Death And Resurrection

Death stalks me this year, distorting my sight. The death of my uncle overwhelmed my Christmas and my whole winter break. A friend's grandmother entered the hospital recently, weakened by a heart attack. And a long-dormant friendship rekindled soon after because of another death.

Mourning and I are old acquaintances. In Irish Catholic families the children encounter the inside of a funeral limousine before they learn to read. I attended my great-grandfather's funeral when I was eight. I don't remember any earlier bereavements, but I know they existed.

From that time on, I have marked time according to what year I began praying for the souls of different relatives. One year for my father's mother and sister, another for my mother's father, another for a great-aunt.

On Sunday, when I go to a church with the proper type of shrine, I light a candle for certain relatives and kneel to say a prayer for them. A few years ago, when I went to Rome for a pilgrimage during Holy Week, I made a point of lighting candles for my grandfather. To release him from purgatory and bring him to sainthood, I prayed in all the basilicas, churches and shrines of the Eternal City.

Like these memories of Rome, my birthday always reminds me of death and sainthood. Jude, my older brother, was born and died 364 days before me, baptized by the same doctor who attended my birth." I am the eldest, but not the firstborn, "I say when I sometimes speak of him. I owe my life to his death, and his assurance of sainthood reproves me and urges me to meditation. He silently reminds me to live each days as if it were my last.

In college, we are curiously removed from the reality of death. We live for four years among those who least believe in its closeness. We can afford the transience of friendship, because we remain untouched by the nostalgia which a realization of mortality brings.

Modern families too cruelly conceal death from us. With only one or two siblings, one or two aunts and uncles and grandparents with one or two siblings, we face death infrequently.

When I first came to Harvard I thought my knowledge of death unusual. In early spring, my girlfriend had a death in the family; the pain I felt as a normal part of life paralyzed her.

For three years, I lived secure in my familiarity, convinced that the face of death was a stranger to my peers. I thought that perhaps the urgency of friendship I feel because of death's presence in my life was unknown to my friends.

My arrogance deserted me one rainy evening in my junior year. A few weeks before I'd written of finding a neighbor bludgeoned on the sidewalk near my home a year earlier. As the mist distorted the light on Mt. Auburn Street, I met a friend of mine from freshman year, walking with her father.

We were introduced, and my friend's father thanked me for writing about his sister's death. His eyes collected the mist around us and made it tangible. Only then did I realize the connection between the death I witnessed and the life of my friend. My emotional self-assurance dissolved in a fog of shame.

Since that night I've thought more about loss and bereavement and have realized how all of us must confront them. As friendships with those who graduated last year fade into occasional correspondence. I feel the urgency which the possibility of unexpected death can bring.

In one friendship especially have I felt the hand of mortality. My best friend from high school, a woman who graduated in December from the University of Wyoming, ceased speaking to me two years ago. When thought of death overtook me in these years. I thought often of her.

Her father and I began our friendship several years before I ever spoke to her. He was friends with my family physician, Dr White--every fall they would go hunting together. When Dr. White learned I wanted to keep bees, he told my father to introduce me to Dr. Fitzsimmons.

We began my apprenticeship when I was in fifth grade. Dr. Fitzsimmons continued to teach me about bees and prairie plants until mid-high school, when I had to abandon beekeeping for academic pursuits. In ninth grade, I struck up a friendship with Regina, the youngest of his nine children. We were united in adversity against the hypocrisies of our respective schools, both singlesex pre schools.

Many times during high school and during the times we talked during the first two years of college, Reg told me how difficult it sometimes was to talk to parents old enough to be her grandparents. With characteristically Irish cynicism, she concealed her feelings for her parents beneath her complaints about her personal generation gap.

Reg's awareness of her parents' age extended beyond annoyance at misunderstandings. She worried about her father's frequent illnesses and constant smoking. I learned that Dr. Fitzsimmons had narrowly escaped lung cancer a few years before. He still rolled his own cigarettes, even though he had barely one lung left.

As I said, however, we haven't talked since early 1990. I never quite figured out why (and now it doesn't matter), but for a long time Regina wouldn't return my phone calls or letters. Feeling the hand of death on our friendship, I slipped back into nostalgia, and hoped that sometime we would be friends again.

That time came last week. As I moved into a new apartment in Boston, I pondered the possibilities of friends' unknown relatives' deaths, and the reality of my uncle's. Then, when I called my father in Chicago to give him my new phone number, he told me that Dr. Fitzsimmons had died of a heart attack.

My parents saw Regina at the funeral, and she asked them to tell me to call her. Although I talked to my father at nearly 1 a.m. I immediately called Regina, knowing that on a Friday night she would still be up at midnight.

The conversation was awkward at first, but we soon fell into the old routine of friendship. Neither of us has changed much in two years, although she says my accent is more East Coast than before.

Now that death has brought us together again, I hope that awareness of our mortality will keep us close. We have exchanged address and phone numbers once again, and promised to write. I'll try to visit her in Wyoming when I graduate this spring.

And the next time I go to church, I think I'll light a candle.