Does the name Princess Lee Radziwill ring a bell? If you’re a member of my boomer generation, it should. Caroline Lee Bouvier was Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister. A failed actress but an active, on-the-prowl socialite, her second of three marriages was to a Polish aristocrat, Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill. He divorced his second wife to marry Lee, and because his second marriage had never been recognized by the Catholic Church, he was free to marry.
Her Serene Highness Princess Caroline Lee Radziwill
For a while, it looked like Lee had beaten her big sister in the husband-hunting game. Jackie had to settle for a congressman from Massachusetts. But we all know how that turned out.
Anyway, when she got married, Lee began using the title Her Serene Highness Princess Caroline Lee Radziwill. The royalty-besotted American press ate it up and referred to her as Princess Radziwill. However, that was all stuff and nonsense. The Radziwills could no longer call themselves prince, princess, etc. as of 1921 when Poland established its constitution. That document abolished the legal recognition of titles. That didn’t matter to Lee and the Radziwills; as far as they were concerned, they were still royalty.
But who were these Radziwills, anyway? According to “Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate history of a Divided Land,” by Jacob Mikanowski, the Radziwills were “an immensely rich Lithuanian family with a bottomless appetite for power and pleasure.” Many of the Roma, or gypsies as they also were called, had settled in Lithuania and went to work for the Radziwills.
The family’s roots go back to the 15th Century. They had immense wealth and longed to be kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The other aristocrats and nobles successfully blocked that ambition, so the Radziwills developed expertise in other areas.
The coolest of these endeavors? The training of dancing bears.
If you lived in the Eighteenth Century and wanted a dancing bear for your royal court, you would send your animal to the Bear Academy in Smarhon, which is in today’s Belarus. The Radziwills owned that town. At the academy, on the Street of the Skoromokhs (jesters), the Romas trained the Radziwills’ dancing bears. They also took on the bears of private clients; you had to pay the animals’ room and board for the duration of their training period.
Lee and Stanislaw Radziwill
The Roma taught the bears not only to dance, but also to play the role of servants, waiting on tables, bringing water to the table, and so on.
One of the most famous feats took place in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Prince Karol Radziwill, known as Lord Lovey, owned the town. He was “preposterously rich, possessing sixteen cities, 683 villages, and 25 forests, as well as a mansion in Paris.” Lord Lovey was also “a drunk, a womanizer with a fondness for Jewish women, and a teller of talk tales.”
One day, the leader of the Roma, “king” Jan Marcinkiewicz, decided to play a trick on Lord Lovey. He had his Gypsies teach a group of bears how to pull a horse carriage. He then harnessed six of them and rode off to Lovey’s castle. The prince got such a kick out it that he treated Marcinkiewicz like a real king. He threw a feast that lasted several days. At the end, they all rode off to the prince’s summer palace, trailed by crowds of bears, Gypsies, burghers, and noblemen.
That’s the way the super-rich used to play in those days. Nowadays, they build spaceships and send their girlfriends up to the exosphere or rent the entire city of Venice for their wedding. I think it must have been more fun in Lord Lovey’s time.
And that’s the family into whom Jackie Bouvier’s sister married. Lee and Prince got divorced in 1974 after 15 years of marriage. They had two kids. She married a third time, and that one lasted 13 years. After third divorce, she again began calling herself Radziwill. On one Saturday Night Live episode, Roseanne Roseannadanna referred to her a “one of those classy ladies where you don’t know what she’s the princess of.” Lee lived her final years in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, so I guess she had no room for those Radziwill dancing bears.
The first time I read Pat Elsberry’s wonderfully comforting When Scars Become Stories, I likened her to the poet Vergil, who accompanied Dante through the torments of his famous Inferno. Upon re-reading her as she guides us through the grief journey, as she puts the experience of losing a loved one and its aftermath, I see that my initial comparison missed the mark.
Author Pat Elsberry
Vergil knew what to expect in the Inferno, but he had never been through it, never endured those awful punishments. But Pat Elsberry has been there. She suffered the wrenching loss of an adult daughter several years ago. She takes our hand and tells us what to expect, what we feel, how to accept those myriad feelings and how to cope – because she has done it all herself.
Also, the first time I read the book, I went straight through it in just a couple of sittings. It’s only 200 pages, broken up into 50 short chapters, each of which includes a summary reflection and a concluding prayer. However, reading it straight through is not the way to do it. Instead, make one chapter a part of your early-morning routine each day. That’s what I do, and that’s how I believe you can derive the greatest guidance and comfort from Pat.
Prayers, spiritual readings, grateful reflections on life already lived and on life yet to come – they’re all part of my own grief journey, now of more than six years’ duration. And I’m most appreciative to now have Pat Elsberry’s wisdom and strong faith in God to accompany me.
Perhaps a sample of Pat’s own words can tell it better. The following passage captures the essence of When Scars Become Stories, in my opinion. It’s from Chapter 13, whose title coincidentally is the same as that of the entire book:
“There are times when I look at the scars of my grief and feel the ache of loss all over again. They are tender reminders of a story I would never have chosen. But there are also times when I look at them and see beauty – a reminder that God has carried me, sustained me, and is weaving my story into something bigger that I can see. My scars have allowed me to connect with others in ways I could never have otherwise. They give me language to comfort those whose wounds are still raw, to say, ‘You are not alone. I have walked this road too, and God is with us.’
“When scars become stories, they become gifts. They allow us to give away the comfort we ourselves have received. They allow us to bear witness to God’s faithfulness, to shine light into someone else’s darkness, and to remind the world that healing is possible.”
I can say unreservedly that those who are bereaved, whether recently or in years gone by, will find in When Scars Become Stories a renewed perspective and hope for the rest of their earthly journey, a hope that will sustain them until they are reunited with their loved ones in eternity.
Well, that headline is a bit of an exaggeration. But read on. There’s something to it.
According to “Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land” by Jacob Mikanowski, two towering figures dominated the cultural scene of that region in the idyllic decades before World War I destroyed that world: Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I, and Anna Csillag.
That time, from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War I, is fondly remembered as the Belle Epoque (or Beautiful Era). In America, it was dubbed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain. In Europe, there was peace and stability, and people had money to spend. And they spent a lot of money on the wondrous, but totally bogus, hair pomade made famous by Anna Csillag.
Mikanowski points out that Csillag’s image appeared in advertisements in every newspaper in Europe. The ads showed her in peasant garb, holding aloft three lilies, and nearly covered by her long and lustrous black hair, which “cascaded down her back like a wooly Niagara.”
How did she get that hair? The myth that her ads spun had her a poor young woman, nearly bald, and shunned by all those in her little village. But one day, she was working with chemicals and discovered a miraculous medicine that cured her baldness and became a hair-growing wonder drug. In her ads, printed in many languages, she wrote “I, Anna Csillag, possess an immense, 185-centimeter growth of Lorelei-like locks thanks to fourteen months spent using my specially formulated pomade.”
The men in her family got in on promoting the hair-growing too. The ads depicted them with “astounding pelts of lustrous black hair – fanlike beards stretching past their waists, and ropelike mustachios coiled around their trunks and midsections like so many boa constrictors.”
The ads appeared the papers of “Budapest, Krakow, Lodz, Vienna, Helsinki, Riga, and all points in between…the ads were so ubiquitous that they became part of the background hum or life in the Belle Epoque.” They also featured rapturous letters of endorsement by users.
The whole thing was a brilliantly executed con. Csillag – real name Stern – wasn’t born in “Karlowitz of Moravia,” as her ads claimed, but in Zalagerszeg, Hungary. She also sold a tea that was purportedly a miraculous shampoo, and a bar of soap that she plumped as “the best soap in the world.”
As she operated her business from Vienna and Budapest, the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy come along to inspect. They found that the soap was just a red-brown toilet soap of inferior quality, and the tea was nothing but a common chamomile. As for the hair pomade, it was “nothing more than a mixture of fat and bergamot oil. It was white-gray in color, had the consistency of lard, and appeared grainy when spread out in a thin layer.”
Did that reality check matter? Nope. The stuff still sold. Or maybe the bureaucrats’ findings weren’t widely disseminated. And Mikanowski notes wryly, “with the benefit of hindsight we can say the imperial inspectors missed their mark. They evaluated a physical product, when the real miracle sold by Anna Csillag was her message. Repeated over and over again, it acquitted the force of a cryptic gospel or a prayer.”
Ah, the power of advertising. Anna would have made Don Draper and his coterie of Mad Men envious. But he did get the message. As Don he famously said in one episode, “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”
Someone else who was envious to the point of becoming enraged by Anna’s success in advertising was a penniless, struggling art student in Vienna. He spent hours poring over the ads, and he was especially fascinated by the letters of gratitude supposedly sent to Anna’s companies. He found that the letters were all fakes, and the supposed senders were dead.
The art student thought that he had found the key to a great mystery – the secret of propaganda. He ranted about its power, declaring to one friend “Propaganda, good propaganda, turns doubters into believers. Propaganda! We only need propaganda. Of stupid people there are always enough.”
The art student also wanted to turn his dormitory into an “advertising institute,” where the residents would all dedicate themselves to selling some product – perhaps a glass-strengthening paste – and promote it regardless of whether it worked. All they had to do, he claimed, was to repeat their message as often as possible, and, combined with a talent for oratory, they would attract all the customers they could want.
None of the guys in the dorm bought that scheme. One of them replied that they needed something worthwhile to sell, and that “after all, oratory on its own was useless.”
Rebuffed, the art student left school. But he wasn’t finished with the lessons he had learned from Anna Csillag and her fanciful stories. He found another dream to sell, another cryptic, diabolical gospel. He put Anna’s lessons to murderously effective use in his role of chancellor, and ultimately dictator, of the country of Germany.
From phony hair pomade to the brutal reality of a World War…now you know the rest of the story.
Several times during the last few weeks, I found myself thinking of Jiminy Cricket and Emily Dickinson.
Jiminy, those of a certain age will recall, used to sing “Books take you ‘cross the sea and down along a trail that never ends.” Emily, many will remember from high school, wrote “There is no Frigate like a Book, To take us Lands away.”
I recently returned from across the sea and lands away when I put down the 592-page historical novel Katherine, by Anya Seaton. This was one of those exceptional books that I just didn’t want to end. I felt like I was back in that time of Geoffrey Chaucer, of courtly love and arranged dynastic marriages, of treachery, adultery, and murder in the castles, of the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War, and of the history plays of William Shakespeare.
Katherine Swynford was mistress, love-of-life and eventual third wife to John of Gaunt, one of England’s greatest noblemen. Son of King Edward III and Duke of Lancaster, he never became King of England. But he would have been a much better monarch than his simpering nephew, Richard II, who succeeded Edward III on the throne and eventually screwed things up royally – pun intended.
Gaunt was smitten by Katherine’s beauty and regal presence almost from the time they met. He was married to the wealthy Blanche of Lancaster, with whom he had three children. Catherine, without dowry and second daughter of Payn de Roet, a knight who died at an early age, was married to another knight of slender means, Sir Hugh Swynford. She bore him two children.
Swynford was in Gaunt’s service and was a reliable and fierce warrior, but that’s about all he had going for him. He died under mysterious circumstances after returning from a military campaign. Gaunt’s first wife Blanche perished in the Black Death plague. Their spouses’ deaths would have freed John and Katherine to be together and make it official, you’d have thought, but that’s not what happened. He first married Queen Costanza of Castile, and he spent a good deal of time away in Spain trying to win more military victories and to become king of that realm. When he was in England, he eclipsed in strength and prestige the hapless King Richard, but he remained loyal until his death.
John’s loveless, political second marriage didn’t keep him and Katherine from having four children of their own. Somehow, that flame kept flickering and never went out. John found ways to share some of his wealth and keep her and their four bastard children financially solvent. It wasn’t that she was always there standing by him. They were apart and out of touch for long periods of time. She even contemplated suicide at one point. They finally married after his second wife died and spent three years together as husband and wife.
The author, Anya Seaton, took about a year and a half to write this book. She stayed true to historical fact and interpolated plausible though undocumented facts and motives where the record was lacking. She traveled through England and stood where her chronicled events took place. Her sources, among others, were Gaunt’s personal registers and the Jean Froissart’sChronicles, highly detailed descriptions of the events of the Hundred Years’ War.
John’s and Katherine’s genealogy chart
As she remarked in her journals, “I’m writing at least plausible history… I’m taking some liberties, etc.” Some of those liberties included imagining a deep-seated demon that plagued Gaunt from childhood and almost caused him to plunge England into a civil war. She has Katherine intervene and, through loving attention, quell the fires of his fury. As Seaton describes it, “Pretty psychiatric but I had to do it.”
Another couple of undocumented surmises by the author were her treatment of Geoffrey Chaucer and of Julian of Norwich, the revered religious leader, anchoress and author of the book of mystical devotions, Revelations of Divine Love.
Chaucer was actually Katherine’s brother-in-law, in a loveless marriage to her sister Philippa. He makes several brief appearances and inserts some wry and pithy observations; Seaton imagines that his Troilus and Criseyde was inspired by Katherine and John. She also had Swynford poisoned by a treacherous loyalist of Gaunt’s, although there is no evidence of that. Late in the book, Katherine, overwhelmed with guilt and on the brink of despair, is brought to Julian. Her experiences there, of course, are imagined by the author. Still, it is plausible – and I wanted to believe it was this way – that Julian relayed the following divine message to Katherine:
“It is truth that sin is the cause of all pain; sin is behovable – none the less all shall be well…Accuse not thyself overdone much, deeming that thy tribulation and thy woe is all thy fault; for I will not that thou be heavy or sorrowful indiscreetly.”
Yes, these are liberties taken by the author. But they work. As Seaton’s biographer Lucinda MacKethan points out about this book and Seaton’s next work, The Winthrop Woman, “Some readers have criticized the history of these works as too heavy, but for most, Anya’s great respect for what might be called the knowability of the worlds she was bringing to light in their greatest asset.”
I have to agree with that. As mentioned above, I felt like I was immersed in those worlds. No one can know what the people in them were actually thinking and feeling. And her description of the sack and burning of Savoy Palace during the Peasants’ Revolt was nothing short of terrifying. It certainly seemed true to history as far as I was concerned.
And for those aforementioned history plays of Shakespeare – particularly I Henry IV, Henry V, and Richard II – I finally learned who all those characters and parties to the conflicts were. They include, in addition to John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke, Edward the Black Prince, Lord Harry Percy of Northumberland and his son Hotspur, Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and the Dukes of Gloucester and York. They flit in and out of the history plays, and I always had a hard time remembering who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Now I feel that I know where they all fit in the tumultuous history of the period.
Anyone who has read Shakespeare or dabbled in history has at least heard the name John of Gaunt. Like me, you probably regarded him as one of the big-time operators in a bygone age. And in that, you’d be right. But that’s the extent of it. Like me, you also would not have realized the profound impact he had on the history of the country of England. Nor, I daresay, had you ever heard of the formidable woman, the long-time mistress who at last became his wife, without whom John of Gaunt would have been just another member of the gone-and-forgotten noble class.
After Gaunt’s death, Richard II went off the rails and was succeeded by Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son from his first marriage. He became Henry IV, and his son was the much mythologized Henry V. The Beauforts, who were the initially illegitimate children of Gaunt and Katherine, were the progenitors of Henry VII, the Tudor royal line, and the Stuart royal line. That includes, among others, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and James I. Katherine’s grandsons were Edward IV and Richard III.
Quite a legacy. As the final line of this wonderful book states, in quoting the witches in Macbeth, “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.”
Perhaps the one good thing about being cooped up at home in the depths of winter is the extra time we have available for reading. I’ve taken advantage of that in the post-Christmas downtime. But after getting through, and learning a lot from, a couple of heavyweight books – The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seaton and Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey – I was ready for something lighter and more fun.
I found that in The Cabernet Club, a delightful romp through a many-faceted life transition by the heroine, Debbie Gordon. Though much of it was laugh-out-loud funny –especially a horror-show of a date with a friend of a friend…hard to believe guys actually behave that way on dates – the book also teaches some life lessons.
Maybe better, it just reiterates those lessons. We all know that it’s never too late to start over. We all know that things are seldom what they seem. We all know that someone’s apparently perfect life can really be a miserable slog. And we all know that “experts” usually don’t know “their ass from their eyebrows,” as Debbie memorably puts it in resolving one of the book’s conflicts. Still, it’s nice to have those lessons repeated as we watch Debbie re-learn them for herself.
Debbie is a long-divorced empty nester who leaves her New England home for six-month trial residency in Florida. If things don’t work out for her, she can always go back north and live in Delaware with her mother hen of a grown daughter. That’s an undesirable fallback Plan B, mostly because it will mean duty as an unpaid nana.
She rents a place in a rather sketchy, over-55 enclave called Palmetto Pointe. The cast of characters she meets there would be right at home in Schitt’s Creek. But fortunately for Debbie, she befriends Maria and Fran. Like Debbie, their drink of choice is Cabernet Sauvignon, hence the name of their exclusive little club. The three of them bond and work their way through a series of adventures that include dates and men, lousy but necessary jobs, small-town politics, health scares and incompetent doctors, and the re-visiting of a long-ago family tragedy when someone else from the old town arrives.
Navigating those adventures along with those ladies was fun for me. I think it will be fun and even somewhat familiar for women and men of their – and my – age group. In our own ways, we’ve been to some of those places. It also brought home the book’s greatest lesson: the critical importance of good friends who are there with us in good times and bad.
Speaking just for myself, I also felt a twinge of envy at that last lesson. And not for the first time, as I’ve frequently expressed to my lady friends over our own glasses of Cabernet. Women just have a knack of forming and keeping friendships like these. That’s one of the reasons that women outlive men, who have a much tougher time building and nurturing such support structures late in their lives.
The co-authors are Rona Zable and her daughter Margie Zable Fisher. Rona had published three Young Adult novels during her career, and she had drafted this novel before she passed away in 2023. Margie re-worked and augmented the draft and saw it through to publication.
If they ever turn this book into a TV series, I think it would be a mashup of Golden Girls and Gilmore Girls. And as noted above, there would be a touch of Schitt’s Creek there too – “Florida Man” probably has a place in Palmetto Pointe. I thought of Gilmore Girls because of the dynamic between an adult daughter trying to make her way in the world and her loving but tut-tuttingly disapproving parents. The situation is similar here but reversed, as the mother is plunging ahead with something new while the daughter hovers in the near background, ready to say “I told you so.”
Does the daughter ever get to say it? You can probably guess the answer, but I’m not going to spoil it for you. Read the book to find out.
What’s so magic about five years? Seems like the world is captivated by the very idea of that stretch of time.
Taken at one of the many Hughes Family weddings
Colleges have their five-year reunions. They look back, drink up a storm, and collect more alumni donations.
Governments – usually the nasty ones like Russia and China – have their five-year plans. They look ahead, map out how they’re going to change themselves, and then find someone else to blame when nothing works out.
Then there’s the five-year lookback rule for transferring your property to escape Medicaid liens, a five-year real estate rule for holding onto the house you’ve bought, and a five-year stretch (supposedly) to play four years of college sports. Seems like everybody’s got a five-year something or other.
Myself included. Tomorrow, my first quinquennium without my partner comes to an end. The next day is a mass in memory of Mary Ellen, who left this earthly world on December 17, 2019. And another five years will begin. Perhaps, if the Lord spares me.
From the parish bulletin
Did I have a five-year plan that started in 2019? Most certainly not. Do I have a plan that will end in 2029? No, but after much contemplation, much prayer, and not a little reading of those much wiser and more experienced than I, I’ve got some ideas.
But first, what really happened to me during those first five years? And where did they go? It seems like only last week that they took her from her bed at the nursing home’s memory unit to the funeral home. I packed up the few things that were there and brought them home – including the lovely “fidget quilt” that my friend Barbie made for her, and the little potted plant in the plastic vase.
Here they are now. Aren’t they nice? I recently re-potted the plant for the fourth time. It seemed to do well out on the deck during the warm weather. Now it graces a table overlooking the back yard, right next to a peace plant. My friends at Hockey East sent that plant to Kirby’s for my brother Jackie’s wake in 2014. That’s already two quinquennia – talk about time flying.
So, these tangible items accompanied me along the way for these five years. I’m glad I have them. And they bring a smile to my face rather than a tear to my eye when I see them or touch them. But I ask again, what really happened to me – or maybe better, within me – over the past 1,829 days?
That great man, C.S. Lewis, has helped me to understand. He’s also brought me a measure of comfort. He’s a master storyteller, profoundly deep thinker, and devout – yet sensibly so – Christian and lover of God. I’m no match for him in any of those aspects, but I’ve found that he and I are quite alike in one way: what we went through, and how we wrestled with it, when we lost our spouses.
I have settled into a morning routine of reading first, before any other activity. There’s always a scriptural or philosophical component. Recently, as this five-year milestone approached, I again took up “A Grief Observed” by Lewis. It is his own account of the weeks and months – maybe even longer – of his thoughts and emotions about his beloved, about the God who saw fit to take her from him, and about himself.
I had read that book shortly after Mary Ellen died. But I guess I needed the re-reading at a much later date before I realized that he and I are in many ways kindred spirits.
Early in the book, Lewis writes, “Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense, that’s most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief…my heart and my body are crying out, come back, come back…but I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.”
Yes, the commonplace. There was one time – I forget the occasion – when she and I were praying together. She said, “And thank you, dear God, for an ordinary day.” So Mary Ellen got this as well.
A little later on, Lewis writes,
“One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow until we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? A lee shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead – and any lights shown from the land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was (her) landfall. Such was my mother’s. I say their landfalls; not their arrivals.”
I can relate to that too. I’m a little more hopeful, at this point, than he was, about eventually calling at a safe harbor. But we’ll have to see.
Mr. Lewis’s wife had a lot in common with mine, too. “Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. Passion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm her. It seemed the first whiff of cant or slush; she sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked!”
And a little later he adds, “ The most precious give that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real.”
Me too, C.S. I’ve always felt, and I’ve said to many close friends who knew Mary Ellen, that I was the smart one in our relationship but that she was the wise one. School always came easily for me. I was a world champion test-taker, but I didn’t have an ounce of common sense. Book-smarts and snazzy report cards count for very little in the game of life. And in our marriage, in our family life, she was the one who made the decisions that truly mattered. Particularly when it came to raising our three children. And she got all of the big ones exactly right.
A few of those close friends from my early years will recall, I hope, my reaching out to them in the final years of Mary Ellen’s life, at the time when her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was confirmed. I wanted them to meet her while she was still “with it” and able to let her personality shine through the descending fog. I remain grateful to those who agreed to meet Mary Ellen and me for coffee, lunch, drinks, or whatever.
I had two reasons for this. First, I wanted Mary Ellen to meet some people with whom we never had the chance to socialize, but whose friendship was important to me. I also wanted them to meet her, because they didn’t really know me until they met the love of my life.
And what about the day-to-day, the living without our beloved? How do we cope? How did we cope?
Lewis writes of an emotion that I too have felt – the shame and guilt and overall feeling that something is amiss when our beloved is not in our thoughts. Then came a lifting of his spirits. And a realization that, I think, has come to me as well.
“For various reasons…my heart was lighter that it had been for many weeks…And suddenly at the very moment when so far, I mourned her least, I remembered her best…It was as if the lifting of a sorrow removed a barrier.
“Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it, he’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’…And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly when your eyes are blurred with tears.”
Coming close to his conclusion, he writes something to his wife that I could have written as well, had I had his genius. But I’ll write it now.
“It is often thought that the dead see us. And we assume, whether reasonably or not, that if they see us at all they see us more clearly than before. Does Mary Ellen now see exactly how much froth or tinsel there was in what she called, and I call, my love? So be it. Look your hardest, dear. I wouldn’t hide it if I could. We didn’t idealize each other. We tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it.
“So can you. Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives – to both, but perhaps especially to the woman – a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
So here I am. As I write this, I am just about at the end of my first five years without my partner. The day of her anniversary mass, I’ll start another trek of time yet to be determined. Do I have a plan for the next five or whatever years? No. But…
We’ve all heard that men make plans and God laughs. True enough. But I do know that I’ll start my every day as I always do, with a prayer of thanks cribbed from my Jewish friends:
“Grateful am I, eternal and living King. Thou hast mercifully restored my soul within me. Great is your faith.”
Yes, great is God’s faith in me, for giving me another of those ordinary days for which Mary Ellen was so thankful, so long ago.
Then what? Well, one could do worse than to emulate the great Oliver Sacks, who wrote the following during his later years:
“Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
“On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.”
That’s as good a plan as any. And sitting here, well into my eighth decade, I’ve got some of that altitude and perspective as well.
But that’s a plan for me. What about for Mary Ellen? As Lewis points out,
“…bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases, like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too. ..We will be still married, still in love…we shall still ache. But we are not at all – if we understand ourselves – seeking the aches for their own sake. The less of them the better, so long as the marriage is preserved. And the more joy there can be in the marriage between the dead and the living, the better.”
I do think that Mary Ellen approves of what I’m going to do for myself, as I try to take Dr. Sacks’s advice. But I will remind her, as well, of the final words of my funeral eulogy to her, five years ago.
After speaking at some length about Mary Ellen and my memories of our life together, I told the congregation that I now wanted to speak for her, to them. I recited the wonderful poem, Epitaph, which concludes,
“Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.”
I don’t mind admitting that today I cried once again, as I did at the church, when I read that last line. And I will strive every day to keep giving you away, my darling. That I promise.
Wensceslas as armed knight on horseback in Prague’s Wenceslas Square.
Maybe you’ve even heard the joke about how he like his pizza cooked:
“Deep and crisp and even.”
But who was this guy, the patron saint of the Czech Republic, whose statue stands in Wenceslas Square in Prague? Legend holds that if the Czech homeland is ever threatened, the statue will come to life, summon the army that sleeps beneath Mount Blanik, ready to defend the homeland. Wenceslas will wield his sword, which is hidden under the stones of the Charles Bridge and is to be found by a child when peril from enemies looms for Prague.
Here’s the rest of the story. There was actually a Wenceslas – real name Václav the Good, as Wenceslas is the Latinized version. He wasn’t a king; rather, he was Duke of Bohemia. He apparently was a very nice guy. He was from a very dysfunctional family, and he died because of his opposition to slavery.
The Charles Bridge
Yes, slavery. It wasn’t invented in the American South. They used to have it all over Europe. And Prague was the main market for slaves who were being moved overland from central Europe to the west and south.
Wenceslas was against slavery; he would buy slaves himself and set them free. But he ticked off three rich guys who had made big money in the slave trade. Their names were Tira, Česta, and Hněvsa; all three of them stabbed him before his own brother, Boleslas, ran him through with a lance.
Boleslas, the bad guy, took over the realm and knew where his bread was buttered. He, nominally Christian like Wenceslas, let the slavers make their money. He reigned for more than 35 years.
It didn’t matter that Boleslas already ruled over half the country at the time of the killing. It wasn’t enough for him, and it was the money that mattered.
According to “Christendom” by historian Peter Heather, Christianity was spreading throughout Europe in those years, driven largely by the political decrees and conquests in the long reigns of Charlemagne and his son, Louis the Pious.
Václav and Boleslas’s father, Vratislaus I, was the Duke of Bohemia and a Christian. Their mother Drahomíra, though baptized before the marriage, was aligned with Bohemia’s pagans. As a child, Václav was raised largely by his Christian paternal grandmother, Ludmila — who was later canonized as a saint in her own right.
When Václav was about 13, his father died in battle and Ludmila became regent. But the regency did not last long. His mother Drahomíra had Ludmila killed, and she then tried to suppress Bohemia’s Christians.
Wenceslas leads the Blanik Knights down the mountain to rescue Prague from its enemies.
When Václav became Duke of Bohemia himself at age 18 and came of age, he banished his mother and foiled her suppression plans by working to spread Christianity. He commissioned the building of several churches including part of what is now St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. He also developed a reputation as a wise and compassionate ruler, known for his deeds of mercy.
But to try and avoid disputes, the country was split in two, and half was given to the younger brother, Boleslas. But Boleslas wanted the whole enchilada. He also remained the favored son of Drahomira. In September 935 he plotted with the slave-owning a group of noblemen to kill his brother. He did so by exploiting Wenceslas’s religious faith. He invited Václav to a church dedication on Sept. 27, 929. The next day, while Václav was on his way to prayer, Boleslas and his henchman attacked and killed him.
Only the good die young. Wenceslas was 22. On the base of his statue, the inscription reads “Saint Wenceslas, duke of the Czech land, prince of ours, do not let perish us nor our descendants.’”
I’m told by those who’ve visited that part of Europe that Prague is a particularly beautiful city and that the Charles Bridge is spectacular. That’s one place I’d love to visit. But I won’t be diving into the Vltava River and searching though the rocks for Wenceslas’s sword. As the legend tells us, that’s a job reserved for a child.
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
That’s Sir Toby Belch, speaking to Feste the Clown in “Twelfth Night.” During the Middle Ages, Christmas was a time of continuous feasting and merriment, which climaxed on Twelfth Night. The height of celebration became the night before, or eve, of Epiphany. The twelve day count actually begins with the night of December 25, the “first night.” The Twelfth Night is the night before Epiphany, and the twelfth day is Epiphany itself.
Food and drink are there in abundance. A punch called “wassail,” consumed during Christmastime, is especially plentiful on Twelfth Night. Around the world, special pastries, such as the tortell and king cake, are baked on Twelfth Night. They are eaten the following day for the Feast of the Epiphany celebrations. That’s why Sir Toby speaks of the cakes and ale.
So here we are on January 5, the Eve of the Christian Feast of the Epiphany. The Twelfth Night revelry commemorates the visit of the Magi, the “Wise Men” from the East who followed the Star of Bethlehem and found the baby Jesus. But who were those guys anyway? Is there any grain of historical truth to this biblical legend?
There may be. Here’s the rest of the story.
According to an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, the “magoi” were surveyors of the night sky. Caspar, Balthazar, and Melchior could be called astronomers, astrologers, or magicians. However you label them, they were probably real people. The Latin word “magi” is the pluralization of the Greek singular “magos,” which signifies to the Latin-speaking world a Persian priest or “wise man.” The “magos” to the Greeks also connoted someone who was a sorcerer.
The WSJ piece goes on to state that the three were seeking not only scientific knowledge of the stars and planets, but they were also looking for divine portents. They were probably priests of the Zoroastrian faith, whose studies of astrology were their attempts to understand the relationship of the powers in the universe to humans.
If this is what they were up to, they would have had good reason to set out on their journey. Right around the time of Jesus’s birth, in 7 B.C., there was a “planetary conjunction,” in which Jupiter and Venus came very close to each other. They stayed close together in the sky for the better part of a year. Then, even more dramatically four years later, they sat just one-tenth of degree apart in the sky. On the morning of August 12 in 3 B.C., Jupiter and Venus sat just 1/10th a degree apart in the dawn sky. That’s one-fifth the diameter of the Full Moon. They appeared to be a single body about one-fifth the diameter of the full moon.
We actually had a similar conjunction in December of 2020. I remember going to Millennium Park, a high point in West Roxbury, to view it. There were hundreds of people, crunching through the now and carrying telescopes and binoculars, there who had the same idea. We did indeed see the “Christmas Star” in what was referred to as the Great Conjunction of December 2020.
The Great Conjunction of 2020
So, to me anyway, it’s entirely plausible that these three wise men, scientists first and driven by their thirst for knowledge, did actually see something wonderful in the sky and hopped on their camels to find out what it was.
The Christian religion says that what they found was not an updated map of the sky, but another form of the ultimate good that they were seeking. They were the first people from a foreign land to see the God who had taken on a human nature in order to save humanity.
The Greek prefix “epi” can mean “upon” or “through;” think of how you use an epi-pen. And the Greek word “phaino” means “to appear;” you know what a “phenomenon” is. Christians call January 6 the Feast of the Epiphany, because God “showed himself” through his human form for the first time.
Now you know the rest of the story, and whether or not you are a believer and whether or not your true love gives you twelve drummers drumming, may the peace and good will that we sang of in our Yuletide carols be with you and your loved ones this whole year through.
It’s rather hard not to, in this festive time of the year. As I write this, it’s three days before the Third Sunday of Advent on the Christian religious calendar. There’s an electric candle in my every front window. It’s also the eighth and final day of Hanukkah on the calendar of my Jewish brothers and sisters. All eight of their menorah candles are now lighted. (Actually, that’s not technically a menorah, as I just learned; more about that shortly.)
Last Sunday at Mass, I saw the Advent Wreath up by the altar. Two purple candles were burning. They’ll light the third one, a pink candle, this coming Sunday. It’s called “Gaudete” Sunday – meaning “rejoice.” We’re supposed to be joyful because the Redeemer is almost here. That’s why candle three is pink.
I’ll be there on Sunday morning, at 7:30 a.m. in St. Anne’s Church, Readville. I’ll see that pink candle’s flame. I’ll see as well the other two candles lighted for the mass, which is to be celebrated in memory of my Mary Ellen. She went home to God four years ago, on December 17, 2019, and this will be her anniversary mass.
I know I’m supposed to be joyful, on this Gaudete Sunday. And I will, sort of. I know where she is, and I’m grateful that the Lord called her home and freed her from the prison that her body had become with Alzheimer’s Disease. My memories of our 42 years of marriage are happy ones. She is still with us as well, in the lives of our children, of her many siblings, and in the many hundreds of lives of the children she taught through her brilliant career in the classroom. Yes, all causes for rejoicing, even as the inevitable waves of sadness wash over me. Maybe this is what they mean by “mixed blessings.”
The readings I’ll hear at the mass show just that mixing; perhaps more poignantly, to me, they also point toward Mary Ellen and what she did for others during her time here on earth. Like the candles, she brought her own special light to the world. More of that anon, too.
The first reading from Isaiah says “…he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted.” Thanks for that, Isaiah. You’ve come to the right place.
The responsorial psalm is not, as is customary, from David. This time it’s from Mary, the only psalm we have from her: “My soul rejoices in my God.” And “…the Almighty has done great things for me.” Yes, I can’t disagree with that. Every morning I awake with a prayer of thanks for the Lord’s giving me a new day; and on this Sunday especially, I’ll say that prayer of thanks that he sent Mary Ellen to me. Great things, indeed.
The second reading, from Paul to the Thessalonians, begins “Brothers and sisters. Rejoice always.” Well, okay, but see the paragraph directly above for my best reason why.
The gospel is from Luke, and it’s the passage about John the Baptist as the voice crying in the wilderness to make straight the way of the Lord. It also says “He was not the light, but came to testify to the light.”
Ah, there it is again. The light. From candles, yes, but from us and our loved ones as well.
Coincidentally, I recently visited the guest book for Mary Ellen’s obituary on Legacy.com. Perusing all the wonderful things that people – many of them her former students and parents of students – took the time to write about her made me very happy. One, however, from a contemporary and former teaching colleague, was spot-on for this meditation on lights and candles. She wrote:
“Although I have not seen Mary Ellen in many years, it is apparent that the same Jesus who beckoned her to join the Sisters of St. Joseph for a short time, has been alive within her as she lived out her vocation to her husband, her children, her family, her first graders, and her professional colleagues.
“Having carried the Light of Jesus to all those in her life, and having shared in His Cross during her time of physical suffering, is she not now enjoying eternal life with Him Who beckoned her home last week? Surely, this is the greatest lesson of the thousands of lessons Mary Ellen taught during her lifetime.”
Tears of gratitude for that one. Yes, Mary Ellen did carry the light of Jesus to all those in her life. We weren’t Jewish, but she was the personification of a shamash.
What’s a shamash? This brings me, at long last, to what I said in the first paragraph about menorahs. As I just learned, in researching for this post, the Menorah is actually a seven-branched candelabrum, used in the Temple and Tabernacle. That’s technically not what we see at Hanukkah. We see instead the Hanukkiah, a nine-branched candelabrum used for the Hanukkah Festival of lights.
The Hanukkiah has one candle for each of the eight days of the festival. It also holds the shamash candle, which is used to light all the others and to show the way.
As the website Chabad.org puts it:
“The shamash serves as a lesson to educators and leaders everywhere. The shamash is not a mitzvah candle. Yet, it is important because it is the instrument that enables all the other candles to form a mitzvah.
“Each of us has the potential to be a shamash. We all have a responsibility to become teachers and impact the lives of others. Just as the shamash is usually placed above the other candles, a person who serves others, a teacher, becomes great because he or she is using a set of superior skills to make others great too.”
Yes, Mary Ellen was a shamash.
And so, on Gaudete Sunday, at her fourth anniversary mass, I’ll have ample reason to rejoice and to be thankful that she and I shared much of our earthly lives together.
You know what it means. Don’t believe everything that you’re told. Be skeptical. Check it out for yourself. If you don’t you could be deceived, swindled, or – worst case scenario – you could be killed.
That worst case scenario was a frequent happening in the ancient Roman Empire. And it was way back then when taking something with a grain of salt emerged as a prudent measure. This is the rest of the story, as told to us by Pliny the Elder in his “Natural History,” written around 77 CE.
Kings, emperors, nobles, and other potentates of that era often had a very short time at the top of the heap before someone knocked them off. And the preferred method of assassination wasn’t the knives-in-the-forum killing that did in Julius Caesar. The weapon of choice was poison.
One man, King Mithridates VI of Pontus, decided to do something about it. Mithridates (135–63 BCE, r. 120-63 BCE) was a bad guy. Of course, the Romans wanted to kill him. If the writings of Plutarch are correct, he orchestrated the mass killing of up to 150,000 Roman and Italian noncombatants in a single day. He was perennially at war with the Roman Republic. But he managed to live until age 82.
How did he do that? By concocting and regularly ingesting an antidote for all toxins known at the time. Legend has it that he built up a tolerance to deadly poisons, thanks to the magic elixir that became known as mithridatum.
Pliny the Elder wrote the story of how Pompey, a foe of Caesar, found the recipe for Mithridates’s secret protective. It included dried nuts, figs, rue leaves, and close to 50 different ingredients – arsenic and venom also among them – that were mixed together with honey and made into chewable tablets. It was to be taken after “additio salis grano” – an added grain of salt.
So now you do know the rest of the story. And if you find it less than believable, well, reach for the salt shaker.
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