In Memoriam--Virginia Marie Boyle (Jones)

In January 2023, Virginia Marie Boyle nee Jones passed away.  I have tried, over the course of the time since then to write something about Mom.  The problem, I have come to realize, is that I was trying to write something that described who she was.  That is, I have come to see, an impossible project.  It can't be done, at least not by me.  Instead, what I can do is describe who she was to me.  I can only tell you what she was from my albeit narrow and singular point of view, and not try to occupy some sort of objective perspective.  I can only talk about her in a personal, and perhaps even narcissistic, way.  And so, this is what I will to do here.

Let me start at the end, and work my way back to the beginning.  Prior to January 2023, I have never lost someone who had the significance in my life equivalent to Mom.  A friend was killed in a car accident when I was 8, and I lost my maternal grandparents at 13 and 23, respectively (my paternal grandfather died long before I was born; paternal grandmother died when I was 2), but none of those losses was like this.  And I learned something from this about death, or at least how I approach death.  I've talked about this obliquely, in that it has profoundly changed the way I relate to religion as a result, but I think now I am ready to get into it with more specifics.

What I have discovered is that so much of the rhetoric around death revolves around trying to heading off or preventing people from resenting the fact of the death of the person in question.  This is particularly true in the context of Christian rhetoric around death.  What I found was that Christianity was speaking to me under the working assumption that I resented God for taking my mom away, and it was going to try to convince me that I shouldn't in fact resent God.  "She's not really gone, and you are not permanently separated from her; you will be with her again.  Don't be mad at God."

The problem is I am not mad at God, and I never was.  I missed her when she died, and I still miss her.  I had a moment at my wedding, in between the ceremony and the reception, that I broke down with sadness at the fact that she wasn't there.  I wish she were still here.  But the predominant thought I have regarding my mother is gratitude for her, for her presence and the time I had with her.  The thought of being resentful to anyone, and especially to God, for not having more of her, strikes me at a very core, existential level as profoundly ungrateful and entitled.  It requires you to believe (1) everything that happens is directed and intended by God, and (2) that God owes to me to have my mom alive and in my life.  The first is at best a dubious philosophical and theological proposition; the second seems completely absurd.  Why am I owed something like that? 

This seems so self-evident to me that I have a hard time understanding why anyone would feel the way apparently many or most people do (otherwise, why would this be the default message?).  And, as a result, the rhetoric that tries to talk me off of resentment that I don't have seems so discordant.  Please, stop defending God to me.  God doesn't need defending.  God's fine and so am I.  And please don't tell me she is in a better place and that I will see her again.  That may be true, but the relevant fact is that she is not here right now.  She wasn't there for my wedding.  I'm not angry, I'm not resentful, but I am sad, and I just want someone to acknowledge that sadness.  Let me sit with the sadness.  Stop trying to make it go away, and stop trying to deflect it away into something else.  And I don't feel like my faith has done that, and that I have to do it on my own.  And that's been really disappointing.

But, putting aside this disappointment, as I said I mostly am just grateful that she was there for so long.  Part of what is so difficult in talking about mom in any kind of objective context is that she (along with my dad) was the constant in my life.  Basically since I was 10 years old when we moved out of New Jersey, my life has been defined by change.  This is true of everyone, of course, but I think I internalized that world view at an earlier age and more thoroughly than many.  But, still, there were constants, and the most relevant constant was mom.  She was always there.  She was the axis around which everything else moved and grew and changed.

I am now at the point in my life where I have been out of my parents' house far longer than I have lived in it.  And, as a result, when I think of my mom I think primarily of the weekly call.  Usually the call was on the weekend, and usually it would last for about 25 to 35 minutes.  If I am being completely honest, it was more her talking than me talking, and often about stuff that I wasn't particularly engaged with.  But even if I was bored or disengaged from the particular topic of conversation, I loved and treasured the conversation itself, the thing itself.  I enjoyed hearing from her, listening to random anecdotes about my siblings or my relatives or people she worked with or the neighbors.  In the last few years, there have been many moments where I have had something come up and thought to myself "oh, I have to tell mom this on our next call," only to realize that no such call was going to happen.  Likewise, when I go to my phone, it lists the most called numbers and hers is at the top, as I always called her and not the other way around.  These are the moments when I miss her the most. 

This has been particularly true in the last six months.  In January of this year, my wife and I welcomed a foster daughter, one who we think is going to be with us for good.  And during the course of the last six months, I have really wanted to talk to her about being a parent.  It's not so much that I am looking for her advice--though, were we to talk about parenting, I am sure she would provide it--but it just feels like I should be talking to her about it and I am not and that seems wrong somehow.  I have this low-level feeling that I am not doing something that I should be doing. 

In truth, the only thing I can say that I regret about my Mom's passing is that she didn't get to see me as a husband and a father.  Relatedly, I wish Danielle got to know my Mom in her fullness, as she only got to meet the version of Mom after she got sick.  I like to think that Mom would be happy to see me as I am now, and she would be happy to see what this part of her family has become.

At no point in my life did I ever doubt that my mother loved me.  It is very much the case that there were times when she expressed it in a manner that was different from the one that I hoped to receive, or that I needed in a particular point in time.  And there were definitely times when I didn't think my Mom understood me particularly well, nor tried particularly hard to figure out who I was.  And while that was frustrating, that frustration was always balanced with the very clear and unmistakable knowledge that she was expressing her love in her way, even if it wasn't my way.  One of the great mysteries of families is the way in which you can be simultaneously utterly alike and utterly different from the people in your family.  You are the product of where you come from, and also have a core space that is singularly you.  It's something my friend Jason commented on at our wedding, when he saw my whole family all in one place for the first time--I am both very much like them and very much different.  For every element of her that I see in myself, there are things that are very much unlike her. 

Mom was not a teacher, in the sense that she really didn't try in a structured way attempted to impart "life lessons" (neither is my dad, at least in that sense).  But I absorbed an enormous amount of who I am from her via osmosis.  My politics are very much similar to hers, and so is my faith.  More specifically, my instincts for those things are very much from her, even if I often feel the need to layer an intellectualism over top of them (that, I think, comes more from her parents).  The older I get, the more I wonder whether this intellectualism is really an attempt to justify and make more "acceptable" to this invisible judge that I have constructed in my head that I am a Serious Thinker.  When, in reality, I just think that God is real, we should be helping people whenever we can, tradition is something we should be skeptical of, and ideology is usually bad.  All of that is from her.

Mom was also a Hater, and so am I.  She could be very cutting, and at times pretty negative.  Dad is the positive person of the pairing (at least, most of the time, and unfortunately less so as he has gotten older), and Mom was definitely not.  My outer demeanor is more like my father, but the inner core is more like mom.  People are always surprised when that inner Hater comes out of me, as it seems discordant from my normal presentation, but it is very much there.  That's from her.  And I believe my depression is also from her.  She never would admit to such a thing, and certainly never seek treatment--indeed, at the heart of it, I think my seeking of mental health treatment was uncomfortable, perhaps embarrassing, for her.  But I think it was there, and I have wondered whether her discomfort with my struggles relate to her own situation.  But it is here that I feel the least close to my Mom, as I have tried to steer into the skid so to speak in terms of acknowledging the struggles, whereas she never did and never would.

But, to return to where I started, when I think of Mom I mostly experience a profound sense of gratitude.  It's not so much gratitude for anything she gave me, or any personal qualities she had, but gratitude for her being there.  Being a foster parent has given me a profound awareness that having parents of any sort is not guaranteed. I am grateful that she was my mother.  I am grateful that I had her.  And I will miss her as long as I am here.