Date Published: July 8, 2025
Publisher: Peanut Butter Publishing
identity, and moving forward offers the unique opportunity for its readers to
start a new dialogue, take an active hand in creating culture and reshaping
the world, and think about making meaning from formative experiences and
relationships. From family dynamics and professional challenges that bolstered
and battered him to the TV shows, films, books, and people who impacted his
queer identity, Bill deconstructs the world that he inherited and begins to
reconstruct the person he wants to become through short, poignant,
thought-provoking, and frequently hilarious essays. The post-2020 world
revealed to Bill that social transformation only comes with individual
choices. If he wanted the world to change, he had to truthfully and
compassionately understand how choices made long ago brought him to this
moment and how the choices he makes now shape the future.
This book is not didactic or instructional; not self-help or psychology; not
academic philosophy or cultural criticism. It is an exercise in honesty and a
portrait of Bill, his family, and how we construct multiple
identities—sexual, religious, philosophical, political, familial,
relational—without reducing them to a monolithic whole, without being
argumentative.
For anyone looking to make meaning out of their lives and the world around
them, this book offers a model.
EXCERPT
six to carry the casket and one to say the mass M y mother had a way with words. At a party to celebrate her eightieth birthday, about three months before she died, I was nominated (read: instructed) by my older sisters to give a toast. I decided to share some of her “greatest hits,” the phrases that made their way into our memories, or at least into my memory. Hers weren’t zingers or one-liners aimed at anyone in particular. They were ob servational, almost footnotes that filled in missing links to conversations or ideas, or that efficiently and wittily wrapped them up. She was succinct, and, sometimes, she was too suc cinct, offering only an occasional hmm to let you know she was still listening. Her phrasing was pithy. She made you think quickly to dis cern the hidden joke, which wasn’t always clarified by her tone or gesture, and her deadpan was convincing. Most of her recur ring phrases were useful. She kept an arsenal handy for lagging chatter or to cover awkward transitions. She knew how to keep a conversation moving, and she knew how to wrap things up. She could engage and detach in one fell swoop. Inane arguments, whether at her dinner table or on the nightly news, would end not with her opinion but with a decla ration that “Semantics is the problem with the world today.” It 101 wasn’t a particularly revealing insight, but it did make you stop to wonder what semantics was. She loved to spin classic proverbs with a turn that you didn’t anticipate, always short of crass but often glancing toward coy. “Well, you know, people who live in glass houses…shouldn’t take baths in the daytime.” And when a conversation about large feet ensued (it comes up more than you’d think in a family of ten siblings), she’d tap the wisdom of her father and say, “You know what they say about men with large shoe sizes. They can kill a lot of ants in the summertime.” ____________ Sometimes, she’d get political—but not too political. When given the opportunity to take a trip to the UK, she declared, “I’m not going to England until they let my people go.” Her people were the Irish (well, some of her people…and it was a couple of generations back), who were apparently still being oppressed à la Cromwell by the English. My sister, Patty, and I quickly re vised the lyrics of the old Spiritual and sang, “When Sheila was in Engl-land…let my…people…go…” Eventually, my parents did visit England (just a few stops on a cruise, not a slash-and-burn campaign on behalf of the suffer ing Gaels). She loved to tell the story about subtly (read: pas sive-aggressively) wrangling with a tour guide over the proper honorifics for Thomas More. When the guide referred to “Sir” Thomas More, she pointedly corrected him, doing her part in the centuries-old Catholic-Protestant standoff, with a clipped, “Saint—Thomas More.” When my mom was eighteen, her mother gave her a sub scription to Good Housekeeping, which she maintained for de cades, but the magazine crossed a line. When an agent called to ask if she wanted to renew her subscription, she said, “No,” (and here, in her retelling, she would shift her weight and her 102 • BILL HULSEMAN tone, assuming what I can only think of as her over-the-phone power-pose), “I wouldn’t.” She described to the unwitting agent on the phone a recent cover of the magazine that featured Prin cess Diana (“Princess Charles. The Lady Diana,” as she would, in other contexts, correct you). “Don’t you people know we had a revolution? We don’t have to pay attention to those people anymore.” When she retold the story over dinner with Mrs. Crump, one of her closest friends and a fixture in family lore, my sister and I cringed while Mrs. Crump cheered her on. She was a well-read woman and spoke with real authority, but once in a while I’d hope that she would cite her sources. She wouldn’t travel to France because, “Well, they never paid their war debts,” or to Japan “until they open up free trade for rice and computer chips.” ____________ I was—hmm…let’s say “lucky”—to inspire in my mother two unique turns of phrase. At my Divinity School graduation, each of us was invited to submit a twenty-five-word message to be read while we walked to the daïs to receive our diplomas. Be cause I hadn’t secured a job or a place in another graduate pro gram just yet, as I walked to the stage, the Dean of Students read, “While pursuing his dream as a lounge singer with an NPR talk show, Bill will pursue paths in interreligious dialogue, Catholic education, and queer activism.” Most folks laughed along with the juxtaposition of my dream job and three, seemingly unre lated trajectories, but I could hear and feel my mother’s gasp— partial shock (“queer” was not in her vocabulary) and a little bit of delight (in the wit and economy of words that I learned from her), punctuated by a cluck of her tongue. Classic Sheila. Having heard a diverse range of academic foci and professional directions, one stuck out to her—when I found them after the ceremony, her initial response was, “Well, congratulations. That SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 103 was lovely. Now, what the hell is,” she slowed to enunciate a new term in her lexicon and to accentuate the absurdity she perceived, “eco-fem-in-ist spirituality?” A few months later, as coverage of planes striking the Twin Towers spread, my mother called me and left a message on my voicemail. “Well, happy birthday…on this awful…awful day.” (That was the entire message.) I forwarded the message to mul tiple friends who needed something to laugh at and can still do a perfect imitation. Dark, I know, but it’s made people cackle. ____________ Mom inherited her wit from her father. Actually, she cultivat ed it. She studied him, admired him, elevated him. Mom beamed when she spoke about her father, and a part of her withered when he died, about a year before I was born. As she told the story, he was the son of poor immigrants who worked the jobs and lived the life of the immigrant Irish in those days. They sent him to college, and he earned a JD, but when he picked up his license to practice law, an old classmate from elementary school was there to meet him. At the offer of some work for the old classmate, he declined, telling him that he never intended to practice law, that it was just something to keep in his back pocket. While my grandfather grew into a decent and honest man, the old class mate was a gangster. Fearing that world, Mom told us, he pur sued other jobs that put to work his charm, his affable nature, his wit. Fearing that world might’ve morphed into regret, grief for a career that was lost before it began, but she never got that far in speculating about her father’s choices. To my mom, it was a moment that revealed his integrity, and that was enough, but to me, it was a profoundly sad detail. Though I never met him, I could feel my grandfather’s disappointment, I could feel his par ents’ confusion, I could feel the shame and disillusionment that swelled, a mixture that integrity is never quite able to absorb. 104 • BILL HULSEMAN He was the one who coined the crack about “ants in the summertime.” He was also the one who, at a wake, when asked by a friend how my grandfather thought the deceased looked, said, “He looks dead.” He took her to every wake in town as a child. He taught her to play golf. He combed Vaseline through his hair every morning, giving it a dark and shiny texture, but after a stroke in his seventies, a nurse washed his hair and revealed a thick shock of white. After he died, my mom couldn’t watch a movie with Spencer Tracy without a) reminding anyone around how much her fa ther looked like Spencer Tracy, and b) quietly weeping. I always thought her mother looked like Barbara Stanwyck, but Mom was never interested in comparing her to celebrities. ____________ We lived in an affluent suburb, but instead of reveling in the glories of suburban life, she told stories about the three-flat she grew up in with her parents, sisters, and cousins, where her fa ther was the only man in the house (one aunt’s husband left her during the War, another aunt died, and then so did her widower, leaving his second wife in the three-flat on Deming Place). She told a story (that I never really believed) about seeing a man get shot on her walk home from the beach with a friend. My disbelief was less about the facts of the story and more about the possibil ity that my mother grew up within blocks of imminent danger. She talked about growing up in the city with pride and with the expertise of a London cabbie. Any directions requested would allow her to demonstrate her mastery of the grid of the city of Chicago. It was never enough to say “three lefts and a right.” Any journey from point A to point B included a near mathematical equation that taught you about the numerical SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 105 system underlying the city’s map. When I worked as an archi tectural tour guide, I geeked out about Daniel Burnham, the master planner who designed that city-grid masterpiece, and hoped my enthusiasm about Burnham’s 1909 plan for Chicago would make her proud. If a tutorial on urban planning wasn’t enough, she’d fre quently identify in which Catholic parishes the starting and ending points of the journey would be. If you were lucky (and I mean this sincerely), you’d pass by the church where her great uncle (a woodworker or carver or layer or something) did all the woodwork (he installed the floors or carved the sculptures or pews or something), all the scraps of which were integrated into an unusual little game table whose entire surface was pat terned with tiny pieces of wood and whose corner pockets were hidden, but I figured out how to open them when I was about seven. The church on the near west side of Chicago and the game table in the corner of our living room were monuments to craft, to history, to stories that could be told. She raved about working the reception desk at the Edge water Beach Hotel, where all the ball players stayed while bat ting at Wrigley. If asked, she would tell you who the kind and courteous players were, evaluated according to how they treat ed hotel staff and whether they’d stop to sign admiring kids’ collector cards. She also laughed at her own inadequacy for overbooking the hotel by ninety-eight rooms, a mistake that somehow (read: because her boss was a friend of her father) didn’t cost her the job. She told stories about treating boyfriends badly. “Teenage girls are the worst,” she declared. “I know because I was one.” One boy asked her to a dance months in advance, and she de clined by telling him there was a funeral she needed to attend. ____________ 106 • BILL HULSEMAN When I was in preschool or kindergarten, my grandmother had a stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body and required her to move out of her apartment and into full-time nursing care. I don’t have the memories of “Grandma’s House” that all the cookie commercials told me I was supposed to have. I do remember a long, shiny, linoleum-tiled hallway with rooms on both sides. I remember old people in robes and hospital gowns and pajamas, ambling up and down the hallway with a walker or cane. I remember a woman with a goiter on the right side of her neck that was as big as a grapefruit. I remember another woman who never said anything but who was very happy when I’d wander into her room and sit in the chair next to the pillow end of her bed. I’d rearrange the few things that were on her bedside table (a frame, a book, a rosary, but I never touched the glass of water) and then I’d continue my rounds down the hall way, eventually making it back to Grandma’s room, where I’d f ind Mom doing a crossword or needlepoint, maybe telling her mother a story or maybe sitting in silence. As long as she was in the nursing home, my mom and her sisters visited every day. One sister came for lunch, Mom arrived mid-afternoon with me in tow, and the other sister came for dinner. It never occurred to me until after she was gone that one of Mom’s deepest worries had been steeped in years of obliged de votion at her slowly-dying mother’s bedside. When I asked her whether she was worried about dying, she confessed only to wor rying about my father. She didn’t want him to eat alone. Break fasts, lunches, dinners…for the nearly sixty years they were mar ried, the kitchen table was the thing that connected us. I grew up on a long butcher block table—five of us on one side, five on the other, sometimes a sixth if any guests or the milkman decided to stay, and a parent at each end. My dad came home for lunch every day (it wasn’t until high school that I realized that most fathers brought their lunch to work, or had lunch with colleagues, or did “business lunches”), and in grade school we walked home SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 107 for lunch every day. Dinner was a command performance, as was engaging in conversation. The standard “grace” was mumbled be fore Mom improvised. “Well, let’s pray for all the people who are sleeping on the street tonight, because it’s just so cold.” Or she’d invite us to pray for someone’s safe travels. Or she’d invite us to pray for someone who had no food. Or “the old ladies” that she drove home from the senior center on Wednesdays. By the time I was in high school, she spent a good chunk of each Monday at a day shelter for women who were unhoused. A woman named Dolores quickly befriended her, and, after she made and served lunch, Mom and Dolores would play Scrabble. Dolores was the only person whom Mom permitted to play with unverifiable words, and while pre-dinner grace frequently fea tured Dolores’s struggles, dinner conversation just as frequently included updates on her neologisms. She arrived at the day shelter one Monday and learned that volunteers from the Junior League would be arriving soon with lunch for the clientele. With nothing to do while lunch was be ing served, Mom grabbed a newspaper and sat in the corner, waiting for lunch to finish so she could “visit with the ladies.” One of the volunteers, whom Mom described variously as love ly, kind, sweet, perky, or persistent (depending on how much Chardonnay preceded the story), circled around to her several times with trays of food. When she came around with lemon bars, the volunteer leaned down to Mom and whispered, “Are you sure you won’t have just a bite?” In that moment, it dawned on Mom that this was her finest. Her daily ensemble typically included a wrap-around-skirt from a catalogue and a pair of plain, white Keds. She never dyed her hair and never put anything more than a comb into it. The only makeup she donned was a bright, coral-hued lipstick. When the Junior Leaguer made her way around the room, she assumed that Mom was a client, a woman who was unhoused, a woman with too much pride to take a free lunch, even from these lovely, 108 • BILL HULSEMAN kind, sweet, perky, and/or persistent volunteers. I’d bet she re played the interaction in her head several times on the drive home, preparing to open dinner conversation with, “Well, I’ve f inally done it. I’m a success.” ____________ After Grandma died, something happened between my mom and her sisters. One Christmas Eve, dinner was delayed because our cousins hadn’t arrived. When she finally called her sister to find out where they were, she was told, “We were never invited,” even though we’d done Thanksgiving at their house and Christmas Eve at ours for decades. When I found her to say good night, she was sitting on the couch in the living room with Mrs. Crump, crying. I leaned in to give her a kiss, but all I remember from the moment, my first really vivid Christmas memory, is the taste of Chardonnay. I don’t remember Mom enjoying holidays, but I remember her preparing for them. Three days before, the dining room ta ble would be extended, the pads would be put out, and the ta blecloth spread to ensure that any creases were gone by the time we sat down to dinner. Two days before, she’d set out stacks of plates, clusters of glasses. Everything was completed in stages so that by the time the hordes descended upon the house, final prep wasn’t stressful and dinner service was a well-oiled ma chine. By the time I was in high school, I started to notice that my siblings were unexpectedly eager to be the first to clean up the kitchen, even while people were still eating. Perhaps Mom saw it as a well-trained and efficient staff, but I knew they just didn’t want to be the one who had to refill her wine glass. “I’ll have a little more of your wine,” she’d say to whomever sat clos est to the bottle. Sometimes she’d stumble through the phrase or just shake the glass while holding its stem, the universal symbol for “I’m soused.” SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 109 One Christmas, we watched It’s a Wonderful Life. When Mr. Potter came on screen, she gave us a brief lecture on Lionel Bar rymore. “You know, when we were kids, we—just—worshipped him. And we all thought he was in that wheelchair because of polio. Well,” she geared up, “it turns out, he was FULL of syphi lis.” Every time Barrymore rolled into view, someone got the nod for a refill, and we all got a different iteration of the Barry more legacy. Some of the details would change, but one phrase was consistent. He was FULL of syphilis. And then when Jimmy Stewart started to berate Uncle Billy, Mom got up to exit, weep ing, saying, “I—just—can’t watch this.” ____________ Dinner customs didn’t change when there was only one bird (me) left in the nest. The butcher block table was gone by the time I was in high school, and except for the occasional sibling who was back for a short stint or just visiting for dinner, setting the table, clearing the table, and refilling my mom’s wine glass were my exclusive ken. Dinners were less conversational—sure, with three people, there are fewer things to talk about, but the real shift was that conversations had become soliloquies, and soliloquies slipped into diatribes. There wasn’t much I could say to steer the conversation, and there wasn’t much I could say that would be remembered the next day. By the end of dinner most nights, Dad had finished two or three scotches (“Chivas Regal on the rocks with a twist and a little bit of water on the side” was the standard order I’d learned by the time I was seven), Mom had finished two or three vodkas-and-water-on-a-lot-of-ice, and they’d split one or two bottles of Chardonnay. Once, when they came back from dinner at the home of friends, Mom was so drunk she tried to get into the house through the wrong door. The family room had an exterior door, a leftover from the room’s original purpose (as a garage) that 110 • BILL HULSEMAN was adjacent to the kitchen door (our primary entrance). I was watching a movie and was startled when I heard a rap at the door. When I opened the very-much locked door, I was greeted with a look of shock and surprise that mirrored my own, a look that instantly made me think it was my fault she couldn’t open the door, a look that humbled me and pushed my gaze away. I focused on the long necklace she wore, one she inherited from my dad’s mother, a string of large, white coral beads. That’s what had been rapping at the handle, that’s what had startled me. About a half-hour later, my dad returned to the family room where I was still, ostensibly, watching a movie. He told me with out my asking that it was his job to take care of my mother. I said, “OK.” Then he went to the fridge and took out a bottle of Chardonnay and poured himself a glass. ____________ My mom enrolled me in piano lessons in fourth grade. Ap parently unlike most of my siblings before me, I stuck with the lessons—not because of some prodigious talent that was acti vated (because that definitely didn’t exist) or because I particu larly liked it (which I actually did), but because it was the first time I could claim some space of my own. If I practiced an hour a day, that meant that I had my thoughts and my feelings to my self for an hour. At school, I wasn’t liked (or I was picked on, or I was shunned, or I was targeted, as my mom would variously describe it, using codewords for “different,” familiar to all moth ers of queer children), and among my siblings, I was ornamental (you know, there but unheard, peripheral). It never occurred to me that I should talk to someone, even when Mom arranged for Father Terry to talk to me, and by “talk to me,” I mean, he came to the door of my classroom, asked the teacher if he could talk to me, and brought me out of school to the rectory next door. We went to his private office, and he SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 111 asked, “How are you doing? I hear you’re having a tough time.” He was warm, and he was kind. I could smell the coffee on his breath and the cigarette-stink on his hands, and he opened a door that I didn’t know how to navigate. I couldn’t tell him that I felt different. I couldn’t tell him that I felt lonely or that I didn’t understand other boys. I didn’t know how to play video games, because nobody showed me. I didn’t know how to throw a foot ball or any of the confounding and arbitrary rules of the game, because nobody showed me. And when my athletic incompe tence became public knowledge during gym class, I didn’t know why everybody laughed at me. I didn’t know why Coach made me sprint out into the field in the first place. I didn’t know I was supposed to go out about a hundred feet, turn around, and catch the football speared at me. I didn’t know it was so funny that the coach was the first one to laugh. Then again, I also didn’t know why I was the only one who could quote Young Frankenstein and Murder by Death by the time I was seven the way that other boys could rattle off baseball statistics and the names of basketball players. And I definitely didn’t know that, a couple of years later, Father Terry would turn to my parents when he felt the pain of the conflict between his vocation and his sexual orientation, that he would turn to my parents for advice on how to break his vows and transition to life as a lay, openly gay man. With enough time at the keyboard, I got to be pretty good. I struggled with reading music (I never got to be the “sit down at the piano and can play anything” guy that I secretly hoped I’d be), but I had a good teacher. Mrs. Neiweem spoke softly and directly. She sat not-too-close and not-too-far. She paid atten tion to things no one ever paid attention to. She praised me for being able to express when I played. Even her husband and duo piano partner, Mr. Neiweem, made a point to compliment sev enth-grade me on the “gentle touch” I applied to the Rondo Alla Turca at a recital. It was the most important affirmation I’d ever heard. Between pieces or technical exercises, she told me stories 112 • BILL HULSEMAN about touring Italy as duo-pianists—Mr. and Mrs. Neiweem and a Kawai grand, driving up and down the Italian countryside, giv ing concerts here and there. It was, I thought, the most glamor ous and magical life, a life I wanted to live (a life I still want to live). After mastering (read: making it through in one attempt) a particularly difficult passage in a Beethoven sonata, she exploded out of her chair, shouted, “Wunderbar!” and clapped her hands twice before she brought her pencil to the sheet music, where she scribbled “Wunderbar!” I’m not sure I’ve ever been prouder. Mom kept track of my time at the piano, and she under stood what it meant for me. Some time in my thirties, I found a form that she completed for my counselor at summer camp. To the question “When is your child happiest?” she wrote, “At the piano, alone.” (She was half right.) At dinner, she’d note that I hadn’t quite reached an hour “at the keys” that day. On summer days in high school, if I wasn’t working or out with friends, I was at the piano, and, wherever she was in the house, Mom was listening. If she was in the next room, I’d hear her sighs at the end of tough passages and the cluck of her tongue at sloppy runs through a piece. Once, I rushed through a Chopin polonaise, and heard her, from the kitchen at the other end of the house, “That’s not—quite—right!” Occasionally, Mom would summon me if they had friends over for a drink (read: five drinks) to play for their guests. “No” was not in the vocabulary available to me at home, so I’d sit down and play. Sometimes politely and sometimes genuinely, their friends listened, rapt, marveling that a human could work eighty-eight keys with ten fingers. I learned to read my audi ence: if they wanted to keep chatting, I’d play something soft; if they’d run out of conversation, I’d play something showy; if they were sober, I’d get away with the second movement of the Pathétique and a Gershwin prelude; if they were wasted, I’d run through everything I could play from memory. They were usu ally wasted, so cocktail hour gave me plenty of time to practice. SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 113 A few weeks before she died, Mom decided she was finished with chemo. She was ready. So hospice care began, and in the fridge, in addition to the food that my siblings and I were mak ing amidst our competitive caregiving, where there had once been a bottle or three of Chardonnay, there was now a stock of morphine and other specialties to “make her comfortable.” A hospital bed arrived, and it quickly displaced the small couch in the den, where she slept at night and between visits from friends and relatives. Almost forty, I was sitting at the piano like a teenager, playing through whatever I could remember with out sheet music, and Mom ambled by, headed toward a nap. I stopped playing and moved to stand up, and she chirped, “What are you doing?” I told her that I’d take a break so she could nap. She pursed her lips, shook her head, and kept moving. I under stood my instructions: sit back down, but nothing too loud. I played Gershwin’s second prelude (she always liked that one) and heard her sigh at the last note. ____________ There are words that stick because they’re frequently repeat ed, or because they evoke a happy moment, or a funny story, or a legacy. Those are words you want to repeat. Those are words I want to hear again. Then, there are words that stick, even if you only heard them once. Whether or not you want them to inhabit your mind, they stake a claim and tag a little footnote on every other memory that says, “Don’t forget the time she said…” Apparently, when I was in high school, a few of my siblings confronted Mom about her drinking. I’d heard rumblings of this or that sibling embarrassed by it or worried about her health. It’s too bad they never asked me. I could’ve told them how much she drank each day, how much she drank when with my dad, how much she drank with friends, how much she drank when she went out to dinner, how much she drank at holidays, which 114 • BILL HULSEMAN was different—it always started later on holidays because she had too much cooking to do before she could make it through her dosage of vodkas-and-water-on-a-lot-of-ice before she could enjoy some Chardonnay. I could’ve told them what she thought about all of them, because once the second glass of Chardonnay was filled each night, the library was open, and she’d catalogue their offenses. I could’ve told them that I resented the fact that they got to jump up and exit the dinner conversation while I was pouring her “a little more of my wine,” or that I resented their claim to suffering because of my mom’s drinking because they got to go home, and the home they left me in was filled with too much Chardonnay. I could’ve told them that they were neglecting Dad, that he was the one who claimed responsibil ity to take care of her, that he was the one who opened the bottle every night, that he was the one who wandered to the other end of the house after dinner to write poetry and finish off any open bottles. I could’ve told them that he was the one who drove when they went out to dinner, that he drove home drunk, that he drove drunk with Mom in the car, that he drove drunk with Mom and me in the car. I could’ve told them that I watched them watch me get in the car and said nothing, that no one seemed to notice that Dad would never surrender the keys. Once, a few weeks before I left for my junior year of college, Mom went on a tear about several of my siblings. I don’t remem ber what prompted it or even much of what she said. I remem ber words like “thoughtless” and “ingrate” bouncing around, and I remember a coldness that overtook me, that started in my cheeks and slowly spread down to my stomach. I wanted to say something, but what? When my older siblings confronted Mom about her drinking—or really about anything—they were shunned. Shutting down a conversation and shutting out any one who hinted at disloyalty was one of her superpowers. If one of us irked her, we got that look and icy silence. When one sibling moved to the East Coast for a job, she took it personally SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 115 and waged a decade-long cold war against him. After they con fronted her about alcohol, my siblings were banished until the topic evaporated. Despite a few years of therapy and occasional Al-Anon meet ings, I never built the courage to address my parents’ drinking. By the time it got bad, my siblings were out of the house, and I was, effectively, an only child, so where they might’ve felt em powered to speak up (because they had somewhere else to go), I was stifled. I coped the way many children of addicts cope: I repressed my own feelings and learned how to avoid the land mines. But this time, I’d finally reached my limit. I was done with repressing and appeasing. I was done waiting for my older siblings to protect me. I was done waiting for my father to do what he insisted years before was his job. I was done navigating the turbulence between the mother I admired and loved and woman I despised and feared. I remember looking at my fingers on the table, shaking ever so slightly, and the words coming out of my mouth slowly, cautiously, because I knew the wrong word, or the wrong look, or the wrong response, would draw her ire toward me like a dagger to the gut. When I could finally speak, I told her I didn’t want to listen to her talk about my siblings. My parents both gazed at me like I’d missed my cue, read the wrong line, but I continued and said, “When I come home from college, I don’t want to have to hear this.” “Well, you don’t have to come home.” ____________ I loved going to church with my mom. When I complained that I didn’t want to be an altar boy anymore, she slyly accepted it, but then talked about what a privilege it was to be on the altar, so close to the Eucharist. (I didn’t quit.) Her brand of reli gion was practical, integrated, and just under the surface of ev 116 • BILL HULSEMAN ery part of her life. There wasn’t a line between church and not church—like death, church was a part of life. And that meant that she was going to have her way with the words. She was always the first among a congregation to rise, the first to kneel, the first to sit. She was the pacer for the whole nave when it came to communal prayers, and just when you thought you un derstood her, just when you thought she was the model, compli ant Catholic mother, she’d throw her own translation into the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who is in heaven,” she’d start, prompting the f irst wince from someone in earshot…is that the right word? “Hallowed be your name.” Why is everyone else saying thy? “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread, and forgive our sins,” that’s not right, “as we forgive those who have sinned against us…” What does trespass mean, anyway? “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us…” A speaker came to her Catholic, all-girls high school during her senior year and spoke so powerfully and so movingly about the religious life that “half the class was ready to join the convent.” The Prioress met with each of the young women to discuss their newfound zeal, and she talked Mom (and most of the others) out of entering religious life. The moment reinforced something for her, though; it crystallized ideas like vocation and conscience, ideas that she’d actualize through parenthood and citizenship. When young Catholics are introduced to the sacrament of the Eucharist, we’re trained on the choreography of the event more than the theology behind it, since ontology and transub stantiation are a bit advanced for the seven-year-old brain. At mass one Sunday, a few weeks before my classmates and I were scheduled to celebrate our First Communion in a Mother’s Day liturgy, Mom decided that I was ready ahead of schedule and instructed my father to take me back to the sacristy after mass. There, in the liturgical “green room” on a sunny Sunday morn SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 117 ing, Father Sullivan gave me my First Communion as my dad rested his hand on my shoulder. When we found Mom back at the car, she looked at me, smiled, took a beat, and then abruptly turned to get herself into the passenger seat. The next Sunday, I joined the line of churchgoers moving up the center aisle, just ahead of my mom and dad (Dad, ever a gentleman, always stepped out of the pew to let my mother and anyone else in tow go ahead of him). I dutifully and in good form received the host (in my left, upward turned palm, my right hand beneath it, as high as my heart, said, “Amen”) and turned left, but before I could scan the congregation to see if any of my classmates had seen me receive communion well ahead of schedule, I heard my mom receiving a host after me. When the priest held up the host and said, “The body of Christ,” she responded, “I believe.” ____________ Though we grew up in a neighborhood with numerous large families, a sprawling brood was still a conversation starter. When someone turned to her in disbelief to confirm, “Did you say you have…ten children?” (which people did, and frequently) she’d lean in and reply, with a half-cocked eyebrow, “They’re from my husband’s first marriage.” Curiously, three sisters among the brood didn’t seem to surprise folks, but seven sons—that was no table. “Well, God gave me seven sons for a reason. Six to carry the casket, and one to say the mass.” I was the seventh son, and by the time I was conscious in the world, it was clear that the first six were not headed to seminary. When I declared myself a religious studies major and took on a philosophy minor, she didn’t object in the way that we’re told parents are supposed to react to the news of majors that don’t obviously and directly lead to a paycheck. Instead, I think she saw a prophecy coming to fruition, and when I’d send papers home for her to read, she’d write back or tell me on the phone, 118 • BILL HULSEMAN “Well, I don’t understand all of it, but you write beautifully.” Af ter she died, I found a stack of essays that I’d sent to her while I was in college and Divinity School, and it was accompanied by a note from a friend of hers, a priest, with whom she’d shared my essays. He noted my writing and said something like “you must be so proud” or something else priests say to mothers. Obvi ously, he didn’t understand her intention, that he was supposed to recruit me to holy orders. After I accepted my first job, a position as a campus minis ter and religion teacher, she called me and, chuckling to her self, told me about a dream she had. “You were cutting letters out of all sorts of colors of construction paper and making a bulletin board.” I laughed, understanding the joke between the words, that all that time devoted to highfalutin academics and ecofeminist spirituality had led to the world of chalk and stick ers, and said (with the absurd confidence of someone who’d never taught before but always said to himself, “Yeah, I think I’d like to try teaching. How hard could that be?”), “Oh, that’s not what teaching is going to look like for me.” Three months later, as I was putting the finishing touches on an overly elaborate bulletin board for the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls, I fumed because she was right. She always had not good but pointed timing. Her mother was buried on my sister Patty’s thirteenth birthday, and our dog was put down on her fifteenth. The day before Patty’s eighteenth wedding anniversary, Mom declared that she was done, and she died the next day. On the trip back to Chicago, I chuckled, thinking about the end of my sister’s wedding reception in the back yard. Once the revelers cleared out, my brother, Joe, my dad, and I were the last three standing. We went to the family room where my dad opened a bottle of Chardonnay. I turned on the TV to find live coverage of the death of Princess Dia…or rather, the Lady Diana. SIx TO CARRy THE CASkET AND ONE TO SAy THE MASS • 119 ____________ I didn’t say the mass, but during my last visit before she died, we planned her funeral. While The Sound of Music was on TV, just before Maria arrived at the Von Trapp manse, she turned to me and said, “There’s a song I want at my funeral…” I fetched my laptop, started a new document titled with her initials, and started taking notes. She had already selected read ings and a few pieces of music, and she dictated the words that would be on the prayer cards and in the programs that we’d distribute. She had some very definite ideas—no sad music, no white flowers, lots of color, even where the post-funeral recep tion would be—but when I asked about a eulogy, she rolled her eyes and said, “Anything that lasts more than five minutes is verboten.” But who, I pressed, should deliver it? “Oh, you’ll all have to figure that out.” I often joke that my mother prepared me for her death from the moment I was born. Whenever one of us gave her a gift, a permanent marker would appear out of the blue and she’d write our name or initials on the bottom. If anyone ever asked, she’d respond, “Well, I don’t want these kids to be fighting over stuff when I die.” I’ve inherited her penchant for remarking on a song or a reading, “Oh, I want that at my funeral.” But that moment, sitting a few feet from each other while Maria and Georg slowly fell in love on the screen, was her final lesson. She approached death with confidence, not resignation. She wanted her funeral to communicate what was important to her and to be a space for the people who loved her to move forward, not to wallow. She knew the line that separated her ken and where her children needed to figure it out. And while I wasn’t able to say the mass, planning her funeral together was a gift I never wanted but I’m so glad I received. The next day, I was due to fly out and prepare for my first weeks as a middle school principal, I waited as long as I could 120 • BILL HULSEMAN to leave for the airport. She’d taken a nap after lunch but was in a deep sleep by the time I needed to leave. I thought about wait ing for her to wake, but I also inherited from her a compulsion for punctuality. And I don’t think I could’ve borne the guilt she would’ve cast had I missed my flight. So I wrote her a letter and included words that I’d written to her before. “Thank you for giving me life, and thank you for giving me a wonderful life to live.”
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