Stephen's Mother Lies Beastly Dead

I have an ex friend, and I use the term accurately. We were close since we met in college, in a most comical, pre "Me Too" sort of way. I was in Calculus class, knowing from the start that I couldn't grasp it, and I sat next to a young student named Christina, a Marine Science student from the Midwest. She was, in that pre implant era, extremely well endowed.

So as the professor droned on about max/min problems, my 19 year old gaze drifted to Christina, sitting next to me and paying rapt attention to the professor. One day I looked up, and sitting on her other side was a funny face with glasses and a big nose. We caught each other looking at the same parabolas, as it were, and he gave me the thumbs up sign. After class, he approached me and said "We're both men of excellent taste." And a friendship was born.

Well, sadly it died about 4 years ago. We shared growing up, and his making a fortune and losing it to three divorces, while I took the tortoise approach, luckily sticking the whole time with Wifey. He had a troubled son, partially so, I thought, since his guilt at the divorces made him try to be his son's fun buddy instead of the strict father he needed, and I cried with him the night he had to hire some beefy men to kidnap his 17 year old and spirit him off to a rehab camp in rural Utah...

Afterwards, things looked up for him, but he asked me for a loan for a business I knew would fail and might invite criminal investigation: a private pain clinic. I said no. Later, he said he was so hurt that I would refuse him, he could no longer be my friend.

I felt a bit guilty, until I happened to reunite with an even older friend of his -- boyhood next door neighbor from North Miami. Al told me that while his wife was dying, of ovarian cancer, our mutual friend had abandoned him, too.

Our fathers were cut from the same cloth -- Bronx born self taught intellectuals. His was a Korean vet, mine a WW II guy. His Dad fled NY and his business when threatened by the Mafia, and opened a factory in Hialeah. After my Dad died, my friend's Dad acted as a mentor to me -- on matters of the heart. He died young, like my Dad did.

But my friend's Mom lived on -- moving to Central Florida with her daughter, who had come out and had a partner. The two younger women took fine care of the Mom, and she suffered from bad health, mostly intractable back pain that left her a sad shut in for the final decade of her life.

My ex friend rarely visited. I used to try to share with him the sage words of my brother Paul -- that taking care of elderly parents is not only in the Ten Commandments -- it's in the Top 5! But there were excuses...

I became FaceBook (tm) friends with the sister, as well as one of my ex friend's ex wives. I learned the other day that the mom had died -- she was in her mid 80s.

I messaged the sister and sent a note. She replied with thanks, and told me her brother hadn't bothered to see their mother before she died.

I immediately thought of Joyce, and his line in the great "Ulysses" about his hero Stephen. Stephen has become an apostate Catholic, and refused to pray at his dying mother's bedside. So later his tough buddies remark that his mother lies "beastly dead" - she died like an animal, without the spiritual comfort she sought of her son.

My ex friend was a Catholic, too, and also half Italian. I would have thought these things would have meant something as the woman who gave him life was passing away. I would have been wrong.

As I age, I proclaim to try to judge less, but I judge more. It comes with the years -- we see more of life, and the consequences of so many actions of people, and can't help but apply them.

My brother Barry and I were talking the other night. He told me that as a fellow in the PICU, he thought he had control over sick children. Give one medicine, they go to sleep. Give another, they wake up, or breathe heavier, or fight infection, or stop having seizures.  One quarter century later, he tells me, he's much smarter: he realizes he has very LITTLE control over their fates. Often therapies fail. Sometimes there are miracle cures.

So I feel for my former friend, and what he has failed to do. I know guilt will tear at him, in some form or another. I see it often in adults who shirk their responsibilities to dying or declining parents. They justify their actions, but their hearts, and souls, if they have them, betray them anyhow.

I wrote back my ex friend's sister, and praised her for the care she gave her mother all these years. She's much poorer financially than her brother -- I hope if any money was left, she gets it, and not him.

But she is, I told her, already much richer in soul. May her mother's memory be a blessing. I reminded her that's the highest Jewish blessing we can offer for the dead. She said that as a lapsed Catholic, lesbian woman, it was one of the nicest things she had ever heard.