Circling My Mother by Mary Gordon

Author:Mary Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307472793
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Besides my husband and me, there are only three people in the congregation for Jane’s funeral Mass. As it turns out, all of them are nuns. Sitting beside Dorothy is an old friend of Jane’s whom I had dreamed of in my childhood; she was a Sister of the Good Shepherd, an order that I had longed to join. Their ministry was to care for “wayward girls” girls who got into trouble were sent to them by the courts as an alternative to prison. The third nun, in a white suit, is the one who made pastoral visits to Jane in her illness. She gives the homily, speaking about how important “her Jesus” was to Jane. This gives me the willies; it seems a transference of the worst, most sentimental aspects of evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism, which usually manages to keep itself from certain kinds of falseness by the impersonality of its formal diction.

I invite all the nuns out to lunch, but the one in the white suit won’t come. Dorothy is eager, however, as is Janice, Jane’s friend, who is still in the Good Shepherd Order but is wearing a blue skirt and striped blouse. At lunch, Dorothy says, “Well, her Jesus didn’t do much to keep her from being embittered. He didn’t do much to make her last days more open, more loving.” Janice says that it is very sad: she gave so much to so many people, and she couldn’t take anything for herself. She says that Jane was terribly proud of me; she would always forward Janice any favorable reviews.

“I think I failed her at the end,” I say.

“I think she set it up so that she could only be failed,” Dorothy says.

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