Marks of Love

Before Mom died in 2004, she and my dad lived in a beach house on the west end of Galveston Island. Afterward, Dad moved to Dallas, but the beach house stayed in the family, and a number of our collective belongings remain there—including Mom’s books.
Among them are many volumes I know she read: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk, and Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, to name a few. Others, I know she never cracked; they’re too pristine, lacking the warps and creases of beach-combed books.
Still others I know she only partly read. I know this because of the bookmarks she left in them.
Some of these bookmarks are of the Hallmark variety, with colored tassels and wacky sayings such as “Reading is Forever!” Others come from her travels with Dad (the Moby Dickens Bookshop in Taos) or her devotional life (“Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!”). Still others are faded dry-cleaning receipts or rumpled grocery lists.

No matter how mundane, though, each placeholder marks for me a sacred spot of time. It marks with great precision where Mom was—as both a reader and a human—and then wasn’t. It records absolutely where Mom’s hands, eyes, and breath last fell, at least within the world of a given book.
What the bookmark can’t tell me, though, is why Mom stopped reading precisely here. Did she abandon the book out of boredom? Was it interrupted by yet another round of chemo? Did it confuse her increasingly muddled mind? Did it terrify her, as the end drew near? (She only reached page 41 of Death Comes for the Archbishop.) Each bookmark is as mysterious as it is certain.
When I’m in the beach house alone, I often peruse these books, especially the marked pages. I might read them through Mom’s eyes, wondering what she thought about a given turn of phrase. I might inhale the pages’ scent, holding it in memory of her. Or I might read the pages tolle-lege style, hoping for a flash of insight or a word of wisdom or guidance.
Sometimes I decide to read one of these books all the way through. When this happens, I have to work around Mom’s bookmark with one of my own. It’s an odd sensation when I reach the page where she stopped—and an even odder one when I move past it. I feel a prick of grief, a twinge of sadness that I’ve left her behind. But I also feel that in reading forward, in completing a book she didn’t, I’m finishing some important work, performing some gesture of love, extending, in some small way, her life.
We think the dead leave us behind, but in fact we leave them. We leave their bookmarked moment of death—such a certainty, such a mystery—and live forward into more pages, read forward into more days. If love marks the page they left, though, we revisit it with thanksgiving. And as we read forward, we act as their eyes and hands and breath. We extend their story.
In this sense, every bookmark visit is an act of Eucharist, and every reading forward is an act of Easter.
 
Dr. Claire Colombo is the director of the Center for Writing and Creative Expression at the seminary and has served on the seminary’s adjunct faculty since 2012. As a freelance writer, she develops religion and language arts curricula for Loyola Press of Chicago. She is a regular contributor to their “Finding God” magazine and newsletters.