I remember Easter of last year as if it happened last week, because I never really left that moment; its impact at the time, while clearly enormous, has since been impossible for me to articulate.
Before I explain what happened last Easter at the Richmond Friends Meetinghouse, a bit of background:
I’d been there before, in other capacities: in 1999 and 2000, as acting President of the local NOW chapter, we rented a meeting room once per week at the Meeting House, and earlier – one summer during my teens or early 20s – I’d visited there with a friend of my mother’s (whom I called my aunt), Kathy Benham, whose friends were having a commitment ceremony there. Both the NOW and Kathy stories are too huge to address here (the latter in particular; Kathy, I can at least note, is one of the women referenced here); for now, suffice it to say, it was in that earliest experience that I first felt “at home” in that Meetinghouse.
Here’s where it gets, even to my thinking, weird. My mother, from whom I’ve been estranged for going on five years (after an earlier estrangement, from 1993-1997), is also a Quaker. But she wasn’t always. As best I understand it, she came to that at some point in the mid-90s. Maybe following ‘Iniki, which devastated Kauai’s economy, leaving her with Oahu as her only option – a loss for many reasons, but one providing for opportunities that can only be obtained in an urban setting. Such as, to find a sizable group of generally like-minded people. In her case, Quakers.
My mother had been raised, during certain fragments of her childhood, by her missionary Southern Baptist preacher grandparents, and it had been, even with great difficulties and burdens, an experience of mercy. (Her mother, who’d abandoned her and her half-brothers in Oklahoma, which state located her brothers’ dad to come pick up his sons; Dennis wanted to take my mother, too, but the state wouldn’t let him, since he was not her father. Finally, her grandparents from Virginia were able to come get her.)
During this part of her upbringing – with Mammaw and Pappaw – one could say she got pretty well “churched.” The ideas she was exposed to then remained influential to her, even as she left Keokee, Virginia for “hippie” and “free-spirited” circles, in apparent contradiction with many of Pappaw’s teachings.
Religion, for my mother, was like a skin graft (an atheist, perhaps, would go with “artificial limb,” which also works), something that was painful, but necessary and protective. She could not, in later years – even if she’d wanted to – extract it, without suffering permanent collapse.
Quakerism, to interject, is something I feel specifically called not to explain to anyone (including other Quakers); Silence, here, is not experienced as “absence,” but its own rare, necessary Grace. (Nor, generally, do I experience my estrangement from my mother as “absence.” In many ways, we can be more present to each other than in any past or future possible situation. Back to that momentarily.) I dislike questions about my “beliefs” because what I have in Quakerism isn’t “belief” so much as (an extremely imperfect) “practice” or “process.” (See joke about its explicit ‘creedlessness’ here!) Preparing for a race, if you will, without imagining one will necessarily succeed in one’s objective (which may, itself, change), nor that one has any idea what lies at the end of the proverbial “track.”
It makes sense to me, anyway, that following those formative, but fragmentary Southern Baptist and “free-spirit”/hippie experiences, she finally became a Quaker. And maybe (quite likely), even before she went to Oahu and started going to Meeting, she’d already thought on this; she may have decided (as I did) she was a Quaker years before declaring that to another soul.
From when I was little, visiting my mother during Summer vacations (she’d given up custody of me before I entered 3rd grade), I had the habit of wandering the streets while she was at work. Sometimes, I’d walk into random churches – there were lots of these in Williamsburg, Virginia, clustered together within walking distance of my temporary home – to “test” whether I felt at home there. (Kinda like in Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret? – only without the puberty-specific worries, as I wasn’t quite there yet.)
I never did – feel “at home.” Not, anyway, until that day (weird I can’t pin down the year – likely, summer of ’86 or else ’90 – maybe as late as ’92) when I went with Kathy to that ceremony, at Richmond Friends Meeting House. I remember nothing about the ceremony. Kathy had two friends in particular, Roni and Rita, whom I’d seen from visits going back to when I was 13 or so; the couple has since had two children, the youngest of whom now attends Young Friends meetings with my oldest daughter. So – maybe it was Roni and Rita’s ceremony? But I can’t place it to save my life. (Yet I do remember, vividly, being at Roni and Rita’s decades ago, listening to a particular Bonnie Raitt song, and also borrowing their copy of May Sarton’s life-altering Journal of a Solitude; I have no earthly idea whether I managed to give it back; now, over the course of untold numbers of Meetings, potlucks and other church events, I’ve had several opportunities to ask if they remember me, but I still have not been able to do it. There’s no particular anxiety about it, though; again, here, Silence is its own valued state.)
But what I remember is that I did not only feel welcome in that Meetinghouse; I felt at home. The experience was positively jarring. I had no context for this “home” thing. (Read, if you will, Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands for salient takes on the ‘Perpetual Exile’ experience.) I said nothing about it, even to Kathy – to whom I was very close, and could tell almost anything. (Or, if I did tell her, I have no memory of it. Also entirely possible. Memory is a notoriously shifty bastard.)
So it was after that – during the years my mother and I were first not speaking to one another (from the day of my Minneapolis airport/FBI/psych unit of Hennepin County Medical Center debacle in September, 1993 to October of 1997, when I wrote to tell her she was a grandmother) – that she, as best I know, “became a Quaker.”
The chronology (feminists and/or linguists will understand the word choice) is relevant because I’ve been asked if I became a Quaker was out of a need to be – even in our estranged state – close to my Quaker mother.
The answer to that question is, of course, no.
And it’s also yes.
The fact is, we each “found” (can that be right? ‘found’?) Quakerism independently of one another, much as separated twins often develop similar habits. (Science is still supporting that, right? If not, I’d want to know. I do dislike imprecise metaphors.) The flip side of that independence being, of course, interdependence; we are as inseparable as we are separated.
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Okay – so, if you’re still with me – back to last Easter.
There was a woman at Meeting whom I’d not seen there before – but, I was certain, recognized from somewhere. The logical conclusion was that she was one of Kathy’s old friends. I wondered if I’d met her in Richmond, or maybe in Pennsylvania, that one time Kathy had taken me up there.
At rise of Meeting, there was a performance of the visiting “Friendly Folkdancers,” of which group, I soon learned, this woman was a part. We went downstairs for the Easter event, consisting of “dances from peoples and regions that are, or have been, at war,” with the idea of “symbolically uniting them.” The dances were alternately moving and goofy (as Quakers tend to be), and during some moment between them, I worked up the nerve to approach this woman, and ask her where it was that I might know her from. (Recall here that I’ve been attending Meeting now for years with a number of people I know I met from when I was as young as 13, and yet have not felt compelled to similarly approach any of them.)
The woman told me her name: Rosemary Coffey, and my synapses went into rapid-fire mode; I knew that name, too, but couldn’t place that, either.
I brought up Kathy. Rosemary had no idea who I was talking about. I mentioned Pennsylvania. She was now living in Pittsburgh, Rosemary said, although before that, she’d lived in Honolulu for quite a while.
“Oh,” I said matter-of-factly. “You probably know my mother.”
“What’s her name?” Rosemary asked.
“Suzanne Marinelli,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Rosemary answered.
“We’re estranged,” I added.
“Yes,” Rosemary replied, looking at me with a great kindness. “I know.”
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Later, after another of the dances, Rosemary approached me. Said something to the effect that my mother would like me to call. I said something like “I know.”
I did know, and I know the same is probably true today. I also know that I can’t call her. Not won’t, but can’t. We may never speak again, in fact. This is our longest estrangement, and we are both only getting older.
But in the years that have passed, in silence, between us, I have only grown to love and forgive her more. It’s been enormously liberating. Reverential, even. And… safe. Not endangered by actual, direct communication. All the more precious and necessary to me.
I miss my mother terribly, and I don’t miss her at all. She’s lost to me, and I see her everywhere I go. Including in the face of a lifelong Quaker named Rosemary, whom I was certain I knew but, we finally concluded, whom I could not have met, prior to that Easter, one year ago.
In that moment, I experienced a bit of death, and a bit of resurrection.
This, finally, is what Easter means to me.
That, and this.
