Once again, it is the holy season of Lent, the time when a wake-up call sounds each year to remind us that we are not yet all that we are supposed to be. Lent challenges us to change the selfish and the sorrowful parts of who we are. It asks us to transform our very lives into what God is asking us to be.

Such systemic transformation is never easy. Any change requires us to let go of our comfort zone, of a past that, even when problematic, is comfortingly familiar. Lent asks us to have enough faith to burst forth as signs of new hope, ripe with love, and rich in promise, as beautiful as the daffodils springing up from the ground around us.

Some of us don’t want to change, yet in the course of our ordinary lives, we are forced by events to do so. For me and my family, one of those events took place at the beginning of this Lent with the death of Maria Concetta Palma Sola, our dear Aunt Mamie.

Ironically, Mamie was a person who never changed. As high-school students, we were assigned the task of reading Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple.” When I arrived in class to discuss this story of “A Simple Heart,” I noted that my classmates couldn’t identify with its main character Felicite. She was so very innocent that they thought her unrealistic. Felicite was very real to me, however, because she so much resembled our dear Mamie.

From the outset we kids knew that Mamie was not one of the adults; she was one of us. We saw it in the games she never tired of playing with us, in the way that she loved bouncing birthday-party balloons back and forth across the living room at us. We saw it as she flew down the Rowe Street driveway beside us, pushing us on a tricycle, or in the way that she’d have us hold our hands down and trace our fingers onto a piece of paper. We knew it when she began making construction-paper lanterns for us or when she’d take a napkin and fold it into a shape that looked like twins in a crib.

It’s as though she stepped out of the musical, “Peter Pan,” singing, “I don’t want to grow up.” Somehow she never quite did. Enough good people (her sister, our Auntie Connie, top on that list) were around to make sure that she didn’t have to grow up. They took care of Mamie so that she could remain a perpetual child, simple, sweet and fascinated with all the things that all kids enjoy: toys, games, silly pranks, and funny stories.

Like any child, Mamie could be stubborn, yet she had a certain unwavering innate goodness about her. Mamie loved all people, no matter what they did. Her love was truly unconditional. When my Dad’s second wife left him, all of us were quick to castigate her, but Mamie wouldn’t join in. “She was nice and she never did anything to me,” she would tell us. Years later she would mention Miss Margaret, the Unmentionable among the rest of us, as, much to our consternation, she would wonder aloud about how she was doing. Mamie taught us about forgiveness. She never had a bad word to say about anyone. Not ever. I think that Mamie’s love was reflective of the way that God loves us too.

Mamie also taught us about patience. When my first Australian shepherd, Brocky, broke into my closet while I was away at work, tore down every article of clothing in my extensive wardrobe and bit the buttons off each item. I brought the mess to Mamie who selected the right replacements from her extensive button collection and then painstakingly sewed each one on. About two weeks later, Brocky struck again in a repeat episode. Once more, Mamie was there, patiently stitching away to repair my clothing.

Mamie taught us about self-confidence too. As an adolescent when I was not so sure of myself or my looks, she would be sure for me. Looking into the mirror at Auntie’s kitchen table and putting on my make-up, uncertain if I were looking decent or looking ugly, Mamie would start singing, “You are so beautiful to me.” Somehow being beautiful to even one somebody provides the courage and the confidence to go forward in optimism. Often Mamie was our only optimism and our biggest fan.

Palm Sunday was her special holiday because way back in 1918, she had been born on that day. She was proud of her “Palma” name given in honor of her birthday, and she loved the times when Palm Sunday again coincided with her special day.

Every Palm Sunday, Mamie wove crosses, crowns of thorns, and baskets from the palms. No one could make them as precise and as amazing as she could. We decorated our homes with them, and placed the crown of thorns around our statutes of the Pieta.

Mamie always made one giant palm cross for my Dad’s grave. “You take this to Allie,” she would command. Every year I did. On hearing of Mamie’s passing, my godson Anthony said, “Forget about Easter this year.” When his Mom asked him what he meant by that, he replied, “Mamie won’t be there to make the crosses and the baskets.” This year Palm Sunday won’t be the same for any of us. Sometimes the loss of one person makes that huge a difference.

Though she suffered from a cleft palate that left her with a speech impediment and also from a hearing defect, Mamie never complained about her fate. She was very artistic and won an art scholarship to New York, which her disabilities prevented her from accepting. She was never bitter about that. Cheerfully she went to work as a stitcher in Boston’s Garment District, sewing Army coats for the soldiers in World War II and fake leather jackets for the civilians in the Fifties and Sixties.

The ignorant who met her would sometimes think that she was mentally challenged. She wasn’t. In fact I think that she was smarter than most people are. She found a way to be constantly happy, something that very few enlightened individuals ever manage to accomplish.

Even in her recent illnesses over the past three years from hip surgery to the malignant sinus tumor that took her life, Mamie remained optimistic and cheerful. She was joyful to the end, accepting of the condition that was disfiguring her. It was never depressing to be around her. To the very last day, she was chatting happily with us, playing with her dolls and sending us to look for batteries to make them work again.

Years after all of us had grown up, Mamie still referred to us as “children.” “Come for coffee, children,” she would say, calling us to a table that held fewer and fewer places as the years passed and God called some home while others, no longer children, found homes of their own. We know that we cannot be children now that the only person who still acknowledged us as kids is gone. Our own Peter Pan days have ended with her.

Perhaps for us “children” the challenge of this Lent will be to finally take that quantum leap that acknowledges our place in the world as self-actualizing adults, ready to leave our old ways forever behind and able to grieve without despair for Mamie and for the passing of our entire once seemingly space-less, timeless childhood world.

It is interesting that a death of someone dear might make us do that. It is especially poignant because all change somehow involves a kind of death. We die to what was in order to live in the present and build toward the future. Our faith, along with its accompanying characteristic, our trust in God, makes that possible, even if it isn’t ever easy.

This Lent, may we die to whatever keeps us from being all that God is asking us to be. May we come to the joy of Easter knowing that through Christ’s Resurrection, all those who have died before us remain with us in a different form. They are still a present benediction upon us in the Communion of Saints which forever links us to each other through the Risen Christ.

May Easter bring us the peace and happiness that come from knowing that Death has been conquered and that eternal life awaits us. In the reviving flowers and plants, now blooming in beauty, may we see a sign of the heavenly life that will one day be ours too. Happy Easter! Happy Spring!

– Carole Anne Scott