October 21, on what would have been her 84th birthday, just three days after her death. I am the recording secretary for the club this year, and a thoughtful fellow member came by to pick up the recording book. She had called me to offer her condolences, and I remembered that this task needed to be done, and she obliged. 

Today was our second meeting of the year, on the one-month anniversary of her death. I tried not to think about it too much, because I was also the scheduled speaker for the month, giving essentially the same program I gave last week to another literary club without so much as a sniffle.

I don't know that it was -- I suspect it was sitting at the little round table in the back where she and I always huddled, usually with Joyce and her daughter Emelie, or Bonnie and her daughter Linda, or Jule and her daughter Carol, or Frances and her daughter Virginia -- that made something shift on its axis, but as I launched into leading the club in our collect, I was overcome and unable to recover sufficiently to continue.  As it happens, I was sitting with Virginia and her Mama, and Virginia moved over, placed her arm around my shoulder, and finished this beautiful prayer for me, the one we hear read every month at our meetings: 

"Keep us, oh God, from pettiness;
Let us be large in thought, in word, in deed.
Let us be done with fault-finding, and leave off self-seeking.
May we put away all pretense
And meet each other face to face -- without self-pity and without prejudice.
May we always be generous and never hasty in judgment.
Let us take time for all things.
Make us grow calm, serene, gentle.
Teach us to put into action our better impulses,
straightforwardly and unafraid.
Grant that we may realize it is the little things that create differences;
that in the big things of life we are as one.
And may we strive to touch and to know the great common woman's heart of us all.
And, oh Lord God,
Let us not forget to be kind."
~ Mary Stewart~ 1904



I was able to pull myself together finally, and presented the program, enjoyed a lovely lunch with the ladies, and went straight back to work. 

I do very well at keeping my vulnerability under wraps, of holding things together in order to reassure others that I am, if not fine, at least all right.  It was a very hard thing to cope with that wall falling away so unexpectedly today. It was bound to happen somewhere, sometime, and I am grateful that it happened in the company of others whom I know miss her, too.


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