Skip to content

Log Out

×

Good Letters

For Easter this year, my older sister gave my two-year-old daughter a potential future heirloom to wear to the midnight Paschal liturgy: a dress of cream-colored raw silk, with ruffles, pintucks, and little puffed sleeves that delicately ringed Anna Maria’s arms. The lined skirt puffed out from the high gathered waist, and in pale light even seemed to shimmer.

When the evening of Holy Saturday finally arrived, we dressed her like a tiny Grand Duchess: my husband combed back her hair, while I pulled white tights over her legs against the cold midnight air.

A church service that lasts the better part of the night is hard enough for adults, but for children it must be truly surreal: my two alternately sat quietly in the temple and then ran outside, restless, into the courtyard to look up at the stars.

At last around two o’clock in the morning, when Fr. Deacon George came through the Royal Doors with the golden chalice and implored the faithful to Draw ye near, Anna Maria pushed aside her brother who’d cut in front of her in line and declared testily, “Not your Jesus. My Jesus!”

For—as many people do not know—Eastern Orthodox children receive Holy Communion from the time of their baptism. The practice is a mirror of how all of us are children before God: we “receive,” not “take.”

By two, Anna Maria had nestled in her parents’ arms and opened her mouth to the Gifts on the golden spoon a hundred times. This Paschal night I held her up, squirming, as Father Elie, doubtlessly exhausted after Holy Week, leaned forward and called God’s handmaiden by name.

It wasn’t until later that I saw the delicate pink stain on the dress’ ruffled neckline, and knew that a droplet of Holy Communion—the Body and Blood of Christ—had landed upon the silk.

This posed a problem: Scott Cairns’ memoir of his pilgrimage to Orthodox monastic republic Mt. Athos, A Short Trip to the Edge, contains a dramatic account of an incident in which a disturbed young man jostles the Communion chalice, spilling it, and all his clothing must be taken to be burned. So was I going to have to do that?

For the record, I was prepared to light the fire.

There may be differing schools on this issue: I remembered that my son’s godmother, who is Greek and the wife of a priest, had told me that if any portion of the Gifts were to spill on a child’s clothes, that I should wash them in a bowl of fresh clean water, then throw the water into the yard where it could sink into the ground. I should then let the clothes dry.

Obedient, I ran water into a cobalt blue bowl—blue, color of heaven—and carefully washed the little dress (disregarding the Dry Clean Only tag that stared up from the inside seam). I squeezed it again and again until I’d gotten out all the water I could, hung it on the rack to dry, then cast the water into the yard so that the gifts of God could nourish the grass.

The water droplets scattered like diamonds on the air. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother, ordinarily no great housekeeper, hanging white laundry on the clothesline in the backyard, as bees buzzed about the tangled sweetheart roses growing on the Cyclone fence, and I felt like an initiate into a particular and vanishing discipline of womanhood.

Two days later I set up the ironing board and ironed out all the wrinkles on the lowest heat setting, then hung the dress on a padded satin hanger.

A week and a half ago—so recently that I still have trouble conceiving of it—my mother died. It was no surprise: she’d had Alzheimer’s for ten years, then had lain in the ICU for two weeks after Memorial Day, a snowy bundle of sheets with the tubes coming out of her.

Two days before she died, on another late evening vigil, I sat beside her amid the humming kitchen-y machines and held her papery white hand, straining to understand the words she could barely pronounce. All the words of theological sophistication deserted me at the moment and the only thing I could tell her was, “Jesus saves.”

I prayed the Our Father with her then, and marveled that she repeated, with difficulty, each line alongside me: I’d figured she’d forgotten it long ago. I kissed her forehead, then fled down the fluorescent corridors into the night.

Last week, a day after my (and her) long flight back to Mississippi, I helped my sister pick the bright crimson dress that we would bury Mama in—the dress, in fact, that she had worn to my wedding.

We drove to Dillard’s department store to buy her new undergarments, and my sister laid out the jewelry—“Barbara Bush pearls!”—in which she’d be buried. Along with the older of my brothers, we selected a dark wood coffin and left off the vault so that her earthly frame would eventually return to the ground.

For you are dust and to dust you shall return.

There was, though, this: At my mother’s visitation, my little Anna Maria in that ironed, cream silk dress, laughing and darting down the carpeted hallways of the Stricklin-King Funeral Home. It was a hot summer day this time, and wisps of hair were matted around her forehead, even in the air conditioning. “Pretty flowers!” she exclaimed at the dozen and a half bouquets sent by people we hadn’t seen in years, the room rich with all their fragrance.

“Mee-maw sleeping,” she pronounced, before like Mommy, she bent to kiss my mother’s still forehead.

The dress is a tangle in my luggage now, but I will wash it, again by hand, its silk folds more precious, more redolent than ever of both presence and memory.

Image depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

+ Click here to make a donation.

+ Click here to subscribe to Image.


The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required