Finding Faith (A Work in Progress)

I originally wrote this when I was still clinging to God. Only recently I decided that my prayers were ascending into a void where no deity was present and that I was wasting time attempting to contact a supernatural being. My life has not changed for better or worse since making this very difficult decision to eschew God and Jesus; the only exception being that I am free to think for myself and be rid of Bronze Age rules and dictums. 

Finding Faith (A Work in Progress)

Some people are equipped with faith. I see a strong belief in God not as something that can be taught, but as a trait or an asset. For me, I simply lack the fundamental ingredients necessary to form any sort of bond with the All Mighty. When I was a kid, my parents took my siblings and me to church each Sunday. There was Catechism as well, but all I learned was to be fearful of God. Jesus was the nice son of the Father; but I learned that to not believe that he is the son of God, and that he died and was resurrected for our sins meant that I was going to roast in Hell for an eternity – just for that. For the simple doubt that enters anyone’s mind that maybe, just maybe this book of ancient text written by people who believed that the Earth was flat and that the sun revolved around our planet (and they’d burn you at the stake for saying otherwise) were absolutely correct when it came to my soul and the word of the Lord.

In my youth, I had a cartoonish view of Heaven. You died, hopefully went straight up through the clouds, encountered St. Peter who scrolled through some sort of giant tome for your name as you hoped a trap door wouldn’t open beneath your feet and send you falling into the flaming pit of Hell. With luck, he’d nod in approval and wave you through like a bouncer at an exclusive, Manhattan night club. You’d turn around and wave goodbye to any unfortunate friends or relatives who didn’t have enough check marks next to their names to make it through the Pearly Gates.

That may not be close to what I was taught during my religious education, but that is what I took away from it all. I was trained to be scared, feel guilty, and to repent, repent, repent. One could never do enough good to earn a free pass in Paradise, and the slightest misstep could damn you forever. In my teens, I rebelled against authority – and that meant against God and Jesus, too. I couldn’t stop thinking impure thoughts with the raging libido of a seventeen-year-old with access to Playboy Magazines. The only reason I started watching Monty Python was because it was on PBS and they (gasp) occasionally showed nudity. But there was God, looking down upon me and shaking his head in disapproval. I was sure Jesus didn’t condone my leering at centerfolds either, and the Holy Ghost, whoever he was, probably put his foot down as well. Wait a minute, I’d think to myself. I was made in His image, and he made women – beautiful women – and it was sinful for me to look at them? Talk about a crisis. It wasn’t just sneaking a peek at naked women that vexed me; it was the idea that just about anything could be a sin. Not listening to your mother and father, lying to others (yes Aunt Beckie, dinner was delicious—ugh), skipping church, talking about classmates, anything that one could do on a daily basis was a sin, and that was just plain frustrating to me.

How could anyone have the fortitude not to sin? What irked me even more was that the other members of the parish whom I sat next to were not better than little, old, hell-bound me, I thought. God, Jesus, Heaven, Mary, Peter, Paul, and all the angels and saints, were way too demanding of my time and efforts; and the world we lived in seemed ill-suited to meet their lofty demands. So, I teetered on the brink of agnosticism; a safety measure with one foot firmly in the God camp, just in case. Why? Because I held strongly to the idea that I could be faithful.

Finally, in my twenties, I became an atheist. And not one of those obnoxious, eye-rolling, “I don’t believe in those fairy tales” kind of atheists. I simply did not believe in God – or Jesus for that matter. This bothered me because I really wanted to believe. I know so many family and friends with a strong faith in God. They have immense knowledge of all that is holy and historical when it comes to religion and Christianity in particular. They seem so certain, assured, and ultimately content. I am sure they did not arrive at their faith easily. The people I am referring to in my life are intelligent and educated. They don’t wave the Bible in the air and quote scripture as if no other fact or idea can impugn such powerful words. They are reasoned, soft-spoken souls who have had some sort of epiphany; or maybe they simply have the propensity for deep, unwavering conviction.

When I had children, I wanted them to have religion in their lives. I figured that as a parent, God would come in handy as a supernatural authority figure who would sit on the sidelines and help me round out the kids’ upbringing as the ultimate disciplinarian. When my children were preparing for their first Holy Communion, they were forced to go to confession – which nowadays the Catholic Church calls Reconciliation (to make it sound like more inviting to the sinning masses). What are little kids confessing to? Not much, really. So, they sit in the confessional and tell the priest that they disobeyed their parents and fought with their brothers or sisters.

Cue the dramatic music: they disobeyed their parents. They sinned little boy and girl sins. I committed those by the truck-load in my early years, and I agonized over the consequences. I only hoped my son and daughter didn’t experience the same internal torment that I did when I was their age preparing for the sacraments. It made me feel guilty that I put them through this at all. Ultimately, it was my latent fear of God and His perpetual punishments, in spite of my stated atheism, and the fact that I did not want to disappoint my father, that I sent my kids to church and saddled them with the same guilt and fright that I carried with me for as long as I could remember.

In church, I’ve sat and watched these children emerge from their visit with the priest after their first confession while waiting for my own kid’s turn. They appear with a sullen expressions on their faces, walking with their heads bowed and their hands clasped, as they rattled off Hail Marys and Our Fathers in their heads. Seated in the pews near their friends, they are buoyed by a sense of relief that accompanies the knowledge that they are young and that death is a long way off. The time to worry about real sins and an actual accounting of all the wrongs they committed in their lives will happen when they are very, very old. That’s what I thought at that age.

After each of my children were confirmed, I stopped taking them to Sunday mass. There was a brief, overlapping, period of time when my father – a deeply religious man – was alive and my oldest was preparing for Confirmation when I still had to pretend that I was a man of God. It was right after my mother died that I would take my dad to the five o’clock mass every Saturday night. During those visits to the Parish of the Holy Cross with dad that I became both envious and resentful again.

In the rows of pews were hundreds of others from my community who gathered together to praise God. I was present, but not one of them. My father’s faith was unshakable and built on the solid foundation of a lifetime’s worth of hardship and surviving the battlefields of Italy in World War II. I admired my dad’s capacity to understand and worship God. His daily prayers and visits to church had a healing effect on him. No doubt he prayed for his family, and I felt a tinge of shame for not praying for him as well – at least not in the way the faithful do. I wished for him  to stay healthy and for good things for everyone else in my life, however, wishes do not constitute prayers.

My parents are both gone. It’s tough to see photos of them since I feel in my heart that as much as time that they spent praying to an angry, vengeful, anthropomorphic, Old Testament God and his progressive, more accepting son, they are by every definition no longer with us. For me to believe that there is a magical realm where one goes after death where we are reunited with our families and friends and all of our pets because we had conviction and performed charitable works takes a leap of faith I do not have the strength to jump. If I had a running start and I ran at full speed while in the best shape of my life, I could not cross the chasm of doubt that is within my heart that prevents me from believing in God. For this I am damned; but that is only if I believe the tenets which outline the circumstances for one to be banished to Hell to begin with. I do not, and I certainly wish I did.

I miss my parents very much and I’d like to see them again. There are some close friends of mine who died young and I often wonder what they'd be like if they were still alive. While I will never forget them, they sit as framed portraits in my memory, and what hurts more than anything is the notion that when I die, and when everyone else dies who knew and loved them, they they have died a second time. The same will happen to the rest of us; after our friends and family die, we die once more with them. There will be no one else to carry memories of us. That is the cold, hard reality of death that frightens me more that a Dante's Inferno. Your name will never be uttered by another's lips, your pictures will have no identity, your character is lost. Your soul becomes anonymous and evaporates forever. Your grave is deep, your body decomposed, or your ashes scattered and mixed with the soil. But you are no longer alive, in person, or in the pages of history. All that you have done is futile and insignificant. Life is meaningless, and there is no point to it all except to support yourself and your family and fulfill any selfish wishes you may be able to afford.

What if after we pass away we actually could reunite with friends and family? We do have something that could be a considered a soul. Our bodies contain energy. All of the science books I have read suggest that energy cannot be destroyed, so there is hope that when we pass away that our minds do go somewhere, even for a brief period of time, and we could perhaps mingle with the others we knew on Earth before our energy is absorbed into a star or a black hole. Maybe God isn’t who we say he is, and that everything written about Him is wrong; that what we must do is love one another and fight off the entropic forces that kill our bodies and prevent civilization from advancing. I’d like to meet a merciful God; one who shows us where we went wrong and sends us back to try again instead of flinging us into an unholy pit of torture for an eternity or rewarding us with a trip to Fantasy Land. If I pray, I’d like a solid answer, and not an eventual turn of events that someone can point to and assert that it was God’s will. I’d like to go to Church and believe that the institution I am loyal to be actually inspired by a creator and not the greed and wickedness of man. As of now, none of these things I ask for seem possible.

Tonight I’ll lay awake in bed for a short time before sleep overcomes me. I’ll think about everyone in my life, what I plan to do, and what I may have done wrong or what I could do differently. If there is a God, and He is listening, I hope my thoughts count as prayer.

This One is Called "Marie"

Each event in our lives is treated like a single occurrence. We all conceptualize them differently and look deep within each vignette for meaning. I have an example of what I am trying to say. This was a powerful episode in my life; one I will never forget. However, in all of the pain and anguish I experienced then, there were poetic and heartfelt moments which make the suffering bearable.

Some background information is necessary here. My mother was a fighter. Not in the physical sense. She had to endure pain for most of her adult existence. She battled problems with her back which necessitated at least two surgeries which I can remember; one of them was to fuse her spine. Her numerous ailments over the years loomed ominous and were treated individually by specialist after specialist until the name Systemic Lupus took over and she was treated correctly.

Then there was cancer. She braved chemotherapy and three enormous operations to save her life over the span of ten years. One of her care givers, a physician's assistant told me on the side after her surgery: “Your mother is one brave and tough woman. Really, I’ve never seen anyone fight so hard.”

Her last fight came in the hospital following a life saving surgery to remove one of the tumors blocking her small intestine. The danger was she would die during the procedure. The alternative was she would starve to death. Her choice was to have the operation and come out alive.

During recovery, things never looked so grim. On a respirator, she would greet her family with a drowsy nod. We comforted her, staving off the notion that these were her last days. With the fanfare of a minor miracle, she was taken off the respirator the next morning and moved to intensive care. And, with her spirits raised, she proved everyone wrong and was transported to a step-down unit after a week; and then, ultimately, home.

Hospice workers are extraordinary people. Morphine, palliative care, and sun-setting, were all like odd pieces of furniture in our collective family vernacular until we saw them put into practice. Without the compassionate souls from Hospice, our mom would never have had the opportunity to view her garden from her living room window during those last days. We placed the bed there because there was no room in the house put it anywhere else. There had to be space for all of us to move in and about, taking turns at her side, caring for her wants and needs, and ultimately, consoling her. It was the perfect spot, because many of our relatives and friends made the sad journey from all over the country to visit her as she faded.

One scene which sticks out in my mind, which causes me both heartache and a curious sense of emotional gratification, is when our mother’s lifelong friend came to visit her. Two days before mom passed, she was drifting in and out of consciousness. Phone calls were made by all of us to those concerned for her to “get here.” All the way from Nevada, came my mother’s best friend. Mom knew Marie since they were both five years old. We kids called her “Aunt Marie,” and her children were our “cousins.” They shared everything, and were close for as long as each of them could remember. Mom and Marie went from Kindergarten through high school together, got married around the same time, had children, watched their parents die, and became grandparents. All the while their bond never faltered. When Marie moved across the country to be close to her children, they did not lose touch, and they were always on the phone together. The news of mom’s latest situation brought Marie out in a hurry.

By then, mom had no strength. It was all she could do to keep her eyes open. Time was short, and the rest of us were coming to grips with the reality that we would end the week without a mother and her grandchildren would be without their loving grandma. Quietly, Marie and Uncle Bill entered through the front door. Knocking was a mere formality and they never had to do so before. Marie carried herself with a brave face. She put her pocket book on a chair, walked quietly over to mom who was asleep, and took her hand. I was seated on the couch, watching as this reunion was about to take place.

“Marie?” Mom’s voice was weak, gravelly, her breathing tortured. “Marie …”
“Shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here.”

No one needed to be asked to leave the room. I retreated to the backyard and kept an eye on them through the large bay window mom was situated by. I saw them clutching each other, and sharing private words encoded in a secret language of over sixty years of friendship. There were tears, and I thought at one point I saw mom smile. I watched them. I was a voyeur. Maybe I was trespassing and I didn’t care. This was my mother, and for the last few moments of her life she was able to reconnect with all of us; to stay here for just enough time for her friend to arrive and they could be pals again, children holding hands in the school yard, talking about boys, marriage, children, grandchildren, and finally what Marie was there for.

For me memories are shaped like bubbles; and, from the moment I learned my mother was going to die and up until her last breath, I can pick out small shapes, recollections. Every once in a while I reach out and grasp one and gaze into it like a crystal ball. This one is called Marie.





cancer, chemotherapy, death, episode, fighter, High School, Hospice, hospital, Kindergarten, Morphine, palliative care, respirator, surgery

The Language of the Dead

It is my belief that the soul in a human body disperses after death. That does not happen immediately, I envision; but, we become a part of the greater cosmos and step into another state of being.

I cling to this belief in the hopes that there is a larger force than us; a being or community of beings which dispense righteousness in the afterlife. Perhaps the only cure for each person's pain and suffering is to learn the consequences of one's actions while they were living.

In death, observing events which make up our existence is edification for the newly departed. As we rise figuratively or literally from our bodies, we see the world as a distant entity, and we then detach from the bonds which keep us within this dimension. Our lives are displayed from creation to the end and then beyond. We view the past, present, and the future through an extraterrestrial portal in time, yet we are unable to speak. There is no verbal expression, no spoken words in the afterlife. We just are. Whatever guides us, teaches or censures us does so with its presence.

We sense them, and court is held before we finally trespass into oblivion. We are human, and shall always be in any form. The world descends from view, and we are captivated by its disappearance, seeking out those we knew and loved for one last time. The path is clear, and we step ahead to the next scene in the Kinetoscope panorama and leave behind a single message which we implore, as only the departed are able to, that it is seen and interpreted.

Clues from those who pass on can be found in a garden long since left uncultivated with a single rose for a widowed bride. A music box playing suddenly on a mantle on a little boy’s birthday after his daddy is gone, or snow on Christmas morning for the daughter who wanted to make snow angels while wearing new, winter coat that Santa never had the chance to bring for her. We are still here, and we decide which signs are for us, and which are mere coincidence, and we deny, deny, deny, until our own inevitable trial comes. The dead are so powerful.

death departed cosmos clues trial Kinetoscope life rose snow

When Life Turns To Stone

There’s a little something in my writing which the reader has no way of picking up on. In my novels, I honor my best friend who died when he was only twenty one years old way back in 1985. The Wade Thompson I knew would have scoffed at anyone doing something so trite; but, the way I see it, he may have changed his mind if he was alive today.

In my first novel, I have a character with the initials W.T. In my second novel, the protagonist buries a suitcase full of stolen cash in three feet of snow at a cemetery, in front of the headstone of Robert Wade Thompson. In my last novel one of the characters based solely on his personality. My visits to him in my stories are my homage to his life, and they don’t necessarily reflect my actual visits to his grave.

Frozen in my mind as an athletic, young, long haired man with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips, the Wade Thompson I knew remained someone I could visit even after death. He listened quietly, I imagined, as I told him about my life when I stopped by the cemetery. He’s buried just miles outside our hometown in a small, quiet, private graveyard next to his mother. She had passed away a few years after he did. Over the years, I’d make a side trip to see him while on the way to my parent’s home.

Last August when my mother was dying, I went there once more to pay my respects before I headed to see my mom for maybe the last time before she passed away. As I always did, I kept him up to date with the events in my life and I told him about what was happening to my mother. This visit was different, though. Suddenly, when for all these years I’d been able to have my gratifying little graveside chats with my buddy, it lost its meaning.

I stooped over his headstone, looking at the inscribed words “Loving Son, Brother, and Friend” and was no longer able to attribute them to Wade. My head spun. My mom was going to be buried soon, and we made her funeral arrangements the day before. I didn’t want her to go, yet I knew it as inevitable. Still, there I was, asking my deceased friend for help with my grief. It was time I came to terms with the fact that he was dead.

Wade was twenty one years old when he died suddenly from complications due to Juvenile Diabetes. We knew he was getting sicker, yet that didn’t stop the two of us from wanting to go to school for computer science together. Also, it didn’t hold up our plans to share an apartment and split the rent as two pals would. After his death, the reflection of his friendship stayed with me all the way through my acceptance to the New York City Police Academy, my marriage to my wife, the births of my two children, and up until the moment when my mom faced her own mortality. Then, in one moment of clarity, he was gone.

This was not his fault. I was the one who glorified him, both in my writing, and in the way I kept him alive by seeking him out for “chats” at the graveyard. My other friends over the years all learned about him, saw his photos and tried to understand as I explained how much of an influence he had on my existence. There was always the question in my mind when I faced a problem “What would Wade have done?” That day, a little over a year ago on that tiny plot of grass, I couldn’t find my friend anymore. There was just a gray, carved stone. Dirt filled the crevices of the chiseled letters which formed his name. I don’t know how it happened, but I believe he wanted to go on. There had to be a point where I needed to grow up and face my problems without relying on a friend who died twenty one years earlier.

Wade never went to college, never got married, did not have children, never had a career, and he died before his mother did. Maybe he couldn’t be there for me. Perhaps he was never around the way I belived he was and I couldn’t, or wouldn’t realize it. I walked away from his headstone that day and went to my parent’s house, around the corner from where my friend grew up, and watched my mother leave us the next afternoon. It’s okay, they are both gone now, and we are all going to meet the same fate. I’ll continue to hide secrets about my buddy in the paragraphs of my novels and short stories. He’d like that, if he was still alive.



cemetery death friend grave graveyard headstone Juvenile Diabetes New York City novels Police Academy, Writing

Writer's Plot Notes: "Someone Has to Die"

With my method of writing, I try to construct my story in a manner that efficiently moves the plot along without bogging the reader down in unnecessary details. Unfortunately, a few people get hurt or killed along the way. It's not like I'm a boy sadistically stomping on ants in the backyard; I am a writer who needs to knock off a few decent, and sometimes not-so decent folks every once in a while to tell a compelling story.

Of all the tales I've authored, I can't think of any which could be considered extremely violent. My first story has a victim who is viciously stabbed and raped and one homicide by way of gunfire. In the court of public opinion, I couldn't be accused of writing something sensational just to attract an audience. To support that claim, I didn't find any audience for that story. I was turned down so many times, I had to fit all of the rejection letters into two, giant manila envelopes, meaning I didn't create anything which stood out among all of the other stacks printed, 12 point type in the slush pile.

My second work of fiction deals with a character who winds up in Hell. But, Hell is supposed to be a bad place, isn't it? Three people were murdered in that story and I still don't think I meant it to be an overly-brutal narrative as it is a theme about redemption. My last novel has three people getting attacked, with only one of the gunshot victims succumbing to his wounds. Maybe my characters have lousy aim; but, I couldn't bear to kill the protagonist as he had to survive to be the hero. My point? Authors are Gods in their worlds, and we have the power of life and death over our characters. The question is, how to dispatch them?

There are those who can coldy kill off their characters in hideous, evil ways. Think of Saddam's torture rooms, shut your eyes, and cup your hands over your ears. This writer can't travel down that road toward hideous torture and greusome death. Maybe if I'm tailgated again on the way home from work by some idiot on the Long Island Expressway I might become inspired to...forget it. I'm not that type of writer.

Still, I was stunned when I took inventory of all the acts of agression in my stories. Yes, the protaganists in all three of my novels are police officers as I excercise the old "write what you know" concept. I figure it'd be easier for an ex-cop to get police stories published than to entice a literary agent with a medical thriller. There is an inherant amount of danger in police work, so it stands to reason that there is the potential for gunplay in a any scene where an officer strolls in a building as a drug dealer hides, panting and sweaty, behind a doorway waiting for him to approach.

Yet, the question remains, how do I kill off my future charcters? I'm sort of weak-willed when it comes to death. Bullets are clean, easy, and impersonal in a way. It was many years ago when I wrote a chapter where a poor woman was dragged into a wooded area, stabbed repeatedly, and savagely raped. When I go back and re-read that portion of the manuscript, I get a bit queasy. That's not because I am such a powerful writer, it's because I had to imagine all of the gory, terrorizing details and hurt someone I cared about. Yet, as sure as I sit here typing this blog post about inserting murder and death into one's writing, someone is going to get hurt in my next novel. I have an idea who it is, and I don't like him. Maybe you'll read about it one day. Whether or not this one gets published remains to be seen; but, either way....it's going to be murder.

write, writer, plot story novel manuscript literary agent slush pile violence shooting

The Toughest Thing To Write, Was Not

Writers are often called upon to perform unpleasant tasks, such as write an obituary, or to report on a tragic news story. For me, the most emotional, yet easiest piece I ever wrote was the eulogy for my mother. For many years, she battled both cancer and systemic Lupus. Unfortunately, there was plenty of time for her and the rest of us to contemplate her death. There was no hope, as the oncologist told her: "Ann, there is nothing we can do for you."

As I and my family kept vigil at her bedside, there was no avoiding the fact that she was going to pass on. Somewhere in my mind, I began to formulate the words which were to become her eulogy. As morbid as that sounds, she was my mother, and in those final, meditative moments of her life, I had time to summarize all that she meant to me and to the rest of us. From there, I was able to envision my thoughts and emotions, and ultimately put them on paper.

In fact, because I am one of those fiction writers who often insert my actual memories into the many pieces I author, I was able to steal a vignette from a short story I typed out on an old Smith Corona typewriter before I was married. On the way home from my parents house on the night my mother passed away, that scene played out in my head just as I wrote it all those years earlier, but the reasons why I opted to put it on paper were just as valid then as on the day she died when I chose to put it into her tribute.

The scene in my short story was crafted from a memory I had as a small boy. I couldn't have been older than the age of five because my little brother was an infant then. I can still see myself sitting in a chair at the kitchen table of our home as my mother cooked dinner for all of us. She was tired and her back was hurting, but she seemed happy. Dad came home from work, and he walked up behind her and kissed her on the cheek. When he walked away into their bedroom, my mother began to sing, softly to herself. I don't think she knew she was singing, or that I was there watching her, in awe of her beautiful voice. The song she sang was "Ave Maria." Perry Como would sing it on his Easter special every year, and my mother would never miss a performance. At times, she would sing along with him, the light from the television reflecting on her face, revealing her misty eyes.

She stayed like that in my mind for decades with her bright red hair pulled back, and with her family all coming home to enjoy her delicious cooking. She was at peace with herself, and I always look back on that moment whenever I’m feeling depressed or going through a hard time for inspiration.

My mother suffered a myriad of illnesses for most of her adult life which can now be attributed to Lupus. Her fight with cancer lasted well over ten years, and she needed at least three surgeries on her spine. Still, just being home and cooking for her family was enough to make her smile and sing the only song she loved so much it made her cry.

It was natural then, on my ride home the night she died, that I chose to immortalize that memory and share it with all of our friends and loved ones who came to show their respects for her at her wake. I removed that scene from that short story, in effect killing the fictional character that lived it in typeset, and returned it to its rightful owners. You see, I was the young voyeur that day, watching from my chair as she inspired me with her beauty and toughness. However, she was the one who lived through the pain and discomfort and became the example to us all. Her eulogy then, was easy to compose, as I had been writing it for my entire life in all of my stories and essays. She was one of my major influences, and she was my inspiration for that short story which was actually all about her in the first place.

As an author, I imagine everything, and yet, create nothing. As for every project I begin, I start from my birth, borrowing from all of my experiences until I've completed my latest manuscript. With the toughest assignment I ever undertook, it was, ironically, the easiest, because my writing was always inspired by my mother. I merely needed to summarize everything she was and will still be to all of us who remain. One day, when my own story ends, perhaps someone will be kind and pen a few words about me. Hopefully this won't be difficult for that person, as I wish to live my life with dignity and leave a proper example for my children, just as my mom did for me.

eulogy death mother cancer Lupus short+story manuscript obituary news oncologist