Then came our daughter, Colleen Ruth, and our family was officially complete. We were five now, and it felt right. As with Conor, we had her baptized in a group ceremony at the church near our new home in Boca Raton. This time there wasn’t even a priest present; a married deacon handled the duties. My aging parents could rest easy at last, knowing their grandchildren were
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no longer destined to spend eternity in God’s waiting room. I felt I had done my duty and could relax.
The Lord apparently still had more work for Dad to do, as Mom had predicted, because he banished Dad’s prostate cancer with the same vigor Father Vin had used to banish Satan. After several rounds of radiation therapy, his doctors pronounced the cancer obliterated and told him, “You’ll die of something else before this ever comes back.” He attributed his good fortune to the power of prayer and returned to his robust ways.
The Lord must have had more work for Mom, too. The year after Colleen’s birth, Mom’s cardiologist determined that her arteries were almost completely blocked. She was just one overex-ertion away from a stroke or heart attack. At the hospital, doctors tried to open the passages with shunts, but ended up rushing her into emergency open-heart surgery, from which she emerged, after a lengthy recovery, feeling better than she had in years.
She no longer had to stop to catch her breath or pop nitroglyc-erin pills to control palpitations. There was only one adverse side effect of the quadruple bypass surgery, and it was a major one.
Doctors warned us that Mom might seem forgetful and mentally adrift for several weeks because of the amount of time she spent on an external heart pump during surgery, and they were right.
What they had not predicted was that Mom’s mind would never quite fully return, never quite be as sharp again. The day of her surgery marked the beginning of a long, gradual descent, barely noticeable at first, into memory loss.
She also struggled with debilitating arthritis, and as my mother grew more frail, Dad took on more and more of the household responsibilities—vacuuming, grocery shopping, even expanding his cooking repertoire. He still cut his own grass, shoveled his own driveway, trimmed his own hedges, and found time to regularly weed and water the flower beds around the church.
As a couple, my parents retreated more and more into their faith. Their friends were dropping around them on what seemed
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a near-weekly basis, and their own close calls had given them a deeper sense of their mortality. I had not thought it possible, but with each year they became even more fundamentalist. With the exception of the evening news, they no longer watched anything on television except for EWTN, the Eternal Word Television Network, founded by a scowling, scolding nun named Mother Angelica, whom they adored for her conservative screeds against the depravity of society. In a modern world from which they increasingly felt estranged, Mother Angelica played to their sensibilities. With her black-and-white reduction of life’s complexities, she was the comforting anchor to their past. When Pope John Paul II came to America, my parents sat glued to EWTN for days, videotaping his every appearance and motorcade.
As our lives moved in their separate orbits, we fell into a rhythm. My parents and I spoke on the phone every week or two and exchanged cards on birthdays and anniversaries. Every winter they would fly to South Florida to spend a week with us, and every summer Jenny and I would load the kids in the minivan and drive the thirty hours to spend a week with them. Unlike those earlier visits, they did not push any agenda, did not even try to pray aloud before meals in our presence. Each morning they would arise and slip out the door for Mass, not inviting us or even telling us where they were going. Jenny and I would be careful not to comment on their devotion to EWTN or the growing number of Virgin Marys populating the house. Jenny and my mother had arrived at their own separate peace, finding a common bond in the kids; nearly all their discussions stuck to that neutral ground. Dad and I, too, hammered out a safe zone, talking of careers, home repairs, and our shared love of gardening. I would help Dad with yard chores and take the kids to the playground at Our Lady of Refuge and to The Lagoon to fish for bluegills or the Harbor Hills beach to swim where Tommy, Rock, Sack, and I had spent so many hours.
As we sat down for dinner on the screened porch one summer
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evening, Colleen in a high chair, the boys kneeling on their wrought-iron seats so their chins would clear the glass tabletop, I asked without warning or forethought, “Grandpa, are you going to lead us in a prayer?” I’m not sure what brought the words to my lips, but I knew I wanted my children to at least experience a taste of that safe, ordered world I enjoyed at their age. And I wanted to give my parents permission to be themselves around their grandchildren. My father looked up at me and blinked a couple of times. It wasn’t easy to surprise the old man, but I had managed. He missed just one beat, then raised his fingertips to his forehead in preparation of making the sign of the cross, and began, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The boys followed his lead and did their best to bless themselves. “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts . . .” At the end, he ad-libbed, “And thank you, God, for blessing us with John and Jenny and our three beautiful grandchildren, and for bringing them safely home to see us.” The kids joined their grandparents with a loud “Amen.”
With the kids young, it was easy to pretend the question of their religious upbringing was settled. But soon enough Patrick arrived in second grade and at the age where he should have been preparing for his first confession and First Holy Communion. My parents waited in anxious silence for an announcement, but that was not going to happen. Not for him or for his younger brother or sister. In the years since Patrick’s birth, Jenny and I had settled into a life wholly our own. Something about the heady responsibility of having three tiny lives in my hands helped me put my relationship with my own parents in perspective. My priorities were with Jenny and our children now, and I embraced my new role as husband, father, and home owner. I was who I was, and as Dr. Adams the marriage therapist had counseled me several years earlier, it was now up to my parents to accept their son, or not, for the man he had become. I could tell they were trying their best to do that.
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I gradually grew more comfortable in my skin as a nonprac-ticing Catholic, one with no particular animosity for the religion but also one who disagreed with enough of its teachings to know I did not belong. For as long as I could remember, one of Dad’s favorite targets of antipathy was that certain kind of Catholic who chose Church rulings to obey or ignore as if they were options on a menu. There were few people on earth Dad held in more contempt than these cafeteria Catholics. “Doggone it all anyway,”
he would carp. “These people pick and choose what they want to believe like they are at the drive-thru window at McDonald’s.”
For all our disagreements over religion, on this we were in accord. So many of my contemporaries called themselves practicing Catholics when in actuality they were practicing only what they wanted. They embraced the feel-good aspects while conveniently disregarding whichever of the Church’s hierarchical edicts they did not like. They might practice birth control, support abortion rights, roll their eyes at the Church’s condemnation of homosexuality, and question why women were banned from the priesthood, and yet they still called themselves Catholics. I knew Mom and Dad were deeply disappointed in my choices, but at least they couldn’t accuse me of picking and choosing off the Catholic prix fixe menu.
The clergy child sex abuse scandal that would rock the foundations of the Catholic Church was just beginning to come to light as my boys were entering grade school, and this vaporized what little was left of my crumbling faith. The actions of the pedophile priests against the most vulnerable and defenseless members of their flocks were sickening enough, but even more so were the calculated effort
s of their superiors to silence the victims and bury the truth. I knew that for every predatory priest and every amoral bishop protecting him there were hundreds practicing their vocation with Christlike piety. Priests like my two uncles.
Yet the blossoming scandal screamed of the highest order of hypocrisy. The molesters and their protectors perpetrated their evil
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while holding themselves up each Sunday in their snowy white vestments as the embodiment of Christ. They were the ultimate cafeteria Catholics, but I would never say that to my father. I could only imagine how devastated he was by the spreading scandal, though he would eventually chalk it up to “a few bad apples” corrupted by liberal elements within the Church and the depraved culture of modern society. I could only bite my tongue.
As I put it in one late-night phone call to Tim, who unlike me had fallen away from the Church with a great deal of lingering anger,
“It’s a good time to take a break from being a Catholic.”
On our own, Jenny and I set out to do our best to raise our children as moral and ethical beings, to instill in them goodness and compassion and generosity. We would not be seeking the help of any organized religion.
Mom and Dad breathed not a word. They dared not. As each child reached and missed Catholic benchmarks—first confession, first communion, confirmation—they kept their lips sealed. Jenny had made it clear that she would not tolerate any more meddling, and there had been enough flare-ups and power struggles that they knew she was not bluffing. They had gradually accepted that I shared her resolve. They weren’t going to jeopardize access to their son and grandchildren by opening their mouths again.
Instead, they began to mail us things. First came a giant, heavyweight family Bible with gold-edged pages and a note encouraging us to make it a central part of our lives. Next came a wall-size crucifix and a note suggesting we display it prominently in our home. Then came a statue of the Virgin Mary and a thick treatise explaining the Catholic catechism. There were children’s prayer books and Bible stories, and birthday gifts of rosaries.
Finally, a copy of Catholic Parenting magazine arrived with a handwritten letter from Dad saying he had bought us a one-year subscription. “Hopefully you and Jenny will find a few things in each issue that will be helpful,” he wrote.
We had been silent on the subject for too long, and I knew
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I owed him my thoughts. Just because my parents no longer badgered me didn’t mean they had stopped worrying. In a letter thanking him for the subscription, I wrote, “I know we’re not raising the kids quite the way you would like, but I want you to know that we put a lot of thought and energy into the spiritual side of their upbringing. We are working hard, and to the very best of our ability, to raise them as moral, principled people. We’re doing it our own way, but our end goal, I think, is the same as yours.”
A few months earlier, I had joined the Philadelphia Inquirer as a metropolitan columnist, giving my unvarnished opinions on a variety of topics. It was the same basic job I’d had in my last several years at the Fort Lauderdale paper, but with one big difference: the columns were now posted online. Mom and Dad were able to read each one the same day it was published, and Dad especially followed my work with zeal. I was past the point of trying to shelter him from my views, which in my column included harsh indictments of the Catholic Church over the child abuse cover-up.
Still, I felt the need to explain.
“As you may have gathered from my columns, I’m a bit jaded about the institutions of men—the political, judicial, corporate, and, yes, religious,” I wrote to him. “But that doesn’t mean I’m jaded about what the institutions represent—democracy, justice, enterprise, faith. We humans are frail and flawed, and it goes against my grain to have one group of flawed humans trying to tell another group of flawed humans how to live. Besides, you know I’m not much of a joiner. So I’m picking my way delicately through the minefield of parenthood on my own, trying to steer the right path, making course corrections along the way. All I can promise is that I will keep an open mind.”
I concluded: “I’m sorry for the pain I know I’ve caused you and Mom, but I know you respect that each of us must follow our own moral compass. Please, try not to worry too much, which I
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know is easier said than done. You have been a great father to me. I’m trying hard to be the same to my kids. Thanks for teaching by example.”
Dad did not respond for two months. When he did, he apologized for the delay and explained that caring for Mom, who was becoming increasingly dependent on him for even the most basic needs, “is becoming more and more of a full-time job.” He added, “I am not complaining. I thank the good Lord that I am able to take care of Ruthie, and I pray that I will always be able to do so.”
Then he turned his pen to what I had written.
“I was pleased and comforted to hear that you and Jenny are working hard on giving the children day-to-day guidance in spiritual matters so that Christian principles will be the foundation of their value system as they grow up.” He said he understood our desire to try to do it without the help of organized religion. “However, I sincerely hope that, when the time is right,” he added, “you will introduce them to the beauty of their Catholic heritage.”
“I haven’t given up on the Church, but I do feel the need to proceed with caution regarding it,” I responded. “I know you’re praying for Jenny, the kids, and me, and I really do appreciate that. We can use all the help we can get.”
And I meant it.
p a r t t h r e e
o
Coming Home
Chapter 25
o
That winter, a cherished life came to a crashing end back home in Harbor Hills. The giant maple tree that for decades had dominated the backyard of my parents’ house had fallen in a blizzard. Dad called to break the news as if we had lost a family member. The tree had self-seeded there when I was a toddler and grown tall and magnificent over the years, shading many a cookout and giving us kids sturdy branches to climb.
“The end of an era,” Dad said and called a tree service to come remove it, stump, roots, and all.
As spring neared, Dad looked out the living-room window, and where once he had seen loss he now saw possibility. “Say,” he said in one of our weekly chats, “I’m thinking now that the maple tree is gone and the sun can get through again, that maybe that spot would be a nice place for a little flower garden. Something Mother could sit and look out on.”
For all its magnificence, the maple had been a flora bully, hogging water and nutrients and blocking life-giving sunlight from reaching the soil, creating an inhospitable zone where only
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a few tough clumps of grass and wild mint could hang on. With its demise, the patch of earth was again available for a new generation of plant life. “I thought maybe you could give me some ideas,”
Dad said.
When Jenny and I moved with the children to Pennsylvania in 1999, it was so I could try my hand as a gardening editor. I spent three years as editor of Organic Gardening magazine before realizing daily newspapers were where my heart lay and taking the job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Dad was an accomplished gardener in his own right, but he mostly stuck to marigolds, petunias, and other tried-and-true annual flowers from the garden center, and he hoped I could steer him toward more interesting varieties.
I was thrilled to be able to help. My father was so self-suffi-cient, even at eighty-seven, that he did not give me many opportunities. Over the next several weeks, we discussed at length the merits of different plants, the strategy of mixing perennials with annuals for season-long color, and of choosing varieties of differ-ing heights to give the garden three-dimensional breadth. I was enjoying the process enormously, partly because I loved gardening, but more, I realized, because it gave us a share
d father-son project over which to bond, just like in my childhood with science fairs and home improvements.
One evening, after the snow had melted and the ground thawed, I grabbed my spade and a bushel basket and headed into my yard. At one garden bed, I stooped over and rooted around until I found the tiny spears of a dormant hosta poking through the mulch. With my shovel, I dug the plate-size root clump out and quartered it into four equal chunks. One I replaced in the hole, and the remaining three I wrapped in newspaper and placed in the basket. I moved on to the purple coneflower and repeated the process. Then to the brown-eyed Susans and bee balm, the phlox and daisies, the fragrant anise hyssop and the lustily pro-lific daylilies. Soon my basket overflowed with a variety of peren-
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nials Dad could pop into the ground and watch take root. One of a gardener’s greatest joys is the joy of giving. It is an easy, painless act of generosity because of the garden’s endless bounty, which reminded me of the miracle of the loaves and fishes we learned about in school: the more you shared, the more there was to share. Putting together this care package from my garden to Dad’s pleased me greatly. I worked with a smile on my face.
A few days later when the box showed up on my parents’
porch, Dad wasted no time in calling me. “Holy smokes!” he said.
“What’s all this? It’s like Christmas in March!” It was the most excited I had heard him in a long time. I had not sent him anything he could not have ordered from a nursery, but he acted as though I had shared exotic riches from a far distant land. “This is fantastic!”
“That’ll get your garden started,” I said. “You can fill it in with some annuals later.”
And that is what my father did, hoeing up the circle where the maple had stood, working compost and leaf mulch into the soil, and tamping in the dormant plant divisions. My father’s exercise was a vote of confidence in the future. From the lifeless brown clumps of roots would sprout new life. And Dad would eventually realize his sweet and selfless wish: that the woman to whom he was so deeply devoted could sit on the porch in the fresh air, her daydreams adrift on the breeze, and soak in the garden’s soothing presence. The garden would rise and flower and stand as a modest testament to nature’s exquisite exuberance and sweeping rhythms, and to its unsentimental resilience. For forty years, the old tree had graced our yard, and now in its absence a new generation was about to take root, one that would not have been possible had the towering giant remained. Seasons change, trees fall, seeds sprout. From death and decay spring new wonders.