What's in a name?
By Michelle Martin
The congregation for my aunt’s funeral wasn’t large, maybe four or five dozen people, all seated toward the front on one side of a large suburban church, built to accommodate hundreds at Sunday Mass.
My Aunt Anna Mae didn’t live the kind of life that drew lots of public attention. A single mother before such situations were common, she raised two daughters on her own with a high school education, working mostly in restaurants and banks, often holding two jobs at once.
She didn’t drive, generally staying home when she wasn’t at work. When she was younger, she smoked too much, probably drank too much and spoke her mind with a bluntness that could be disconcerting. She cared for her older daughter, who is mentally disabled, until she died July 8 from lung cancer.
All that is by way of introduction, and judging from his homily, the priest who celebrated her funeral Mass knew those things about her.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know—or forgot—her name.
I lost count of the number of times he added a couple of letters to her given name, telling us over and over again that “Anna Marie” had the same hope of heaven that Jesus extended to the “good thief” in Luke’s Gospel.
Each time, my cousin Linda, seated in front of me, gave an involuntary start, as though she wanted to speak up and correct him. Linda, who raised two sons, often on her own, battled her mother for months at a time. Still, she put 3,000 miles on her car and jeopardized her job in the three weeks between her mother’s diagnosis and death, driving the rounds from suburb to suburb, between her home, the hospital, and the house where her mother and sister lived.
Now, in addition to planning the funeral, she must try to untangle her mother’s legal and financial affairs and find a way to provide for the continued care of her older sister, who has never known any home but their mother’s. Listening to her mother being called out of her name seemed like one straw too much.
But soon enough, the homily was over. As we moved through the Prayers of the Faithful, my dad seemed to put a little more emphasis on Anna Mae’s name than usual, and the priest used the right name for the rest of the Mass. He said the final prayers over the casket as incense wafted toward the ceiling, and we followed it out of the church and made the short drive to the cemetery for graveside prayers.
The ritual has become familiar to me over the past couple of years, as I have gotten older and the people I know who are dying are as likely to be my friends as my parents’, or parents of my friends. The ritual, more than any words the priest could say, is what I, and most of the congregation, find comforting. The funeral Mass gives us an opportunity to say goodbye, to thank God for our lives and the life of the one who died, to pray that we will be reunited with each other and with God in heaven.
The homily, when not calling my aunt by the wrong name, touched on all those points, and I think that was what allowed us to take it with a grain of salt—or maybe enough grains to go around the rim of a margarita glass.
It was a margarita that my cousin Linda raised in toast to her mother at the funeral lunch, as we all drank to Anna Mae, and then, for good measure, to Anna Marie, whoever she is.
Martin is a staff writer for The Catholic New World.E-mail her at [email protected].
