Walk in the Light

I have been told many times that it was a beautiful funeral service. I wouldn't know, although I did do everything that I could to make it so. As with most of that week, I remember some things with great clarity and others not at all.

My husband, my mother-in-law, and I wrote pieces to be read by others. I have attended several funerals in the past few years at which family members have themselves spoken, but we were all too numbed by shock and pain. We could hardly imagine even going to the funeral, let alone speaking from the pulpit or lectern. And after a summer of ministering to the incredibly sick and dying at Famous Giant Hospital, I was very much inclined to let others minister to me.

I wanted to say something though, and a couple of nights after Josh died it came to me in a rush, so I crawled out of the bed in which no one was sleeping anyway and headed for the computer. One of my friends of the past two decades read it with great composure at the service a few days later.

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Josh spent his 11th grade year in France, and we all visited him over the winter break. His wonderfully loving and gracious French family welcomed us to a magnificent Christmas dinner, and we spent time getting to know his home city and exploring Paris and the coast of Normandy.

One of the places to which we traveled was Mont St. Michel, the tall and expansive medieval monastery that rises so astonishingly from the rock of a small island in the English Channel just off the northern coast of France. Josh had already been there with his school, and delighted in showing us the massive pillars and archways in one of the lower level, and the views out across the sea from the top. But his favorite place was the monks' refectory, or dining room, located high up in the monastery. "Wait 'till you see, Mom -- you can walk in the light!"

And indeed, you can. The refectory is lined with windows on either side, windows cut into the stone at a slight angle so that, as you walk the length of the room, the light seems to walk with you. The day we were there, the refectory was cordoned off with a rope, but no one was around, certainly no one official. "You have to see this," announced Josh, and so we ducked under the rope and walked up and down the thousand-year-old stone floor,with the light accompanying us, step by step, window by window. We walked in the light at the top of Mount St. Michel, as the monks must have done for hundreds of years before us.

Josh's love for the nuances of light and dark, for the possibilities inherent in design and material -- the parts of him that made him a wonderful photographer and potential architect -- were so in evidence that day. The sense of adventure that took him to camp in North Carolina as a small boy, and to Europe to study as a teenager, and to travel with his brother as a college student, was in full swing, as was his deep love for the people he cared about: his French family, as well as us.

Oh, Josh. If only the light had stayed with you for all of the short time you were with us. Walk in the light now, my darling Josh. Walk in the light now.




Refectory image here.
Mont St. Michel image here.

France: Noelle!

I started a little series some posts back on our son's great gift of France to us via his 11th grade year spent there. If I can get some help from The Lovely Daughter later, I'll try to scan in some photos. In the meantime:

Of course, the rest of us went to France for Christmas. We spent the first few days in Rennes, where our son lived with his wonderful family: Marithe, his French mother, her friend, and her two sons, one a couple of years older and one a couple of years younger than Chicago Son. Marithe is a nursing home administrator and had to work on Christmas Day, but she welcomed us on Christmas Eve with an extraordinary meal that went on for hours. It was such a joyful and festive evening: reunited with our son after three months, meeting his family and enjoying an evening of food and wine and gifts Francais-style, all of us so delighted to meet one another and laughing over our limited communication capacities. Geoff, his mother's companion, and Thomas, the oldest son, were both excellent English speakers, and Chicago Son could manage quite well in French by that time, so all was not lost.

After a few days in Rennes, which gave us a chance to get to know Chicago Son's family and city a bit and visit the coast of Normandy, we headed for Paris. Three highlights of that trip:

Chartres, of course. Although we had rented a car to travel in Brittany, we took the train to Paris and then, still uncertain about our movements, took a day long bus tour to Chartres. Anyone who has read much of my other blog knows that I fell in love with the city as soon as we began to ride through its narrow streets and with the cathedral as soon as it loomed before us. I had a moment of apprehension ~ it was absolutely freezing in France that holiday season, with temperatures seldom out of the teens, and it suddenly occurred to me, sitting in the toasty coach-style tourist bus, that an 800-year-old building was unlikely to feature central heat. Sure enough ~ we spent a very cold few hours there, but they were enough to lure us back a few years later (in the summer!).

New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysees. I don't much care for crowds and you couldn't get me to Times Square on New Year's Eve for anything. I would have been happy with a tiny cafe in a deserted neighborhood. But everyone else wanted to go outwhere the action was that night and I figured, What are the chances of ever again celebrating New Year's in Paris? What incredible fun we had! I don't know how many hundreds of thousands (literally!) of people from all over the world crowd the Champs Elysees on New Year's Eve, many of them carrying freely-flowing champagne, but it was really, really, wonderful! (And very, very cold!) A bank of clouds settled in around the top of the Eiffel Tower at about 11:55, so we couldn't see the fireworks at midnight, but it didn't matter. It was completely exhilarating to be out partying with all those people who had found their way to such an extraordinary spot.

And a small memory, one of many. We stayed here, which has become our favorite Paris hotel. A couple of doors down is a creperie, and it took us about five seconds to discover its chocolate crepes, which became standard fare for us as we were left or returned from our various jaunts through Paris. When my husband and I were back two summers ago, we smiled immediately at the thought of our three teenaged children dashing out the door to the creperie window in the mornings.

We were so incredibly fortunate to have those ten days all together in France.

France: The Journey

Karen, who has recently lost a beautiful son, suggested that I write a bit about Chicago Son. Her idea is a timely one, as I am just approaching that place which some assured me I might find, the place in which the memories are occasionally and in some ways consoling. And I am in no frame of mind yet to address the issues raised by the Wedding Reception post and comments. So a little bit, here and there . . .

One of Chicago Son's best gifts to us was France and, even better, his French family. First, the journey there:

When he was in 10th grade, a team from School Year Abroard visited his school and he became entranced with the idea of spending the next year in France. He had been studying French since first grade, and the summer camp where he had by that time become an employee welcomes a large influx of international counselors every year, so he was well primed for adventure. His joy when the acceptance letter arrived in April ~ a couple of weeks after it had been expected, so we were on pins and needles with the waiting ~ was something to see. By the end of the summer he was packed, his suitcase containing a beautifully carved display box he had made for his soon-to-be French mother (I have one just like it), and off with his father to Providence, where my sister-in-law and her husband live. The plan was to make a college visit to Brown University, our alma mater, on September 11, 2001, and to fly out of Logan (the Boston airport) with the school group on September 12.

Needless to say in this blog, plans change.

Chicago Son and the Quiet Husband did make it to Providence, after a wide detour around New York City, and spent an eerily quiet September 12 on the Brown campus before returning home. No one knew what to do. There were four young people from his high school who had been on the first leg of journeys to France and Spain when the planes hit, and they all enrolled and tried to catch up in the classes that had begun two weeks earlier at their home school. Emails came from the SYA office almost daily as the organization scrambled to re-group.

And . . . about twelve days later, the same group of about 40 young people gathered at JFK and boarded an Air France plane to cross the Atlantic. That time, I was one of the drivers (we went with another dad and his son), the Quiet Husband having taken time off from work two weeks earlier. It was not easy, dropping our children off for an overseas flight and a year abroad less than two weeks after 9/11, but nearly every family did it. We did not want to let the evil and ugliness of terrorism cow us or deter our children from their eager embrace of the world and the variety of people and experiences it holds out to us.

Would I do it again? Would I not only permit, but encourage, a seventeen-year-old son to live away from us for a year, had I known that that he would be gone only a few years later? I like to think that I would. I like to think that I would still have urged him to reach for his life, to soak it all up, to immerse himself in the goodness and joy of this world, even if, and perhaps especially if, we had known. Because we never do know, not in any single second, what the next one will bring. Carpe Diem. Always.