Okay, so you’re master of the universe and you’ll have your way. But I don’t get why you would call this guy home so soon. He was such an unabashed guide into your heart. He wrote about an accessible you. He sang praises to the mundane where you hid in plain sight. Only Brian could find the luminous in a smart phone, a peering seal, suntan lotion or thin bony shoulders. Only Brian could present your son to us as a “Gaunt, dusty man with starlight in his veins.” He talked to you endlessly. Couldn’t you have just listened from there awhile longer?
And this woman Mary. You left a hole in her heart. Not my concern? Yeah, I know. But I also know about marital love, its deep intimacy being our only hint at the intimate way you love us. How contradictory it all seems to fracture such love. Is she ready for your premature endowment of emptiness? You won’t neglect her, will you?
And those kids you blessed them with. Now a trinity without a father. No more wisdom from the heart of a deep believer. No grandfather’s arms to receive their own children. How could you? I frown at the thought of the wisdom and humor he would have found among their grandchildren. Frown because we’ll never know it.
Brian was fearless in his love for you and your unimaginable ways. He said he didn’t fear meeting you. “No man was ever more grateful for our profligate generosity and here at the every end, here in my last lines, I close my eyes and weep with joy that I was alive.” And “Oddly it’s not my eventual death that frightens and nags me….” See that word eventual? He wasn’t thinking now. Why were you?
Well maybe he was ready in some strange sense, but was Mary? Were the children? Did you listen to what they had to say about it? Well, I think you owe them now. Love. Strength. Understanding. Acceptance. Patience. Where does the litany end? Show them the way to wonder and joy without him. It won’t be enough but give them gratitude for him.
OK, OK. Don’t get annoyed with my edginess. I’m annoyed with you so be munificent. Please.
Which brings me to his sheer writing skills, Oh, I know you sent him to us with an imbedded talent but he honed and polished over long hours and taxing revisions. He became a writer’s writer who was only recently emerging from the parochial media.
You knew he was New Yorker ready. I knew it. Others knew it. For years. Why did you keep a lid on him, limit him when he was the equal of Hansen or McDermott or Dillard or Lopez, facile explorers of your mystery? He was carrying the joy of loving you to that big, noisy, self-absorbed world, so indifferent to your presence. And he was doing a heck of a job. Then you said enough. Why?
Well I don’t want to be ungrateful. He lyrically sang to our tribe and for our tribe, a troubadour for the sacred. One who sought and found your stories in our common lives. So many of us went to different schools together—ethnic, Catholic, urban. We are subsumed in the same sacramental imagination. He knew better than most that you are met in loved ones, in the marketplace of the marginalized, in human fight and plight and fright and flight. And when he showed us where you dwelled we often smiled. Or laughed. Sometimes chortled at the truth he exposed “in the holiness everywhere evident and available.”
He figured you had a sense of humor. Otherwise why would you let us become us? You were lonely right? So lonely that you breathed spirit into some homo erectus a half million years ago, then laughed and cried at the long-running show.
And Brian, if you’re eavesdropping on my rant, put in a good word for me.
To jog your memory, I’m one of many envious admirers of your well-practiced, hard-won craft. We talked about publishing, and many years ago John Reedy made me leave work on a catch-up Saturday so he could host a graduation gathering for Jim and Ethel Doyle’s kid on company premises. The only time in my life I was told not to put in extra hours.
And tell Sophia I occasionally grasp the wisdom of my years, wisdom I wish I had nearly 20 years ago when you keenly wanted that collection of essays made into a book and I could not find a spine while in years to come others smarter and more clever invented those spines and the books rolled off the presses.
Oh and on occasion I’ll say an Ave for Mary. And Liam. And Joseph. And Lily.
Brian Doyle wrote essays and “proems” that graced the pages of U.S. Catholic for decades. Brian passed away in May 2017, and he is sorely missed.
Image: Artem Sapegin on Unsplash
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