At 8:30 a.m. on a blisteringly hot and humid morning – it is already 94 degrees outside - I step into the deep marble air-conditioned cool of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Carlisle, Illinois. The dry wall of cold is at first shocking, but as I become accustomed to it I realize that it is only a temporary respite.  Eventually I must step back out into the hazy blast furnace/sauna that is mid-August in southern Illinois. 

This is my mother’s home town and I have come here with my sister to place Mom in a home, a nursing home, a home from which she will never leave.  She is dropping like a stone, governed by gravity, through the deepening and darkening stages of dementia know as Alzheimer’s.  She is lost to us.

This church was my mother’s church, the one she grew up in, went to school at, and will likely soon be buried from.  It is stone block and marble veneer, huge columns with arches built to resemble the great churches of Europe.  It is cavernous, stern, forboding.

I am not here to pray or light candles or seek favor, I’m simply here out of curiosity, wondering what I can glean about my mother back in a day when she was young and whole… before the great war, before my father, before me and my brothers and sisters.

Before Alzheimer’s. 

I try to imagine her as a giggling young girl, walking quietly through the church with a Kleenex pinned on her head.  I try to imagine her running gaily across the school grounds in a plaid Catholic school uniform, with pigtails flying, trying to catch a friend.  But I can’t, enshrouded as she is in her old ladyness and disease. 

Jesus is bleeding and dieing everywhere I look.  We are, I assume, to be made to feel both guilty and grateful – the oldest of Catholic tricks.  Confessions, sacraments, last rites are all means by which the clergy gathers control over their flocks.  The sacraments are the herding sheep dogs and the priests are the shepherds.  This is old-school church here – just as I remember it – scary and overbearing.

I wait, but there’s nothing new to be learned here.  I’m waiting for fireworks that simply will not happen.  Ever.  There’s nothing here for me but the cool and the quiet. 

So grabbing my hat, I glance around one last time before rising from the pew and walking to the rear of the church.  I push open the heavy doors.  The heat and humidity that has been waiting outside comes muscling in like black Friday shoppers at midnight, fogging my glasses and dampening my skin.  And then squinting into the hazy, dirty sun, I leave Medieval religion behind and return to the Dark Age of my mother.

I will return to this place only once more.