Memento Mori

 Memento Mori

(I wrote the following in November 2019)

Over the past few weeks, my family and I sat in a small hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, and watched my father pass away. Arguably the hardest thing I have ever had to experience. The doctors had done everything they could, it was up to his body to fight the sickness and there just wasn’t enough strength left in him.

So, we sat, taking turns in the small ICU room, slowly watching each grain of sand slip through his hourglass, unsure how many remained.

One of those evenings, I received a call at 1:00 A.M., the doctor on the other line was concerned his vitals were dropping and he couldn’t get ahold of my mother. The hospital being close by, I was there quickly. They had stabilized him with medication and a breathing mask. I recall thinking for the first time that my father was dying. 

No way, he will be fine, he has been through worse. A tremendous weight fell on me and when it began to lift, I found myself, victim, to the evils of hope.

Accepting the fact that I would be spending the rest of the night there, I got myself comfortable on a folding chair between my father and the window in his room. Staring out the window listening to the rhythmic sounds of the various machines that were keeping my father alive.

In many ways, our lives are made up of different bricks. It is hard to say what ingredients make the perfect brick. Surely it differs from person to person. The traditional Fired bricks are sand and clay with a few other lesser amount ingredients. What would the ingredients be for our bricks? Love and/or truth? How important are the lesser ingredients? One item missing, and we find the bricks crumbling.which are represented by the people we build relationships with and to and the lessons and experiences we learn those relationships. Like bricks, some last forever holding together their edifice through life’s storms while others are weak and crumble with a simple Summer shower. Sometimes we focus more on trying to hold together the crumbling ones rather than appreciate the other bricks that have stayed strong all along. 

Outside of his window was a small tar and rock roof which had a small stack of bricks piled up on cardboard. They were laid in a somewhat organized fashion with a few broken ones scattered on the roof around the pile. I sat and stared at the pile one morning before dawn, wondering why they were there. The hospital had been completed for decades and surely, they weren’t left from then. My mind wandered to Freemasonry.

Our parents represent our foundations, we will learn much of life from them. As with any parental figure, our feelings towards them shifts with age from admiration in our early years, to sometimes dislike in our teenage years then, often back to love when we become adults. Maybe that is why our mortar never dries to allow the bricks to shift and adjust until perfectly placed in our edifice.

The mortar that holds our bricks are malleable and represent the memories we hold on to. The angry ones I have of my father when I was a defiant teenager have diminished and become lessons learned. All the foolish arguments disappear from memory, the good times that we reminisce about become great times. His brick is now completed as a cornerstone of my life. It now rests on my shoulders the responsibility of the family.

Freemasonry has never made any man better; it is the people in Freemasonry that can shape our future. It is the late-night conversations on car rides home from an event or the Brother that sought me out last week at my lodge just to hug me not to console me but just share my pain, to help remove even a piece of the sadness from me and let me know he was with me. It is these bricks that I choose to shape my future, which in turn will be my duty to help shape others.