I was just listening to NPR's "This American Life," hosted by Ira Glass.
His guest, Daniel Savage, told a story that I totally identify with except...
that I've never been Catholic (we were "Weslyan" ... a hybrid of the Weslyan Methodist and Pilgrim Holiness churches, seriously) ....
and that I'm not gay (although I post more pro-gay stories & pictures on my facebook page than most of my gay friends do).
But the rest of his story hit close to home. He talked about losing his mother and how religion, which is supposed to comfort us, doesn't... It somehow kind of makes it worse.
During his story you hear him occasionally lose his composure for a brief second. Everytime he did, I did too. Even now I'm typing with a lump in my throat.... typed words on a computer screen a become wavy through tears.
You can listen to the story at this link or read the transcript. I'm posting the transcript, as well, since I am only talking about 1/3 of that page.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/379/transcript
Act Three. Our Man Of Perpetual Sorrow.
Ira Glass: We've arrived at Act Three of our show.
Act Three. Our Man of Perpetual Sorrow
One of the things that's the strangest thing about returns to the scene of the crime are that so many of them involve somebody returning to someplace where he really doesn't want to go. Someplace that he dislikes, or disagrees with, or wished he'd never been at in the first place. But then the person finds they can't help themselves, he goes back.
Well, Dan Savage has written books about he and his boyfriend deciding to get married and then adopting a little boy, actually not in that order. He made a name for himself writing a funny and deeply informed sex advice column called Savage Love. Please welcome Dan Savage.
Dan Savage: Hello. This is intimidating with that kind of welcome.
The crime scene in this story is a Catholic church. In particular, Saint Ignatius on Glenwood Avenue on the North Side of Chicago. And yes, I went to Catholic grade schools. And yes, I was an altar boy. But no, the crime is not what you've already assumed. No Catholic school children were harmed during the production of this story. So you can relax.
I'm not a practicing Catholic. I am a lapsed Catholic. An agnostatheist. A sort of agnostic-atheist hybrid. Which means I cross myself on airplanes. I once blew up at a friend who thought it was hilarious to invert one of the crucifixes in my ironic collection of Catholic kitsch. And half the time when I take the Lord's name in vain, like when I mutter Jesus Christ through clenched teeth as my boyfriend passes someone going 90 miles an hour, I am in all honesty seeking the protection of a higher power.
I go right back to not believing in God once he's safely delivered us back to the right hand lane. Which makes me a hypocrite. And an ingrate. I was raised in a Catholic home. I went to the same Catholic grade school my mother and grandmother did, and I had some of the same nuns they both did as teachers.
But by age seven, I was already having trouble reconciling loving father with eternal damnation. But the fatal blow came at age 14, with the realization that I was gay. Something I figured out at roughly the same time I entered an all-male high school for Catholic boys thinking about becoming priests. Which is a bit like realizing you're an alcoholic on your first day working at the Budweiser bottling plant.
Luckily for my sanity, I didn't think, "Oh my God, I'm going to hell." I thought, that can't be right. What the church-- my church-- says about me. They have to be wrong. Soon I was contemplating the possibility that the church was wrong about other stuff. Maybe lots of other stuff. The odds of virgin births. The virtues of celibacy. The evils of masturbation. And it didn't take long to arrive at the biggest doubt of all-- the existence of God. And that was that.
By senior year I'd started going to a public school and stopped going to church, except for the odd family wedding, baptism, or funeral. And they are all odd, aren't they? I go to church about as often as I go to Planned Parenthood for a Pap smear. Then, 12 months ago, my mother died. A virus can lay dormant in your body for so long that it's possible to forget you were ever infected. Then something happens that weakens your immune system and the virus seizes its opportunity. For more than two decades the Catholicism I'd contracted at Saint Ignatius had lain dormant, manifesting itself only on airplanes and in passing lanes. But the immunity I'd long enjoyed was weakened by my mother's death. Because since that sunny, awful day in Tucson last spring, I found myself slipping into Catholic churches.
Not for odd weddings or funerals, but on totally random days of non-holy, non-obligation. Tuesday afternoons, Friday mornings. And not just going to church, but going out of my way to go to church. There's a Modernist Catholic chapel close to my office. It won a big design award, but to me it looks like all modern churches do. Like someone stuck a crucifix up on the wall in the rec room at the Brady house.
Saint James Cathedral in downtown Seattle, a longer walk, looks like a Catholic church should. A lot like Saint Ignatius, actually. Stained glass, marble, crowds of plaster saints. Saint James is open for contemplation all day during the week. There are usually one or two volunteers straightening up the hymnals and the offering envelopes in the backs of the pews, and keeping an eye on the homeless people, and me, that have come in to get out of the rain. There's no music, only a few lights are on, and when a priest strolls through he doesn't make eye contact with anyone.
When my mother would call me with bad news-- a relative I hadn't seen in years diagnosed with cancer, a friend of hers with a desperately ill grandchild-- she would always say, "I know you don't pray, Daniel. Keep them in your thoughts." My mom knew that thoughts were the best I could do. And now, at Saint James, I sit in a bank of pews opposite a white marble statue of the Virgin Mother, stare into her face, and keep my mother in my thoughts. Sorry.
By her own estimation my mother was a good Catholic. She believed in Jesus, the Resurrection, the virgin births, both of them. There are two, did you know that? What are the odds? The Trinity, the Sacraments. She believed that sex was sacred, and that people, particularly people with children, should be married to each other. But she didn't believe that being a good Catholic meant blind obedience. So I guess you could say she was a good American Catholic. She believed women should be priests. That priests should be able to marry. And after four pregnancies in four years, she concluded that birth control was not a sin.
She prayed that the leaders of her church would come around during her lifetime. Unfortunately, the church, under the last two popes, went in the opposite direction. And whenever the present pope, Benny, she called him, or the previous pope, JP2, condemned birth control, or insisted that women could not and would not ever be ordained as priests, my mother would sometimes call me and sigh and say, it's like they're trying to make Lutherans of us all.
But she refused to leave the church because she believed it was her church, too, just as much as it was Benny's, or JP2's. A little voice inside her head said, that can't be right, they must be wrong. That voice, the same one I heard, somehow left her faith stronger. She took it hard when I came out. Her first impulse was to call a priest. God bless Father Tom, who, when my mother, distraught, told him I'd just come out to her, placed a hand on my mother's knee and came out to her himself.
[APPLAUSE]
My mother came around fast. And came out swinging. Rainbow stickers on her car, a PFLAG membership, and an ultimatum delivered to the entire extended family. Anyone who had a problem with me, had a much bigger problem with her.
My mother was diagnosed with a degenerative lung condition six years ago. She had some bad years, but she was stable enough last spring to drive down to the Southwest with her husband, my step dad, to visit her sisters. She took a turn in Tucson, where she was hospitalized for a week. But we thought she was going to pull through, as she had on several other occasions. Her doctors in Chicago had just given her two more years.
But the morning of her seventh day in the ICU, the morning we'd begun to make arrangements to get her back home to her own bed and her own doctors, a moment after my stepfather left her bedside for the first time in a week, a doctor appeared at the door of her room and waved me into the hallway. There'd been developments. Her lungs have been slowly disintegrating for five years, and now they were coming apart. One had a hole in it that was getting bigger, and there was no going home. This was it. The doctor told me he needed a medical directive from my mother, and he needed it now. Can I go get my stepfather? No. Now.
So it fell to me to tell my mother that she was going to die, and lay out her limited options. She could have a tube put down her throat and be hooked up to a machine that would breathe for her for a day or two. But she would be in a drug-induced coma, although she would live long enough for her other two sons to come to Tucson, but she wouldn't know that they were there. She could wear an oxygen mask that violently forced air into her lungs and live for six more hours. Or she could take the mask off and go now.
No mask, she said. No tube. Now. I told the doctor. And then I ran to the ICU's waiting room to get my step dad and my sister and my aunt. She didn't go into the hospital expecting to die, and she was not ready to go.
When we were all at her bedside, she arched one eyebrow, shook her head and said, "Shit!"
My mother used profanity sparingly, and only in quotation marks. When she said "shit," what she meant was the kind of person who casually uses profanity might be inclined to say "shit" at a moment like this, but I am not the kind of person who uses profanity. I am a Catholic grandmother. And I certainly wouldn't use it at a moment like this, but if I were the kind of person who used profanity, "shit" might be the word I would use right now. But I'm not that kind of person. She swore on her death bed as a joke, because she wanted to make us feel better.
A priest arrived to perform last rites. And it helped her brace for what she knew was coming for an extremely painful final few moments. I could see it help. I could see the comfort the sacrament gave her. It gave me comfort. The priest led us in prayer. Prayers my mother and I both learned at Saint Ignatius. Prayers that filled a terrible silence, and solemnized an awful moment. And then my mother told us she would be with us always, looking down on us, and that we would see her again. She didn't say in heaven, but that is what she meant.
Then she made her last request. "Remember me. Keep me in your thoughts, Daniel."
One of the cards in the back of the pews at Saint James is addressed to non-practicing Catholics. "WELCOME BACK" is printed in large letters across the top. Are you a Catholic who's been away from the church? Welcome back classes are designed to help you return to the sacraments and regular church attendance. A return to the sacraments.
I fantasized about returning to the sacrament of confession. Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It's been 29 years since my last confession. Hope you packed a lunch.
I want for there to be heaven. And I want her to be looking down on me. Though, and I say this is a professional sex advice columnist, not all the time. There are things a mother has a right not to know, she used to say. But Catholicism now tempts me. I wouldn't be wasting so much time in Saint James if it didn't. My boyfriend would not have found a "WELCOME BACK" card in the back pocket of my jeans if it didn't.
But when I am tempted, when I feel like, maybe, I could go through the motions, Return to the sacraments, take what comfort I can, the Pope goes to Africa and says that condoms spread AIDS, or an archbishop in Brazil excommunicates a Catholic woman for getting her nine year old daughter an abortion, but not the Catholic man that raped the nine year old girl.
Or I contemplate how the church views me and the two people I love most in the world, my boyfriend of 14 years and our 11-year-old son, and I think, I can't even fake this. But there I sit at Saint James two or three times a week.
Being brought up in a faith built around a guy jumping out of his tomb? That makes it difficult to reconcile oneself to the permanence of death. Who knew? The afterlife. It's cruel really, when you think about it. Criminal. Telling children that the people they love don't die. That there's some other life, some better place, a place without pulmonary fibrosis, or Tucson, Arizona.
And maybe that lie is a comfort for some, but it's made death more painful for me, not less. Which is the opposite of religion's intended effect, is it not? The voice of unreason in my head, the voice of nuns back at Saint Ignatius says, "She lives. She is in heaven." And the voice of reason, which sounds a lot like Christopher Hitchens, barks back, "No, she doesn't. She's dead. Get over it already."
This inability to reconcile myself to death has not been good for me. I visit Saint James like an addict drops by a crack house. For a fix. To deaden the pain, by losing myself momentarily in the fantasy that she lives, and that we will be together again. There's an inscription on the ceiling of Saint James, "I am in your midst."
If I were the kind of person who could believe, I would believe. But I'm not that kind of person. Shit. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Ira Glass: Dan Savage. Sex advice columnist. Editor of The Stranger. And the host of one of the most entertaining podcasts in the country, The Savage Love podcast.
A couple weeks ago as we were preparing for today's broadcast, I was in Baltimore visiting my dad, and I'd been going over drafts of the stories for today's show including Dan's, and I was visiting my dad in Baltimore. And my dad showed me how he had digitized all of our old family videos, which apparently is a really good project if you're retired.
And among the videos was footage from one of our very first live shows. We'd just barely been on the air at all, and it was Valentine's Day in 1998. It was a slightly smaller audience than we have today. It was at a bar. The Empty Bottle on Western in Chicago. The Empty Bottle's reach is that big? Anyway so he had footage. He had filmed the thing, and there was this footage that I didn't even know existed, and had never seen.
And onstage was me and my mom. My mom died five years ago. She was a marriage therapist and she was giving Valentine's Day relationship advice. And on stage with her was Dan Savage who was giving relationship and sex advice. And then at some point, Dan introduces a guest of his own. Let's roll that.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Judy Savage Sobiesk everybody.
-Mrs. Savage I want you to just help out by reading some questions with me, so why don't you start with that one, because--
-Thank God for trifocals. Why are men typically aroused more by seeing naked bodies and women are typically more aroused by reading about them?
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
Right, Yeah, this is the main thing I learned watching this, is that Dan and I made our moms take part in a show that was really, really dirty.
Well, our program is produced today by our Senior Producer, Julie Snyder, our Production Manager, ... etc etc etc (the rest is on the website and on the podcast).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And here I am.... wishing I had any video of my mom. I'd love to hear her voice.
I wonder what she'd think of me now. I'm a completely different person.
And that will be another blog... another day...
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