Easter Family Reunion

My Mom & her brother; spring comebacks holy & secular

A fairly different, earlier version of this essay appeared last year on my old blog — but what better time to bring something back in a transformed way than Easter, right? You can see me doing a staged reading of this piece this weekend as part of a suite of multimedia artists featured in Pacific Theatre’s online Easter show, Testament. Follow link for tix.

“As I move past you to middle age”

– Kenneth Rexroth

When he was teaching poetry to the novices at Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky, in the 1960s, Thomas Merton read aloud to his students a poem published by the same house, New Directions, as published some of his own writing (including the poetry, which I’m told isn’t great, but seems pretty good to me). That’s how I first heard “Delia Rexroth,” by Kenneth Rexroth, a poem that has become my story (or one of my stories) — I heard it on a warm and relatively clear recording of Merton’s classroom sessions, now sold as audiobooks. I read once that the monk was full of contempt for the dullards by whom he felt surrounded before his hermitage, but throughout the sessions I’ve heard, Merton is good-humoured and patient, if slightly astounded by the anemic quality of the educations his novices had received before arriving at Gethsemani; in any case he is suffused with passion for the material and the chance to share it. “Under your illkempt yellow roses, Delia, today you are younger than your son.”

Donald Grayston, my mother’s priest at All Saints church in Burnaby in the late 1970s and early 1980s — the man who, within a dozen years, presided at my parents’ marriage, mine and my brother’s baptisms, and my Mom’s memorial service— was a Merton scholar. My mother’s name was Robin, and there are no yellow roses, illkempt or otherwise, over the spot where her ashes were laid in the memorial garden beside All Saints, on Royal Oak avenue, site of rising property values and lowering aesthetic standards; there is a bush. I leave the knowledge of what kinds of plants are which to my brother, the horticulturalist by training; I just know that the bush is green, with shiny, waxy leaves, and that in my pseudo-scientific understanding of the transmigration of, let’s say, particles (?), it has grown in part from my mother’s energy. When I go to visit, or to pay respects, to speckle the insides of my glasses with salty stains and spots, I will take a leaf from the bush between my fingers just to try to get closer.

One quick digression: death is inescapable. What’s more, so is the fear of death. From a combination of parental instinct and parenting instruction, I decided that I would never tell my daughter Joséphine anything at all that I didn’t believe about death. Before I went back to church, I had no sense that there could or would be a Heaven where we saw our loved ones again, and even now, a few years back into regular religious observance and relatively deep Christian study, nothing has changed my mind about that. Regardless, when Joséphine — who was introduced to the concept of death earlier than many kids in her social or geographical strata are — asked me what happens when we die, I did my best to offer her something that I considered to be the hopeful truth: that the memory and the love of us live on in the people who cared for us, and that our bodies return to the earth, to come back as part of the grass and plants and flowers that grow from where we are. We both seemed pretty satisfied with the answer. The next day, I got a phone call from my wife:

“Did you tell Joséphine that when she died she would come back as a flower?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“Because I put a vase in the middle of the table and she started screaming, ‘I don’t want to be a flower!’”

Mom died thirty years ago, on March 11, 1991, in the last days of winter, ten days before the spring. Another priest, Father Ed, who looked and spoke like the vicar from an Agatha Christie novel, came to our house to offer pastoral care. We joined hands in the kitchen to say a prayer, and in the split second after everyone else closed their eyes, but before we did, my Uncle Phil — mom’s smart, hilarious younger brother, who had lost his dad, my grandfather, when he was five — looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and shared a smirk. The look said, we know this is silly. Smart, funny guys like us, half-orphaned, we’re not going to fall for this stuff.

And he never did. But decades later, at his kitchen table, Uncle Phil did tell me matter-of-factly about the time he’d gone to his big sister, telling her how confused he’d been by an encounter with a tree — how the light had seemed to hit every leaf at once, the deep connection he had suddenly felt, to he didn’t know what, and that he hadn't known what he had been supposed to do.

“You were supposed to pray,” Robin had told him, gently.

Joséphine with Lego Robin

Mom was 39 when she died, and this Easter, I’m 40. Today, she is younger than her son. Uncle Phil is gone, too — but he lived to see the next generation of babies; his own grandkids, as well as my mother’s granddaughter. When Joséphine was born, to a Chinese-Canadian mother, we gave her the middle name Ji Quan, because it sounded like ji gung liu, the Cantonese word for robin, the red-breasted bird. When she was born, the first baby in the family’s regeneration, Uncle Phil wrote her song:

Just when it felt like tomorrow was a bridge already burned/the springtime came around and a robin returned