Poor Banished Children of Eve

 

It is the dusky shadows of an ancient September.  My grandmother sits on the porch of her house, reciting the rosary in monotonous, sepia tones:

“Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.  To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve…”

I was often pulled into this ritual.  She would hand me one of her spare strings of beads, and I would take my seat in the autumnal twilight, sinking into the recitation, the circular rhythm.  In the span of my childhood, I went from not understanding the words I breathed, to comprehending their significance, to finding them anachronistic.  Yet, there is a comfort in prayer, a reassuring spirit in following through:

“Glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”

Except worlds do end, and begin again.

My grandmother is gone.  The house is unrecognizable, altered by another owner.  And I am middle-aged.  The ritual remains lodged in the shrouds of memory.  Yet, it is once again September.  In September, we use to go to play at my grandmother’s house after school.  That, too, is a strand of memory broken.

Our rituals have all been broken.  This only adds to our feeling that the world has turned upside down.  We do not leave our homes now.  We avoid contact and protect ourselves.  My ritual is to rise in the morning, go to my desk, bring up a student’s face on my screen, and work with her for an hour on her essay.  Later, I will pull up another face to discuss her struggles in her classes, the learning strategies and work-arounds that will help her get back on track.

Despite all our devices, our methods of communication allowing one person to see another in pixels on a screen, we are lonely still.  It feels as if the world is ending, but as my friend, William Michaelian, wrote recently:

“The end of the world is a strange and beautiful place. It keeps growing, and it keeps ending. And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

To do this, we may have to let go of cherished rituals:  family dinners, baseball games, the rhythms and milestones of the workweek, the long walk at twilight.  We must adapt and change our colors, and recognize that we see the world differently now, and there will be new rituals to embrace.  “And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

I do not pray anymore.  Mumbling words without the strength of conviction is an exhausted ritual I can do without.  I love silence.  If she were still alive, I would gladly go sit on my grandmother’s porch with her.  I would tell her how the world has changed.  She would tell me the torch has been passed.  And then she would say her prayers while I take in the gloaming in silence, feeling the wind on my face.

I have been dreaming of her lately.  Or, I should say, in the dreams, she is dead as she is in real life, but I dream of her house.  I am there again.  The house is empty, but the same as when I last was there.  I am responsible for repairing and renovating it, for keeping it preserved.  There are the gardens, the fruit trees, the lawns, the two-story house itself.  I rise every morning at dawn to walk the property, a single house on three connected lots.  I water the vegetables and flowers, mow the grass, prune the trees and shrubs in season.  If there is something to repair, the materials appear, and I can put it right again.  There are no other people in this dream.  I am the sole survivor of some colossal ending.  It is strange and discomforting.  I do not leave the property, and a ten-foot wooden fence protects the place from intruders.  I can see only the sky above.  Nearby houses are shadowy and undefined.  What kind of dream is this?  Purgatory?  Heaven?  When does solitude become loneliness?

There is no one left to perform the ritual, no mumbled prayers to Mary, the Mother of God.  I am not interested in continuing the nightly prayer.  I am more interested in the Orthodox Jew, swaying back and forth in prayer.  I am more interested in the Buddhist, in the lotus position, humming, gone into another plane of existence.  I am interested in the Muslim, on his knees, facing Mecca, which may be a million miles away on the other side of the globe, yet he is tethered to it by a strong and indestructible fiber of the heart.  Finally, I am the one who spans the distance and lands somewhere between agnostic and atheist.  I know the world is a sacred place.  I know that divinity lives in all things.  And I know that we do not end.  We are transfigured at the moment of death—we become light and air.

So I am thinking of past Septembers.  We just observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a moment we should all reflect upon, not just our friends in Judaism.  The world needs to recognize the pain and suffering we cause each other, the way we are hell-bent on destroying who we are and what we have built with our own hands as well as the pulsating Earth beneath us.

My grandmother, in an afterlife of her own construction, is probably sitting on her porch in some other unreachable dimension, mumbling her prayers and letting the beads slip over her fingers, keeping count of decades and prayers.  That is her path now.

I stay up late into the warm fall night, remembering all of it, the way we live, the poor banished children of Eve.