Katy's mother also died around Thanksgiving, eight years ago. I still don't like the holidays she says and I wonder, did my mother dislike the holidays because her own mother died around that time. She wasn't a reflective woman and it wouldn't have been like her to figure out why she didn't care for certain things, but now that she is gone and dad is pulling out decorations, I realize Mom never cared for them. She endured them. She was rarefy happy, seldom joyous. Life was a martyrdom. If my father had died, she would probably still be wailing about it. She would always says, "I don't feel... Christmassy. I don't feel it." I suggested, once, "since you are a Christian, since you are a Catholic, maybe you feel it if you went to Mass, or if you put up a nativity scene." No, she would say, and move on. The truth is I can't have a heavenly hope for her because I don't understand her own hopes. She was Catholic, but wouldn't go to church, but would go by watching church on television. I often though there was little religion to her because she had an almost allergic reaction to it, but she did had a series of devotional books that she said she loved. I got them for her. She loved them. Last year I feared for her driving in a snowstorm. She said in the end she trusted God to bring her home and so he did. I thought God would bring her back all the time. I thought God would bring her back over and over from these sicknesses and near misses, but it is now, writing this, I realize that she always trusted God to bring her home and he finally did.The thing about my mother is that she had a hard time seeing me as another person with my own business, and I think maybe that is my problem too, that it is only now that I see that God had business with her and she had business with him, and what has happened is, at least in this world, the conclusion of this business.
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