Frank Anthony LoDestro
I don't remember the year my mother died. Numbers are not a writer's friend. I just remember all my children were under five and Jr. was 20 pounds of screaming baby that couldn't last more than five minutes in a moving car.
Funny, the mile markers we choose.
I didn't think my father was equipped for life without her. She cooked, kept the bills, turned Sunday pasta into an art form, made sure we went to Mass, and taught us that family dinners were more important than being valedictorian, star athlete or the lead in the school musical.
Then, one day, she went to heaven. On Memorial weekend, the cancer had won. Grief doesn't sit. My first inclination was to take care of my father but you don't do that for a soldier who served in the first Marine Division at Guadalcanal in WWII. Nope. Frank Anthony LoDestro was, as the other Italian Frank croons, going to do it his way. So we came to an understanding. We would grieve for my mother on equal footing.
That started our annual visits to the cemetery. Every year, my father and I would go to Resurrection Cemetery a few towns away to attend outdoor Memorial Day Mass. Sometimes I would snatch one child or another to attend. Always it was me and Dad. The sky was our ceiling, the trees and surrounding houses the pillars of nature's vast cathedral.
By the end of most of these Masses, I'm sure I should have gone straight to confession.
Inevitably, my father, like he did when we were kids, would snicker partway through Mass about the "pondaloon" sitting in front of us.
Dad's hearing was debatable so the pondaloon in question would sometimes catch my father's bass voice in the breeze, turn around, and throw back a stern stare. I begged Dad to stop as I pushed down that wild, deep-throated laughter that bubbles to the surface when you know something is wickedly fun in a completely inappropriate place.
Then we would fold up our chairs and walk to where my mother was. We brought flowers to lay carefully by her gravestone. Dad would get his pail and fill it with water from the faucet nearby, scrub off any white bird poop on the stone with a small brush, say three Hail Marys and kiss the stone three times. This was ritual.
Of course, my father had another reason to feel an edge over all the other pondaloons in attendance. Soon after Mom's funeral, Dad commissioned a 12-foot granite statue of Mother Mary to watch over my Mom's grave. Nobody in the Mass crowd knew that, of course, but that didn't matter to Dad. When he saw people praying the Rosary by the statue, he felt so proud honoring his wife of 40 years in such a visible way.
Oftentimes, we love people the way we wished we had loved them when they were with us. In this case, Dad's love weighed 700 pounds, built from a lifetime of moments both memorable and regretful.
After my father joined my mother in heaven a decade ago, I kept going to Mass each year. It was something I could do for him that he did for her. Roderick started coming with me and, together, we honored a great man, our red camp chairs in hand.
Ceremony and ritual give us definition. They shape our culture and allow us to celebrate shared beliefs. They are our life's mile markers.
My ribboned Holy Communion dress and veil, the gold ring around my finger, the white linen baptismal gown and tiny suits worn by my children. These are rituals no different than West African women of the Fulfani Tribe tattooing their mouth and lips before marriage or the ancient Romans sacrificing animals to the gods.
Rituals honor people, hope, love. These universal ceremonies give purpose across the continuum of time.
This year, Mass is canceled at Resurrection Cemetery because of the virus. This ritual was a pilgrimage with my father and then for my father. If there's one thing I could say to Mr. Coronavirus, it's this.
You're just a big pondaloon and you can't stop this Italian girl from breaking with tradition. Nope. I'm still goin' to the cemetery.