Do Our Departed Beloved Seek Us?

Father Angelo.  He sang to my daughters on the living room floor, they on his lap, he in his clerical black pants and shirt, his roman collar in his front pocket, arousing toddlers’ curiosity.

Piva, piva, lowlaydooleva,

piva, piva, something like that, in his Milanese Italian, he from there, spending two years at the my university as part of his training as a Missionary in his Italian order.

Just last week I was mentioning Angelo to a priest friend, a Jesuit who at age 70 is going to serve in Africa, going because he burns to serve in a place where he can serve in the face of possible death, to be so certain of love that he can serve without fear.  Angelo had gone there.

Yesterday afternoon we went to visit Fred’s family, Fred who died two months ago after letting me share his deepest thoughts and memories in the year during which he lived in the face of dying, first fighting the cancer that might be fought and then accepting the death that should not be feared. 

Kathy sat in “his” chair, and I in “mine”, under the huge east-facing window with its view of the bay, steel-gray under steel-gray sky.  His wife, widow now, his brother and sister-in-law sat across from us able to see the view to our back.  As the near-solstice light faded in late afternoon, his wife turned on the lights high in the ceiling, remarking that one bank of them, those above the window, were not working. 

As we were talking, I noticed in my peripheral vision some flash of brightness in the now-darkening sky behind me, but ignored it, engaged in our conversation, our careful, nervous conversation, here with Fred so recently gone, here with his wife just after Christmas.

Sometime later it was she who mentioned that flickering – how strange that it would be happening just now – that flickering in the row of lights there above our heads, above where he and I had sat, Fred and I, in our weekly ritual of coffee and conversation.  They began telling stories about people telling stories about being visited by their recently departed ones.  I listened, politely, thinking rather about circuitry, and whether their fancy electronic controls were saving them from the heat threat that would come from a short-circuit in our more plebian on/off switches.  This talk of visitation from the dead was not for me. 

This morning I woke with a song in my head, that song in my head, that “Piva, piva” that Father Angelo had sung to my tiny daughters.  It would be ten years later that he would die, just in his 40’s, of a disease he had picked up there in his mission, in Africa, where he had served, as it turns out, in the face of death, so certain of love that he could serve without fear.

So as I sat down at my computer, I did a search.  “Piva Piva…”  And up came the words l’oli d’uliva!  Olive oil!  I clicked on the link, and began to weep.  “Piva, piva l’oli d’uliva” is a children’s Christmas song.  It has been 40 years since Angelo sang that song to my little girls, who are now as old as he was when he would come visiting us from his mission, sitting with me on the front porch, looking old, wondering why they could not find out what was wrong with him, what was making him so tired.

Forty years that song has been in my head, coming to me in my workshop, or while I’m cutting grass, or just driving.  The flickering lights were just last night.  But now I recall Fred saying to me, sharing on his back porch his comfort in dying, that he had heard not only that we can evoke memory of those, soon like himself, who have gone.  He had heard that the way our brains store such memories, these memories can actually seek us out. 

Our memories can seek us. Those of beloved memory can find their way to us, to the conscious parts of our minds.

When Fred said that, I was thinking about circuitry, the way our fancy knowledge about brain electricity allows us to reckon such things, even skeptics like me.

This morning, half way between the birth of the Babe and the visit of the Magi, Angelo is singing to me.  I did not seek him.  He sits with me there in the floor, singing this song to me, rocking me.  I am somehow as sheltered in his lap as my little girls were.  I look down and see the worn weaving of the rag rug, and the shiny black of his Italian trousers.  I feel my head resting on his chest, and hear his heart beating.  I notice how marvelous it is, that his heartbeat and rocking and tempo are all the same.  I am not thinking of circuitry.  I am wondering how he found his way to me, today this morning.

Here is a link to the story of the song, and a video. 

  FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.