The End of the Road, Part I

The last time I was here, one year ago today, it was a bitterly cold, gray day. There was about a foot of snow on the ground, I remember, with a thin layer of ice on top. The short walk from our car, parked on the shoulder of the cemetery road, to their gravesites next to the white birch tree was unexpectedly laborious. The ice wasn’t thick enough to walk on. When we first stepped out of the car it held only momentarily before giving way beneath the weight of us, and then we sunk into the snow below, stumbling and sliding for a second until we found our footing. We quickly figured out that the best way to maneuver was to kind of punch through ice with each step, lifting our knees up high and stepping down hard and sure in our winter boots.

I hadn’t wanted to bring the baby out of the car (he was barely a month old), but Gene insisted. I was mad about it; it was too cold for the baby. Gene carried Chips from the car to the graves, and I’d had to carry Liam in his heavy, cumbersome infant carrier. I was mad about that, too. The baby weighed less than ten pounds, but together with the carrier he felt double that.

I remember scowling as I set the carrier down in the icy snow, and reminding Gene that the baby needed to go back into the warm, running car as soon as possible. Then I took Chips from Gene’s arms, stood him in the snow next to Liam in his carrier, and waited impatiently while Gene carefully opened his camera bag and meticulously adjusted the manual focus on his Nikon FE2.

I came across the black and white picture just the other day, while I was mining through all of our 2008 photographs, looking for shots to upload for a photo montage I was creating for Liam’s first birthday. I sat looking at it for a while, noticing things. You couldn’t even see the baby, for instance. He was swimming in a size-6-month bunny snowsuit, and the carrier was mostly covered by a big fleece blanket, anyway. You pretty much just saw the floppy bunny ears of his snowsuit, the hood of the infant carrier, and the big fleece blanket. Then there was Chips, my handsome two year old, still looking like a baby himself, still chubby and round, and all bundled up in his puff jacket and scarf and jester hat, wearing the black snow boots that were one size too big for him last year. And, of course, me, looking tired and mad. I realized that about summed up the entire year for me, last year: tired and mad, tired and mad, tired and mad.

I’d taken a picture of Gene and the boys next to the graves that day, too. I’d forgotten that. Gene must have asked me to take it. It was tucked into the envelope of photographs, right behind the one of me and the boys. I stared at that one for a while, too, secretly thinking that the tall metal flower pot hangers that Rob had spiked into the ground behind Galina’s grave marker, in the year before he died, were an eyesore. Or maybe it was just the plastic pots of fake flowers hanging from them that were the eyesore. There they were, in the black and white shot of Gene and the boys at the graves, the poles looking a little crooked, and the plastic flowers gaudy and completely out of place in the cold and wintry scene.

In the photo Gene is squatting down in the snow between the boys, with one arm around Chips’ waist, and the other draped over the baby carrier hood. His head is tilted to the side and he is smiling sweetly, a little proudly. While looking at the picture the other day, it occurred to me that the expression on his face is kind of introductory. It’s as if I took the shot while he was introducing the boys to someone off-camera, although there were only the four of us that bitter March day, I think in the entire cemetery. He was smiling at me and at the camera, but his heart and mind were a million miles away. He was communing with his dead parents. It’s a sad and sacred photograph.

I didn’t choose it for Liam’s first year video montage, though. I passed on both of the cemetery pictures.

And I realized something else the other day, while looking at those photographs. Gene is a documentarian. He is taking photographs for the future. I’d never really thought about it before. In my typical careless, impatient way, I’d thought of pictures mostly in terms of the here and now. You take pictures on vacation so that you can come back home and show your friends. See, this is where I went. Look how much fun I had. Then you toss them into boxes and pack them away and forget all about them. That’s why in the past I fretted over Gene’s picture taking. I asked him to stop taking so many photographs. They seemed inconsequential to me. I wondered what we were going to do with all those pictures he insisted on taking. I worried about who would have to get rid of them all, once we were gone.

While sitting at my dining room table, looking at the black and whites of the cemetery from last year, I also thought of the old family photos Galina had given to me before she passed away. She’d neatly written on the backs of each photograph, in both Russian and English, identifying the year of the photo, and the names of the old relatives, and in some cases, the places they were taken – Moscow, or Odessa, for instance. There were pictures of grandfathers and great grandfathers with bald heads and impressive beards. Another of a great aunt and uncle standing stiffly in front of a dacha in a birch forest in the early 1900’s, which reminded me of an Ingmar Bergman film. Galina as a girl in the 1950’s, smiling, with a kerchief on her head, vacationing on the Black Sea.

And there were several cemetery shots. People standing in front of tall, imposing headstones and gated family plots, in all kinds of weather, staring solemnly, almost tragically, into the camera.


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Still Catholic After All These Years (My submission to the Confession Station Project)

I hail from the land of Chicago Catholica, circa 1970. Growing up, the church was my world, and our parish my passport. If you’d have told me as a child that Chicago was known as the city of neighborhoods, I’d have thought you were talking about St. Ita’s, Our Lady of Lourdes, and St. Gertrude’s—the whole north side was mapquested in my brain not by streets and avenues, but by churches. Back then I thought everyone was Catholic, everyone. When the one oddball kid on my block went to the local public school instead of St. Greg’s, where the rest of us went, I pitied him and assumed his parents just couldn’t afford the tuition. I knew kids went to Pierce, the public school with the gravel baseball field on the other side of Ashland Avenue, but just who those kids were was a mystery to me. My naïve, narrow little mind could only make sense of it by deeming them disadvantaged. Everyone went to St. Greg’s; ergo, everyone wanted to go to St. Gregs; ergo if you didn’t go, it was because you couldn’t; ergo, you were poor. It wouldn’t dawn on me until years later that my own family, with only one working parent and seven children, was probably way poorer than the vast majority of those public school families. Live and learn.

When I went away to college the blinders really came off. Most people at my university weren’t Catholic. For once, I was in the minority. I was living with Lutherans, Methodists, Unitarians, Jews even! I knew, because I asked them. I went around interviewing new friends about their religious backgrounds. No one else cared but me. Everyone had an answer, everyone was something, but nobody really much cared about it. “Well, we’re Unitarian,” they’d say, or Methodist, or whatever, “We’re X, but we don’t really practice. We never really go to church, or anything.” One girl in my dorm called herself a Baha’i, something I’d never even heard of before. She explained that her faith was a sort of melding of all religions, a unity of all faiths for all mankind— and really, who could argue with that idea? I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Eileen in Carbondale, a strange land where 25,000 18-25 year-olds from all walks of life banded together, generic Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Muslims (thanks to SIU’s ambitious foreign exchange program), agnostics and atheists; all of us comrades united with a dual purpose: to study and drink beer. Religion didn’t matter. It was about love, and laughter, and higher education. It was Utopia. It was John Lennon’s Imagine. I was completely swept up and away. Just like that, into the thick of 1980’s techno rock, another lapsed Catholic was born.

Fast forward twenty years. I’m married to a wonderful Jewish man who was born in Soviet Russia and immigrated to America with his parents in the late 1970’s. I’ve lost my father to cancer. My mother just passed away from Pulmonary Fibrosis. My husband’s mother is suffering from terminal lung cancer. We feel like a tree in the boreal forest, whose trunk has been axed to the core. We are childless, having spent our time together working and traveling, and then caring for sick parents. We decide we don’t want our tree to topple. We want the cycle of life to go on. We want to have a baby.

I get pregnant, and miscarry, get pregnant, and miscarry again. I am 39 years old. My doctor tells me my eggs are old, I’m coming to the end of my fertility cycle. I am starting to get desperate. My aunt tells me about the St. Gerard medals that have been passed around the family, to female cousins trying to have children. There are two medals on a chain, and they’ve gotten several cousins pregnant— one with twins. “I only want one medal!” I say. “Can you get me one of them?” The last cousin to get the magic medals can’t part with them. She’s grown attached to them and feels like they’re protecting her precious, hard-won child from harm.

I take myself on a 45 minute drive to a Catholic missionary with a gift store that sells St. Gerard medals. I feel ashamed and sheepish. I haven’t been to Mass in years, with the exception of my parents’ funerals, and haven’t considered myself a Catholic for decades. Here I was now, turning up on the church’s doorstep desperate and desolate, like a prodigal daughter.

I buy the St. Gerard medal, and decide to stop into the missionary’s church on my way out, to light a candle for my parents, and drop a donation into the collection box—it’s the least I can do. The big church is dark and empty. I walk up and down the aisles like a museum-goer, taking in the stained glass and statuaries. I light two candles, inhaling deeply, enjoying the waxy, honey, smoky scent of the votives, and stuff a ten dollar bill into the box. I walk over to a wooden pew and sit, reaching down to pull out the kneeler. The bench creaks loudly, protesting my weight. The thud of the kneeler as it hits the marble floor echoes all around me. I say an Our Father and a Hail Mary, and then I just kneel for a while, missing my parents, and thinking, for the first time in a long time, of those days back in the 1970’s, when churches were as comfortable to me as the living room sofa in my parents’ old two flat.

I’d have him baptized, I decided then and there. Or her, if it was a girl. If by some miracle I was able to have a baby, I’d have the child baptized in a Catholic church, as homage to my mother and my father, and the church, who raised me, and gave me the heart and the capacity to love without borders, to look to the good in all people, and to hope for things yet to be.

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