Benedetti: Love beyond our imperfections

By Paul Benedetti

A little more than a week ago, the mother of one of our very good friends died.

Her death was unexpected, as much as a death at 85 years of age can be unexpected.

It was, like the deaths of many old people, neither a shock nor a tragedy. She had complained of leg pain, gone to the hospital and the next day a blood clot moved through her body to her heart or her head and killed her. Though in a retirement home, she had been up to that point of relatively sound body and mind. And like most of us, my friend and her family saw the quick and uncomplicated death, though sad, as something of a blessing.

On the weekend, there was a small celebration of this woman’s life. There was a simple, private burial of her ashes at Holy Sepulchre Cemetary where my friend and her three siblings stood in the spring sunshine and said their goodbyes.

At the graveside where her father was buried, my friend gave her mother a brief eulogy from neatly typed notes that she later handed me and gave me the privilege of reading.

She did a good job with a difficult task and there was something in her words when I first read them that struck me, but that I could not quite identify.

Her mother’s life had not been easy and my friend was open and honest that their relationship had been a complicated and not always happy one. She acknowledged the complexity of her mother’s sometimes troubled life and then spoke about her in earlier and happier times. About her youthful zest for living and her beauty. She talked about the gifts her mother had given her, gifts that had in central ways, shaped her life.

She spoke about her mother’s love of nature, her appreciation of Canada’s natural beauty and her simple affection for fishing. She talked about the long afternoons they had spent with their lines in the water, not catching much of anything, but just enjoying the silent reflection that comes when you are calm in yourself and doing something you like. She talked about how she had passed that love of fishing onto her own daughter and sons.

She told the people standing solemnly in the cool, spring air about her mother’s talent for knitting and crocheting, an art she herself had never mastered and now likely never would.

She talked about her mother’s love of food, about her respect and gratitude for the bounty of the earth. She recalled childhood memories of autumn days spent chopping basketfuls of vegetables and of canning tomatoes and beets and peppers until the jars lined the basement shelves.

She spoke of how that love and cooking and baking had stayed with her, a lifelong affair with food and all that it can do to heal and draw people together.

And when she was done, they set down the urn filled with her mother’s ashes and she and her siblings stood by the graveside for a time. Then they filed back to their cars and reconvened at her home for some lunch, drinks and conversation.

There, we joined them and stood around, chatted and watched as old photos filled with smiling faces, scenes of brides and grooms and babies and well, life, clicked along on the TV screen – a looping slideshow of a life lived flickering by on a Saturday afternoon.

I left a few hours later and walked through the waning afternoon light to my home. I slipped off my jacket and loosened my tie and lay down on the couch and my mind filled with all that I had seen and heard.

And I thought about being a parent and I knew that though I have tried to do my best for my children as her mother had, I have made mistakes at times, fallen short. And that, despite my honest efforts and best intentions, I would likely, through circumstance and flaws of character, fall short again. I thought that all of us, our parents and us as parents – all of us – are flawed.

And I hoped that my children would in time come to understand this and, like my friend, have the maturity to accept it and the grace to forgive.