St. Anne and the Fingerprints

I sit here trying to write a letter of condolence, for a friend who suddenly lost her son.

We both grew up in rough, urban places. I shall conceal her past to protect her privacy, but our stories were familiar to each other from the first.

I was born at Lawrence Hospital, in Bronxville, but grew up several continents away in south Yonkers, in a cold-water walkup where the ambient winter temp in my bedroom was about 50 degrees.

My mother, a bit of an odd duck, moved us three there in a fit of pique in 1959--she had the Irish gift for the quickly acquired, yet permanent grudge, of course never informing the party she was mad at that she was, well, mad at them. It was the kind of place where the tenants would leave a dead rat on the landlord's doorstep to convey displeasure and suggest that the consequences for any failure to address the grievances at hand would escalate significantly. (Well, you know how it is--it's 11 p.m., the living room thermometer is still reading 55 degrees, and one has run out of one's informals. And you don't have to reorder rats and wait 6 weeks for their delivery.)

So let’s just say that poverty holds no romance for me. If money is no guarantee of happiness, poverty is, I can assure you, a corrosive to the character, for it impedes the ability to do good, to feel useful, to feel valuable to the world.

So my friend and I, through different routes, left that grim world behind, yet, for all our education and all our knowledge (two very different things), we never quite eradicated the impress of its thumbprint on us. We each married, happily, and we each had a son—in each case, a child far more complex than either of us bargained for. My boy is autistic; hers wild and passionate, who was destroyed by drugs before these traits could be channeled into military valor or poetic ecstasy.

And so I sit here, trying to compose a note to her. She is, of course, inconsolable. And though I make my living with words written and words spoken, the page lies before me large, and blank, and hopeless. This is too sad, too terrible. She worked so hard, overcame so much, loved him so deeply, and he, so young, is dead. Nothing I can say will set things right, nothing I can do will help, and yet I must say something.

So I go to pray for her this afternoon, which I always do tucked into our most comfortable chair, in a glass-walled room at the back of the house, where I look out at Vermont, which I love so much, and at objects that uplift me: a Celtic cross, with a surplus of intricate knots in it; a crewel sampler I stitched just after we were married. And a lovely painting recently added to my retreat, a gift from my friend James.

James's mother reared this extraordinary man alone. Now in his thirties, he is movie-star handsome, a former Navy man, now a magazine editor, whose Aegean-blue eyes take in the world with unusual steadiness. When he and his lovely companion were over to dinner--their first time at our house--I brought him into Ned's room to see our little boy sleeping, lovely in his innocence and peace. He is a beautiful child, with the ethereal pallor often found among autistic children. Perhaps accompanying this disorder is some degree of anemia, a deficiency too slight to show up in his blood tests, yet sufficient for the faerie-like quality of his tribe.

A few days after James and Liz were here, out of the blue, a gift arrived unexpectedly from James. A fellow Catholic, he has sent us a gorgeous, framed print of a painting of St. Anne, the mother of Mary, with Mary standing in front her.

In this painting Mary is about Ned's age, 8 or 9. St. Anne is looking at the sweet little girl who is her daughter, while Mary looks placidly past her, a content child of a serious nature who, for the moment, has no worries. And although St. Anne has no idea what lies ahead—the abject misery her daughter will experience as her son is tortured and killed—she gazes on Mary with a complex expression suggesting both admiration and worry, as if she sees there's something special about her daughter, and that being special is not entirely a good thing. The entire scene is diffused with a golden light, so one thinks of sunset—of death—yet love and family and contentment, simultaneously.

James had this lovely painting framed with multiple mats that pick up flecks of color and set in a frame that is a work of art in itself. James is a property rights man, and that's what we always talk about--almost never about religion, nor about Ned, so this was entirely a surprise, and a lovely one--

So I sit in the pale afternoon sun, and I pray for another mother who has had not a lovely but a terrible surprise. And I pray for myself, that I'll find something to fill that awful page, something that isn’t stiff or formulaic, something that will be comforting.

And while praying to St. Anne and St. Anthony, whom I love for finding the lost, I suddenly remember my friend Diane from Shreveport. We met while singing in the choir in St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s, the church where, in my mid-40s, I converted to Catholicism from agnosticism. I’d slipped in beside the friendliest-looking person in the choir, which was Diane. It turned out she taught autistic children in middle school. A few months before we met, her son had been killed in a car accident at 17, running from the cops for a minor infraction. He’d been in & out of trouble, some fairly serious, and their sleepless nights had far outnumbered the restful ones.

I remembered Diane's telling me about her boy’s funeral, about how Father Pike had found the perfect thing to say at the funeral. Father Pike was a priest much beloved by the people of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s. He’d been married, very much a man of this world, before he found his calling. A fine tenor, his love for music and for fun were exceeded only by his love for Christ and for his congregation. So Diane drew comfort, knowing he’d find the right thing to say when nothing seemed right.

"I knew it would be hard for him to do this. Everyone knew our son, that he’d been in trouble that he’d died that way. I had no idea what Father Pike would say."

She told me how Father Pike got up to deliver the eulogy. He looked around the crowded church, full of friends of the much-beloved couple, among the best, most generous people among us.

Father Pike cleared his throat. He looked out across them and said the boy was "a work in progress—."

And then he paused, slowly scanned the congregation, and added, "as are we all."

That was my friend’s lost boy exactly — a work in progress.

And at the moment—all this took place in a second or two—at the very moment I recalled that story and that wonderful phrase, I noticed in the fading light that on the wall above the golden painting, about a foot above the haloed head of St. Anne, mother of the Mother of the perfect Son, was a small, smudgy handprint—my son's, pressed there while balancing on the narrow back of the sofa he knows he's not supposed to be climbing on.

A work in progress. As are we all.

Update: I made a few edits and changed the title.