The Only Reason to Celebrate Easter

A meditation on my father.

Hello, dear and loyal readers. I'm back after "book leave," my description for the arduous, months-long process, just completed, of rewriting my novel.  In this first post-leave post, I'm departing from my usual focus on larger social issues to share a personal narrative that began long ago. It's a family story I'm still writing.

March 31st was Easter Sunday, the day my father died in 2013. His death is why I mark the day; otherwise, I loathe the holiday's religious aspects, with bloody images of Jesus, feet nailed to the cross, that were a regular feature of growing up in a Catholic household.

But Easter was important to my father, and this year, 2024, to mark the first time that the two dates coincided, I suggested a family gathering in his honor. We would meet at the cemetery and lay flowers by his grave. My sister would drive in from Allentown. My cousin would meet us there. I would depart from Manhattan with my eldest son Daniel and his father Joe, my ex-husband and friend.

Leaving from the Upper West Side would limit the amount of driving I would have to do. I had come back from Washington a few days earlier with a bad ear infection and wanted to keep the exertion to a minimum. I was in DC to visit Daniel's brother and his wife for four days, in part to help with my grandson while my daughter-in-law worked on a major event. But unreserved cuddling and kissing of a two-year-old came at a price, and I had caught his cold.

When I jumped into the car in the predawn hours of March 21st, I was in a state of exhaustion mixed with elation. The day before, I had completed the second draft of my novel and kept a promise to myself and others that 3/20 would be the day. For nine months, I had eliminated distractions, made sacrifices, and honed my practice to a precise early-morning ritual that I upheld religiously. Every day--Christmas and New Year's included--I would run out the door at six, laptop in hand, and sit at a local Dunkin Donuts until I had produced my daily minimum of 1,000 new words. My life centered on my writing and the rigors that supported it, including a strenuous exercise routine of swimming four miles per week and eating a sugar-free diet. Day after day, week after week, month after month--pages accumulated. My online writers' group cheered me on. Finally, on March 20, 2024, I wrote the final scene and typed "The End."

That Thursday morning, I was in an altered state, as if shot out of a cannon and deposited in strange territory. Stunned. I had worked so hard for so long on this marathon endeavor, and while I suspected I might be on the verge of collapse, I also craved some celebration. I wanted my children to acknowledge my accomplishment.

That didn't happen. My son Matthew is a doctor with a busy life and a young family, and caring for his little boy was so intense and so nonstop that we were numb with fatigue by early evening. It was a weekend devoted to childcare and household chores, and it resembled so much of the time I spent with my kids while they were growing up. Those countless hours of mothering that obscured all other commitments.

Now, there was a difference. I came to Washington with another identity that was gaining traction in the world: that of writer. My sons had glimpsed that self, as I had been more public about it in recent years, but for most of their lives, I had not been "out" as a writer. They could be forgiven for not knowing me as anything but Mom. Mom who took them to chess tournaments and baseball games and soccer practice. Mom who drove them to sleepaway camp. Mom who pushed them to do well in school, who listened and dispensed advice. Mom who juggled her tutoring business and teaching gigs with washing their clothes and cooking their meals. They knew little of the ambition that had always been there, right beside mother as the major dream of my life.

But it was time for them to know me as I knew myself: not just as their mother but as someone with a lifetime arc. A complete person who had been a girl and a young woman with aspirations just like theirs. I wanted them to know the whole story about my writing life and how much I had poured into this novel and why it meant so much. I wanted them to know the details of this goal that had been a lifetime in coming.

The lifetime part--the obstacles I faced, the difficulties I had overcome, and why it had taken so long--had everything to do with my father. And Easter.

A bit of backstory: on the strength of my mother's faith, our Catholic family was more religious than the others in the neighborhood. My father did not share her devotion, but he went along with the practice. Like most children of the 1950s and 60s, my sister and I were dominated by our parents, who controlled the flow of information and the prevailing systems of belief. Being Catholic was not negotiable, and we participated in all the Church rites, including First Holy Communion, confirmation, and catechism classes.

The dutiful and pious girl I was left the Church as a teenager. By today's standards, that may not seem like much; a majority of Americans identify as having no religion. But in the 1960s, my breakaway was a seismic event. It was not impulsive or ill-considered; I spent hours attending evening catechism classes arguing about original sin and human sexuality with local lay teachers. I disagreed with virtually every point of Church doctrine and practice.  Eventually, I came to see there was no place for me in the Catholic Church or other organized religion. I was seventeen, and I never looked back.

But as a child, religion was a way to be close to my mother. She was a true believer who followed every precept, every utterance from the Vatican. Popes were important to her; she venerated John XXIII almost as much as JFK. I stayed by her side, followed all the rules in the hope that my perfect observance might make her as happy with me as she was in the Church.

It didn't. For most of my life, my mother had her back to me. The pattern began when I was small and continued until adulthood. I thought it was normal to have a mother who spoke no words of love, not ever, nor gave hugs or other spontaneous displays of affection. In photographs from my earliest years--we're talking age two--my mother and I stand side by side, not touching. But when she developed Alzheimer's in her late 70s, her demeanor changed dramatically.

During her decline, my mother became sweet and childlike, a stark contrast from the cold and critical personality she had shown me most of her life. "I feel close to her for the first time," my father said. It was a sentiment I shared.

My father took care of her to the end, nursing her through the relentless indignities--the hallucinations, the toilet adventures, the bed sores, the silence--that drive most family caregivers to quit. I was his wing person, but he was the main man who carried on, determined to honor the promise never to institutionalize her that he had made years earlier. In the latter stages, he had some hourly help, angelic women who came to the house to feed and bathe her and relieve him of the most degrading part of watching his wife starve to death.  

My mother's life ended in Alzheimer's, but it was a short step from the psychological troubles that had plagued her for decades. Her healthy years were anything but, and I suffered under the heavy load of her illness, which I now understand as schizophrenia. Her terrifying lack of affect toward my father and me existed alongside a fixation with my sister, on whom she doted. That and her unwavering Catholic faith.

I inherited my father's independent streak and his creative drive, and we banded together. He was a painter and an amateur architect. I was always a writer, knowing from an early age that was what I wanted to do. Of course, the 50s and 60s weren't good years for a girl to have aspirations. Restrictive social norms permitted motherhood and maybe a teaching job. But I didn't care. I would be a writer, a novelist.

There was plenty of agreement from my teachers, who said I possessed great talent. And evidence: I was ten when I published a poem in Scholastic Magazine, and a year later an article on the front page of the local newspaper. I wrote stories in my spare time. Then a play that was produced for the parents. My future seemed bright.

When you're young, you can coast, to some extent. The lack of maternal love can be compensated for by sheer determination and by a father who was in the same boat--but only to a point. During high school, I didn't understand why I was losing momentum and questioning myself. I wrote a few things, mostly for class, but my confidence was starting to wane. I didn't connect the growing sense of despair with my mother's silence toward me.  

In college, the slide worsened. Those nightmarish four years were rife with battles with my parents. My father, who had previously supported my education, morphed into a tyrant. His concern was sheltering my mother from what he viewed as my immoral behavior (I had a boyfriend). He demanded I change my ways, study a useful subject like medicine, or leave college and come home.

The fights were a distraction from the wretched reality of my life. No one knew of the months of insomnia, the crying all night, and the weeks of classes I cut. I did as my father said and quit French, the subject I loved most, and wrote almost nothing. I took premed classes that I hated. My dream of being a writer faded into the past.

I didn't understand what it meant to be a first-generation college student, especially at an elite school. Nor was there any institutional recognition of the common experiences--the pressure, the overblown sense of responsibility, the self-denial--of people like me, who today are identified and given support by the university. But my mother's illness made everything worse. I was used to the inattention, but away from home, the strain was amplified. Not knowing how to ask for help, I withdrew into isolation. I suffered bouts of severe depression and earned poor grades. I smoked heavily and gained a lot of weight. I managed to graduate but had no sense that a future awaited.

It has taken years of work to repair my shredded self. A turning point in my recovery occurred soon after my mother died. In the first weeks, my father and I had many conversations, during which we dissected the past, beginning with the last years of Alzheimer's and how hard it had been for him. In the hours we stayed on the phone, the talks grew more honest and personal. I had never spoken about the wounds of my youth. My silence had enabled a one-sided family narrative, with me as an apostate black sheep who hadn't lived up to early promise.

It was late at night a month or so after her death, but I was determined to discuss those years from my point of view. I was used to my mother's absence, I said, but the crushing blow had been his crackdown at the time I most needed help. "You came down too hard," I said.

His first response was gaslighting. "How can you say that?" he asked. "I was such a softie. A real pussycat."

"No, you weren't." I was shouting now. "I was just a kid. You were too harsh, and it's taken twenty-five years to get over it." There was a long silence on the other end.

"Please forgive me," he murmured in a voice quivering with emotion. "I was an Old World guy. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't understand you at the time. I apologize from the bottom of my heart."

The next day, he called me to talk. He was thinking about me, he said, and wanted to know how I was. I was licking my wounds and didn't have much to say, but he persisted. "Your mother couldn't love," he said. "And that is a form of abuse."

Words can heal. In that short conversation, my father validated my experience of life as I had lived it. I felt heard by him for the first time.

On Easter Sunday, standing around the gravesite, my family members paid tribute to my father's cheery outlook. His gregarious personality. His endurance in caring for my mother. "He made lemonade out of lemons," my sister said.

My father's life was a mixed bag. He too was a motherless child who was orphaned at thirteen. Briefly homeless, he landed under his older brother's roof and stayed there until he enlisted in the Navy. After the war, he joined that same brother in a family business, and he worked hard to provide a comfortable life for his family. He could have made more money, had he been more confident and assertive. He married a woman who couldn't love but stayed with her to the end. My father was too deferential, too responsible by half.

But he was far ahead of his time, a World War II veteran equipped with emotional intelligence who could speak words that ended decades of suffering. "He was a healer," I said on Easter Sunday, among my family members--who know me today as the writer I always was. But the story of how I got here, and the twists and the stops on the long journey to the place where I now stand, is still being told. My children need to hear all of it. As I learned from my father, healing begins with being heard.