Yesterday, Sheila sent out an email that intimated that Kathy has very little time left. It was a tough day at work after finding out that for SURE that I'm losing my funding, and as I was driving back to work after lunch, I really needed to touch home, so I called Roseanne and left a message. When she called me back, we talked about a lot of things, mostly Kathy and Mothers Day, and how scary it was, especially for her at 70, that her peers were dying. I was struck with a real, palpable terror of her and Ethel dying, almost as much as when I would think of my mother dying. I was melancholy all day, and wanted to sleep.
When I checked my email when I got home from I Cantori late last night, I got an email from Sheila saying that Kathy had died minutes before, and there was a beautiful picture of her and Joe as preschoolers, with his arm around her. That's how they were throughout their life, weren't they? They were so close. She followed him pretty much everywhere he went throughout her life.
Now that I've watched my mother die, and have lived without her for more than a year, my heart is broken for Sheila, Nicky and Kathleen. And also for June, Maryann and Emily. The alone-ness and forever of death is such a constant ache. It never goes away. Never.
In America, when we talk about cousins, they are sort of on the periphery of our adult lives. But what I've learned, since I'm one of the few who has moved away from Cieri epicenter, is that time and space don't affect the love, the complete comfort and acceptance, the shared history, the remembrance of times and places and people long past. Now is forever tied together with yesterday in the person of cousins.
Who else remembers Kathy as a young teen? I do. As a candystriper spending long hours at my mother's bedside after her first surgery. As a shapely teen working at our inn together with Ethel and Terry. What a summer that was! So many memories of NH and Uncle Nicky and Joe and Kathy with us, the B Street group.
But what I need to say about Kathy right now, just hours after she has gone on to become her true self in heaven, is that she was only ten years older than me, but she is the only person in my life, including my parents, who took an active interest in my spiritual life. Even when I was about 10 or 12, before I started my major questioning and spiritual searching, she must have recognized something in me, and talked with me about God and her experience of Him, and she took me into her home a number of times so that I experience worship in a more engaging way. And she did this when the rest of the family was incredulous that she and Joe Boy had found religion at all -- the two sinners par excellence - one just a bad, worldly boy, and the other a crunchy granola type before it was fashionable - and everyone denigrated their lifestyle choices. But she was brave enough to either not care, or just bear it, and take a particular interest in me, a snotty, know it all, agnostic kid, and try to guide me towards God. No one else spent any energy on my spiritual life and my relationship with God. Just Kathy.
I'm not sure why she did that, except that we are family, and she loved me. She certainly did love my mother, and my mother always, always had Kathy in a special place in her heart, and was always, always grateful to her for her care of my grandmother and her care of her. And maybe some of that spilled over onto me.
I always thought that Kathy was beautiful. And when she lost her hair and was bald last year, I thought she was really, really beautiful. She always had lovely eyes and a beautiful smile. I didn't care that her lifestyle was different. I don't think anyone else did either, though we never spoke about it. I never cared that she became a charismatic Catholic, though the spontaneous prayer thing makes me very uncomfortable. Everyone else thought her lifestyle was a little weird, up there in Weare in a log home.... but I loved her home.
So, now, Kathy and Joe are together again, with so many other loved ones. I wonder if, when we die, we recognize each other in our transformed state? The urge to love flesh and blood family is so unquenchable - can it survive the presence of God? Does it just drop away in the bliss of being in God's presence? God, I hope not. I can't imagine that the terrible pain of separation would not be healed by the comfort of being together again in Heaven. But a joyous family reunion would take our eyes off the throne, wouldn't it? No matter what I personally choose to believe and choose to hope for, it won't be the reality of death and heaven. The only thing we mortals know for CERTAIN is that death will bring us to judgement and to reunion with God, and that will be such a joyous thing that everything and everyone else pales in comparison. It is beyond our human understanding.
But a void in me still hopes to be filled with a reunion with my loved ones. And today I have to add my cousin Kathy to that ever-growing roster. I hate it. Death sucks. When I meet Kathy again in heaven, she will say to me, "See honey? I *told* you God was real!"
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