A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT

ME AND MOM

Posted by Bernard in Personal, Mother Sunday July 16, 2006 at 8:46 am

“Death has made his darkness beautiful with thee.”-Alfred Lord Tennyson-

The following is excerpted from the eulogy (i.e., Remembrance) I delivered for my Mother during the funeral Mass for her on Tuesday, July 11th, at Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church in Claremont, California:

Today, as my Mother’s eulogist, an honor given me by my Father, I have been asked to chart the course to this wonderful woman’s heart with insights and memories gleaned as her firstborn. I pray I am as equal to the task, as she was as a mother to me.

The late Adlai Stevenson, with characteristic eloquence, wrote many years ago:

“We are always saying farewell in this world, always standing at the edge of loss, trying to retrieve some memory, some human meaning from the silence, something which is precious and gone.”

That is my obligation today — to retrieve memories and human meaning from the silence. I cherish this honor. God help me to do it well … well enough, as the Irish poet William Butler Yates wrote:

“Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart.”

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IN LOVING MEMORY OF A WONDERFUL MOTHER

Posted by Bernard in Personal, Mother Friday July 14, 2006 at 11:50 am

LaVonne E. Higgins(August 16, 1924 - July 5, 2006)

Know, too, that our family finds comfort and cause for joy in the words of the apostle John, who wrote (John 3:16):

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

My Mother believed in God. She believed in the “light.” She believed unwaveringly in the tenets of her Catholic faith. She trusted in The Lord her entire life and held Him dear, through successive, debilitating strokes. And even in the end, when infection and terrible pain raged through her body and deadly complications from a tragic hip fracture held her fast, she loved God, the Father Almighty, because, as the Bible says (John 4:19), “He first loved us.”

Her faith remained as fervent, even at the edge of death, as her courage was exceptional thoughout, and I am proud of her for that. She never renounced her Lord and Savior despite intense pain. As Shakespeare wrote, everyone owes God a death. LaVonne Higgins gave Him hers with all the dignity she could muster.

And that is why I believe my Mother is in a vision of Heaven that one of my favorite poets (Wendell Berry) describes — a Heaven “where those who love each other have forgiven each other … where, for them, the leaves are green, the light a music in the air, and all is unentangled, and all is undismayed.”