Fragile Passages of Sainthood

Alan Soffin

Some say saints have walked the earth. I doubt it. I see centaurs. Half-horse half-“man,” or, nowadays, “half-person.” The human cannot shake the interest of the animal from which life proximately comes. We live a conflict of interest, fated never to be sure—“Did I do it for myself or something greater?”

One must see transcendence in others, if at all. Even then, it is a momentary thing. Let me tell you how I saw it, evanescent as heat lightning at my mother’s burial.

I have to say my mother was a narcissist (I come by my centaur half “honestly”). She was also prejudiced, racially. (Thank goodness, I have that other half.) But, heading into her mid-90s, she needed 24-hour help. And so, due to the funds she had by luck and frugality amassed, she was able to hire a live-in. Black, of course. (Tell me irony is not the law of life.) Women from Africa and the Caribbean. They came and went; narcissism makes cold comfort.

Of course my mother was herself a victim, as we all are, of things beside our centaur half. An immigrant who never went to high school, a survivor in a social jungle whose better side lay in dreams of ideality and memories of Founding Fathers. And so, there she was at the end, wheelchair-bound, in a small house, surviving in the only way she could, with people paid to help (not religiously, unless God is a behaviorist).

Then it came. A coma; brief, painless. She died, attended by a black woman and by the antiques she had for years acquired with an artist’s eye.

My mother and this helper had been together for over a year. The woman was tough. She had her own story, one that, in time, proved stronger than my mother’s. 

So, despite my mother’s complaints and absurd accusations, her dominance was partly eclipsed. They cohabited loudly. The helper had a sister, also strong, who, from time to time took over, while my mother’s paid companion recharged elsewhere. That made two black helpers, two assaults upon a prejudice that now had lost its voice but could never lose its past.

Of course, the helpers knew my mother’s prejudice. Yet, as they happened also to be human, attachments emerged, as plants grow out from rock.

It was a long drive to the cemetery on Long Island. The retinue was next to non-existent: my wife and I, and in the back seat, two middle-aged black women. We had warned them that the drive was long and that they certainly needn’t come. They knew there was no money for their presence. That was over.

The graveyard had a barren aspect—flat, a few trees, nondescript stones, and an office made hard by glass and the odor of receipts. We followed the hearse that carried my mother an obligatory several hundred feet from the building to the spot where my father and sister were buried. The years of my boyhood lay in the box that was drawn from the vehicle.

As workers tilted the boards down which her simple coffin slid, my mother passed into the earth, attended by her son, his wife, but no one else of personal or blood acquaintance. 

Through tears that came suddenly and surprisingly, I saw two heavy, dark-skinned women, standing motionless as dirt trickled down into the grave. Why were they there? There was nothing in it for them, these people she had disparaged for so many years and yet without whom she would have suffered grievously. The acid of her ignorance was something they knew, as all “minorities” know.

My wife and I had stepped away. They, however, did not. Perhaps it was their tears, to me far more surprising than my own; perhaps it was their silhouettes so still against the sky. Perhaps it was their offering of unearned homage.

I had no illusions about their lives (as, painfully, I have fewer and fewer about my own). Yet their vigil had the dignity of sculptured figures that in cemeteries everywhere stand guard over the dead.
Later, I thought perhaps there were that day, if not saints, then fragile passages of sainthood—much as on a cloudy day the sun will, very briefly, illuminate a person or a tree and, passing on, leave them once again in shadow.

—Alan Soffin, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, numbers among his interests philosophy, religion, filmmaking, writing, and music ranging from classical through jazz and international sounds. Soffin is awaiting publication of Rethinking Religion (Cascadia, 2010).