Rita Mary Rose Curtin
While days like Mother’s Day are corny, they do elicit memories. I think of my mother. She died at the age of 100. Although she was quite debilitated at the time, she still kept asking me not to let her go, as if I had such power. She was afraid of death, but when I looked at her photo this morning, I felt she wasn’t dead or buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York where thirteen years ago we placed her next to our father and her husband Edward of sixty years.
“The dead don’t stay where they are buried,” the English writer John Berger’s mother tells him when he sees her in Lisbon seated on a park bench fifteen years after her death. Here Is Where We Meet is the book where you can read of this encounter and more. And there is much more, as when John remembers his mother saying to him when he was thirteen years-old, “Most people, she said, can’t stand the truth. It’s too bad but there it is, most people can’t stand it. You, John, I think you can bear the truth, we’ll see. Time will tell. I didn’t reply.”
When I spoke to my mother this morning, she told me to not make it public because people will think I am crazy. She was always worried that I would put myself in danger by saying or doing controversial things. But she knew also that I would not heed her advice and she was glad for that as well – secretly. When I told her what Berger’s mother said to him, she said, “Of course she was right. Would you stay buried there?”
It didn’t seem appealing, but I didn’t answer her.
“Where are you now?” I asked her.
“Don’t be too nosy, Eddy,” she said.
“I always want to know everything,” I said.
“There are some things best left alone. You are in one side of the world and I am in another. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Don’t you remember when I gave the eulogy at your funeral and I said you had a favorite saying about how the truth shall make you free?”
“I remember, but you also r
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
