Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Note: This is a modified version of the essay I read for Miss Spoken, a live lit show I co-host the fourth Monday of every month at Cole’s Bar in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago. Every show has a different theme. The theme of this show was RESIST.

I wasn’t resisting the call in my tita’s texts.

The call to prayer, the call to Mass. She’s been doing it for years. Every Saturday for the last decade or so. Sometimes it’s a text, more often it’s a Facebook message because that’s what she uses the most to chatter with her fellow retired Filipino nurses.

The messages get a little wordier the closer they get to Christmas. Like, back in November she wrote:

Hi Family! Happy Thanksgiving greetings to you all. Thanksgiving Day is not a Holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church but it’s a wonderful feeling if you visit the Lord in the church and give your gratitude for all the Blessings and Graces we all have been receiving. Most of the churches have two masses, inquire in your churches so maybe you can attend one. Masses are usually in the morning JESUS is waiting for you. 🙏🙏🙏🙏❤️

I didn’t actually go to Mass on Thanksgiving. I had cranberry sauce to make, and a parade on television to watch. But I liked the idea that if I had found a church to attend, there Jesus would be. Sitting at the end of a pew, waiting to hand me a little cup of stuffing and gravy to snack on during the service.

When I pre-empted her Christmas text to go to Mass by texting her from Midnight Mass at Holy Name, she replied: “It counts as Christmas Mass! God bless you!” with a prayer hands emoji.

And I’m not a regular churchgoer. Not at all. My father isn’t one either, I don’t think. Not anymore. Not since my mother was alive, and she died five years ago.

Mom liked going to Mass because she was a social butterfly and a nosy old lady who liked to gossip after Mass every week. We’d spend entirely too much time as a family, lingering on the sidewalk and wanting to go home, back to the promise of a lazy Sunday afternoon eating Saturday’s leftover pizza and playing videogames in our underwear, while our mom grabbed the arms of the other Filipino ladies in our parish to talk shit about the Filipino ladies who didn’t come to church that week.

When I was a teenager, and thought I knew everything, I argued my way out of Mass by saying I didn’t really believe, and wouldn’t I be a big hypocrite if I went to Church, received Communion, while I wasn’t sure if I was Catholic anymore? Somehow, my parents respected or merely tolerated this choice and would leave me and my older sister (who was of the same mind as I was) to our own devices while they took our little siblings.

Which gave us a whole ninety minutes to take long showers, call boys we weren’t supposed to talk to on the phone, or smoke cigarettes we weren’t supposed to have. In exchange, we didn’t get the gossip straight from mom, who emphatically refused to share when we asked her for updates. We could guess the gossip by going through the church bulletin that would fall out of mom’s sensible Liz Claiborne purse, reading the updates on who died, who got married, who re-married, and who was sick and extrapolating from there.

Beat that with a stick, Jesus.

The first round of COVID vaccines were just becoming available in the spring of 2021, and I got my first jab on the day Mom died.

Two months after her stroke. Two months of her lying in the hospital while the rest of us watched her via an iPad my dad had left at her bedside on one of the few times he was able to visit.

I never thought that I was watching her die in real time. But it’s not like I thought she’d get better, either. Every involuntary blink, every low moan from her throat — what my father thought were signs of life and resistance to the afterlife were to me indications that she was shutting down. Like the way you flip switches and press buttons and sometimes even shake a device before you finally accept that the thing you had was beyond repair, and nothing could save it. There was no amount of money or time or care you could spend that would revive it, or her, without a great deal of pain and sorrow.

The day mom had her stroke, a few thousand people stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC in an attempt to prevent the transition of power from one administration to another. People were injured. People died. There were arrests, and then, somehow, there were pardons.

Five years later, and those same insurrectionists, those same traitors, are in our streets. They’re masked up and armed, dangerous and homocidal. They’re kidnapping children, terrorizing immigrants, and killing civilians.

I’m glad my mother is dead. I’m glad she isn’t around to be frightened by this. I’m glad I don’t have to try to explain this to her. I’m glad she died in a world that still had a little hope in it, with vaccines and an ice cream loving Catholic democrat on his way to the White House.

Every bad thing and every good thing that has happened between now and then, I catalogue based on whether she’d find it interesting. Not in a notebook or in a list on my phone. But somewhere in the back of my mind. It’s very “And that’s what you missed on Glee”, if you remember those Fox promos for the television show.

Like, Olivia Rodrigo! She would have loved that she is half Filipino. Or Heated Rivalry! She would probably spend all her time trying to convince me that one of it’s stars, Hudson Williams, is actually Filipino because to her he would have looked Mestizo despite the multiple interviews I’d show her on the internet where he says that his mom is Korean. I could imagine her snorting and saying “Well, his mom looks Filipino” before changing the subject.

She would have been devastated that my leg had to be amputated in the fall of 2024. But I’ve no doubt that, wherever she is, whether it be Heaven or some other afterlife, that she’s hanging out on a bench and gossiping with some other little old lady angels while my amputated foot frolics around her like an expensive puppy. Just waiting for me to show up, in some form or another, so she can tell me what I missed out on while she was dead and I was living.

I’m hesitant to go to protests. Protests are long and involve walking and while my prosthetic leg is sturdy, it doesn’t have a fancy bionic ankle or motors to make walking any less awkward than it is. I have to carry extra socks for when my stump changes shape or size. I have to know when discomfort is actually pain, and that I should try to be on my way home to the comfort of my own bed before I get sores.

But I knew I had to go somewhere this weekend. Because on January 24, I stepped away from TikTok and endless videos of those boys from Heated Rivalry long enough to log onto Threads to see a video of a man shot at point blank range by a crowd of masked men. I saw it. With my own eyes. From multiple angles. In real time and in slow motion. Mere weeks after Renee Good. Not even a month after Keith Porter was killed in Los Angeles.

If I get to see my mom again, I’d want to tell her that I did something, or not nothing at least. My Tita’s text message on Saturday said “Pls go to mass tomorrow & pray for all our sick & deceased family members. God bless you all!❤️🙏😇🫶” And I know Tita Lot was referring to my grandparents. My mother. And they’re always with me.

But the first names that came to mind were Alex. Renee. Keith. Cowboy, my friend Leah’s cat who died last Sunday. I was his catsitter for 15 years Ramsey, my friend Jacqui’s cat who died on Thursday. I was his catsitter for almost as long.

My friend Hazel, who was more my sister’s friend in high school but came back into our lives five years ago when she showed up at Mom’s funeral. She was my age and died, suddenly, of an aneurysm, leaving behind her mother, her husband, and young son.

I felt, and continue to feel the burden of their deaths on me. On my mind and on my soul. So how do I feel and honor their lives as well? Where do I start.

I went to Mass. I slipped into a pew. I made the sign of the cross. I prayed. I sang. I knelt. I received Communion. The Body of Christ. The Blood of Christ.

Alex. Renee. Keith.

Mom.

Amen,