Another Book Club Moment and The Full Moon...

This month my book club read Saints for All Occasions by J.Courtney Sullivan and it made for a very interesting discussion. The book centers on a Boston Irish family, the parents immigrants from Ireland, and the death of the oldest son. It's too complicated for me to begin to summarize, but it's an interesting portrait of a family keeping deep secrets and the consequences of doing so.

Much of the book centered on their Catholic faith and traditions. Since I was raised Lutheran, much of that narrative was not familiar to me, but I began to find the book interesting on different levels. It was the family dynamics....and the death. I've lost people I love.....but it's been several years since I had to experience that final goodbye. Yet, sometimes, I find that my grief is still aching just below the surface.

Intellectually I know that grief is a long process, and different for everyone. And each person you lose hits you in a different way. Reading this novel I found a lot of sentences that brought tears to my eyes.....unexpectedly....and memories flooding back. Toward the very end of the novel one of the brothers is thinking about the funeral and burial that will be taking place the following day. He knows his brother wanted to be cremated, but his mother wouldn't allow it saying "real Catholics didn't get cremated." And the end of the chapter continues:

"It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk around leaking it everywhere. It could lie dormant inside you for days, weeks, years. You could seem a perfectly whole person to everyone you met. Without warning, grief might poke you in the ribs, punch you in the gut, knock the wind out of you. But even then, you seemed just fine. The world went on and on."

For me I think it was the recent full moon....that beautiful white globe with the smiling face that pops up over Lake Michigan once each month. I see that moon and I immediately think of my mom and my mother-in-law.....both died on the night of a full moon. So that moon hits me every single month....sometimes harder than others. Usually it's just a little remembering, sometimes it's a lump in my throat, sometimes it's tears....but it's always a thought, "Oh....hi mom!"

This month was a special full moon, the super blood moon. A friend we met in Montana caught a beautiful picture of it. Greg Efner lives in North Carolina and shared this photograph on Facebook.  He was in the right place at the right time to catch the special color and the shadow from the total lunar eclipse.

I think it was the moon combined with the book that made me feel raw again.....and a bit sad.  But I also feel grateful that the people I miss so very much were a part of my life and left me with so many lovely, warm memories. Damn....time to find the Kleenex.....