Learning Christ……

My Dad died in June. He had cancer. My sister Jenny was there when he died, but because she was pregnant with her fourth child, she forgot. She remembered again at my nieces wedding in November, when we took a family picture and he wasn’t there. I could tell what she was thinking because she could not stop crying.

My Dad’s birthday was on October 2, he was born on the feast of the Guardian Angels, to Angelo and Angelina Calfo, both of whom were probably saints. My Dad was like a Guardian Angel in some ways. Whenever anyone says my Dad is in heaven, I secretly become grateful that there is a place for the imperfect- remembering that he pushed the waiter at my 50^th birthday party. We all wanted to shove him, but Dad, was the only one who was brave enough. My Dad was very brave.

I was a sixties and seventies child born to two fifties parents, who raised me as if it was still the fifties, only because I was the second of nine. My sister and I pretty much annihilated any hope of raising wholesome children in public school, when my sister joined the Socialists, and I ran away from home, over and over again. By the fourth child, they realized that child rearing was a hands-on job and that it was going to get ugly. They were both perfectly capable of child rearing in a more hands on way. They just didn’t realize that they had to, until they found the world crumbling around them, which was after I graduated high school, and left for good.

From then on, every one of my brothers and sisters went to Catholic School.  I would call home to “check in” only 3 times in 6 months or so until I got married. I lived far away most of the time, and only moved closer when I found out my Dad was ill.

My parents had nine children just about the time Paul Erlichs 1970’s book “The Population Bomb” became a New York Times best seller. When we were little we would drive 500 miles to visit my Dad’s parents and after that, another five hundred to visit my Mom’s. In our Country Squire station wagon, we would read books, and fight to get into the rotation for the front seat. Jenny didn’t a wear seatbelt in those days and was allowed to romp loosely in the car. My Dad would drive all night, and sometimes I would smell cigarettes that he only smoked on our Vacation to keep him awake. Passing cars passengers would have their counting fingers out mouthing…”one…two…three…nine! WOW!” We were a 70’s anomaly and the only big family in our school.

I missed most of the conversation with my Dad for most of my life until he retired. Then he started spamming all nine of us with emails that we had all seen years before. I answered every one. Email saved my relationship with my Dad- and I even made a special yellow folder for him labeled “Dad Spam”. When I would send him an article he liked he would send me a note, “Good one, Cari!” and then he would forward it to his whole email list. This was a substitution for all the “A” grades I never got, the “Atta girls” I never deserved. I felt proud, as if I had finally graduated from college.

My Dad was a Thomist. I don’t know if my brothers and sisters know that. Religion was a subject that we would spam each other about often. When I sent my Dad the news that the Pope had signed the “Moto Proprio”, my Dad swiftly sent me back a note saying that “Latin was disallowed! It had been since the seventies! I needed to get away from those crazy people.” I finally had him. “Dad” I wrote, “that came from the Pope”. That started a flurry of emails and a reminder that his parents were obedient to Vatican II and never protested…

My Dad had a favorite prayer that was called “Learning Christ”…It started, “Teach me my Lord to be sweet and gentle in all the events of my life”. When my Dad’s cancer became very painful, he stopped coming downstairs and sat upstairs in isolation mostly watching the news and reading the paper. He kept saying, “All I want to do is sit at the table, and have one more meal with my family”.

The last thing in his life that I learned about my Dad, was that he really LOVED my Mom. For the month before he died, I heard his tearful cries, “Frannie, come and lay down here with me. Then he would say to her, “You have the most beautiful green eyes I have ever seen. I love you Frannie.” 

In the other room my brothers and sisters and I cried. One of my sisters said, “He REALLY digs her!” We laughed, but he did dig her. I remember watching Pepe Lepeu on TV as a kid and thinking that my Mom and Dad had a relationship like Pepe and the Cat. My Dad was always trying to get in some private time with Mom (the cat) who was driving a child here or there or making 150 centerpieces for a luncheon. She just seemed like she was trying to escape. Somehow he caught her long enough to make 9 children.

Before he died he bought a new chair he called, “His chair of penance”. When he was moved to the hospital bed, I sat in the “Chair of penance” and felt a steel bar poking me that was definitely NOT in the right place. While I was sitting there with him, he asked me to find him a Holy Card with the “Learning Christ” prayer on it. I sent it to him in an email. “Good one, Cari” he said. That was almost the last email I ever got from him.

Seeing the coffin and knowing that my Dad was inside of the golden wooden box was unexpectedly overwhelming to me. I felt my entire body weaken. I even started to drag my feet. My husband and my six boys had to steady me all the way in to the Church. Just like in the movies. The funeral director came up behind me and whispered, “You have to be strong for your Mom.”  I mustered all of the strength that I had left, and walked in teary eyed but steady. – I think. The Monsignor who spoke at my Dad’s funeral described him best. “He was just like Saint Joseph, only your Dad was not silent”.

I read the “Learning Christ” prayer the other day... it reminded me that my Dad was not just a man, but a force of nature. He raised nine children about whom my grandfather would say, “There is not a dud in the whole bunch!” I can agree with Grandpa,  looking at my brothers and sisters that my Dad indeed succeeded. He drove all of us, as different as we are, to share one commonality, that we “Sign our work with excellence”. This however, was not his greatest achievement. His signature achievement was his life’s perseverance in obtaining the virtue of Charity. Lastly, it was to impart that Charity to his children and grandchildren. That virtue, he knew, was the foundation of everything that was valuable in life, and death.

Learning Christ

Teach me, my Lord, to be sweet and gentle in all the events of life--

In disappointments,

In the thoughtlessness of others,

In the insincerity of those I trusted,

In the unfaithfulness of those on whom I relied.

Let me put aside myself,

To think of the happiness of others,

To hide my little pains and heartaches,

So that I may be the only one to suffer from them.

Teach me to profit by the suffering that comes across my path.

Let me so use it that it may mellow me, not harden nor embitter me.

That it may make me patient, not irritable.

That it may make me broad in my forgiveness, not narrow,

haughty, and overbearing.

May no one be less good for having come within my influence,

No one less pure, less true, less kind, less noble for having

been a fellow-traveler with me in our journey toward eternal life.

“Teach me thy way, O LORD” (Psalm 86:11)

-Hugh McCord