A Letter from Veronica Marrinan

This letter is a part of The Catholic Woman’s letter collection For the New Feminism. Each piece featured in this series will explore the different ways in which Catholic women are making sense of what it means to be a woman in light of her lived experiences and in light of the Catholic Church. The intent of this series is to explore that “‘new feminism’” St. John Paul II called women to cultivate. To learn more about what such a feminism means and could look like, check out our free video program Cultivating Catholic Feminism.

D

ear Sister,

I am at the cemetery with a birthday cake. I am three years old. The cake is white and the candles are red. My mom and I are blowing them out and singing happy birthday, hushed so we don’t disrupt a family nearby. We keep a small garden shovel and watering can in the trunk so we can always take care of the flowers. My mom is 30 years old. My dad will always be 27.

When my mom married my dad she knew the risk she was taking. She knew about the hole between the two atria of his heart and the machine that would pump the blood through his lungs twice to make up for it. She knew the doctors had sent his mom home from giving birth with a four-page letter of his conditions, and the advice to enjoy the two weeks they could expect to have with him. She knew each day was an anomaly. She still said yes, and chose an emerald green vest for him to wear on their wedding day. They went ice skating on their honeymoon.

Photo contributed by Veronica Marrinan

He changed my diapers while she went to work as a copy editor in Manhattan. One morning his face was very cold. At first, she thought it was the air conditioning. She turned it off, turned back, and then she knew. I started crying. She took me out of my crib and called the ambulance.

Usually, widows have a lot of help from their church communities. My mom was new to it––not only the widow part, but the Catholic part, too. When she was pregnant, my mom turned to my dad and said they needed to figure out what to do. They questioned if the sedevacantist group they were in was actually the last remainder of the Catholic Church or a schism. They prayed, researched, and eventually left. They resaid their vows in the Catholic Church and I was baptized in a small chapel in Jersey. Her parents didn’t come. She and my dad took a picture with me in front of a statue of Saint Therese. She wore a blue sweater and he wore a grey suit.

When I asked my mom years later why she didn’t go back to the schismatic group after my dad passed, she said matter-of-factly that she didn’t want anyone else telling her how to live her life. She spent her whole life being told that asking questions showed a lack of faith, and she wanted me to grow up where my relationship with God was a safe place and doubts were an invitation to a deeper relationship with Him. She wanted me to be home. She wanted me to be in the Catholic Church.

This gumption, this calm and steady strength, has formed in determined detail the portrait of womanhood that I so needed to see.

Photo contributed by Veronica Marrinan

Still, my mom is not the kind of person most people would think is a rebel. She doesn’t share this part of her life with a lot of people. She is five feet tall and still wears jeans from the girl’s section of target. She gets mistaken for a teenager at 51 years old. But she chose to seek truth Himself, deeply, even if it took her away from the support system she had known her entire life. Even if it pulled her away from who she had grown up being told she ought to be. This gumption, this calm and steady strength, has formed in determined detail the portrait of womanhood that I so needed to see.

Forming My Sense of Femininity Through Grief

I consider our time as a single-mother home to be a blessing, not a deficit. Not many little girls get to share matching bedspreads and a nightlight with their moms. She freelanced so that we could be together during the day. I played with little felted dolls on the floor next to her desk and learned how to answer the phone politely in case it was a client. When she was in meetings my cousins became my favorite playmates. We ate cereal for dinner on Fridays.

Once while she was teaching journalism at her alma mater, the babysitting plan fell through before class. She set me up at a folding table near her with a coloring book and crayons. I can still hear the magic hush that fell over the class when she dimmed the lights, turned on the projector, and began to speak. This was my mom, the same woman who filled my sippy cup with orange juice every morning. She was commanding the room, and yet it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Photo contributed by Veronica Marrinan

There’s a particular kind of authority that you see in single-mother homes. With all the choices coming down to her, my mom’s trust in herself became integral. The confidence with which my mom answered the phone, bought our first house, and paid for my schooling was just as much a part of her femininity as playing with me or making breakfast.

This doesn’t mean my father was absent from our home. My mom often spoke of him. His brothers came to move our couch into our new apartment. His sister picked me up from preschool two days a week and told me how I had his ears. My mom sat editing at her desk while I cut his favorite things out of magazines to place in a light green scrapbook. Covering the plastic over the tacky pages became a ritual, a way to send him coloring pages and learn the stories behind each photograph. He was, and is, always there.

Grieving Well

My mom missed my dad with a tenderness towards our future. She gave me the gift of grieving well. Grief, to me, is the most vulnerable kind of love. It is choosing to nurture connection even when our nervous systems tell us that someone is gone. It doesn’t just happen when someone passes away, either. Our whole life can feel like a kind of grief if we don’t know how to hold our sorrow. One day we’ll all have to live without someone we love. Choosing to enter into love despite that fear is courageous, and something we can only do with God’s grace.

Our whole life can feel like a kind of grief if we don’t know how to hold our sorrow. One day we’ll all have to live without someone we love. Choosing to enter into love despite that fear is courageous, and something we can only do with God’s grace.

Photo contributed by Veronica Marrinan

Mary’s life is a remarkably quiet example of this. She knew the risk she was taking. She knew what she was signing up for. She trusted God to wound her well. Her whole life was a peaceful preparation to stay when Calvary came. We may think that none of us will be asked to do something so remarkable, and maybe we won’t be. But maybe we will be asked to marry someone who may not wake up tomorrow. To raise someone who will live with chronic pain. To love someone who is lucky if their mental health lets them make it to graduation day.

These are not things to run from. We will never experience joy if we keep waiting for sorrow to run out. We need to make a home in it: fluff the pillows, make a cup of tea, turn on the light, and trust that God will come to sit at our table. Because He will.

If we never take the leap of faith to trust that God will meet us in our suffering, we will never share that part of ourselves with Him. Sorrow is going to be there, regardless of how we choreograph our life to avoid it. We are not exempt from the pain of suffering because we don’t acknowledge it. We are only exempting ourselves from the intimacy that Christ wants to offer us.

My college chaplain said it far better than I ever could:

“God has used the worst kind of experience and made that our salvation… In other words, our salvation comes about through an act that went all the way down to the bottom of our humanity. He died. That’s why the son of God took on a real human nature, because he could accept all the conditions and the effects of sin and a broken world and embrace all that and make that an offering, because of His perfection and because of His divinity. He made that an offering that is actually redemptive for all of us.”

Entering Into Grief With Our Mother

We need to trust God to wound us well. And if we don’t know how to, Mary will help us. One of her Seven Sorrows is also a Joyful Mystery, the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the temple. They brought their son to the temple. They carried two small doves. They met a man who told her a sword would pierce her heart.

Grief has helped me reframe my perception of Mary’s life. She probably wasn’t shocked when Simeon told her that. She knew what she had signed up for. But it showed her that she could trust Simeon and his love for her son. It helped her feel seen and known by another person who saw what she was carrying, the weight of this future grief.

When I am carrying grief in my palms, meditating on this helps me feel less alone. The Prophecy of Simeon is the second sorrow in the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady. It’s prayed like the rosary, seven Hail Mary’s for each sorrow. It became a way the door was propped open for me in my relationship with Mary. It can be challenging as a cradle Catholic to understand the Rosary in a new way. The seven sorrows provided another side to Mary’s walk with Christ that resonated with me in my own grief.

Once visiting the cemetery my little brother complained about being tired while we were walking back to the car. My mom challenged him to a race and ran with him through the tombstones. I can picture her face, even now, looking back at me and laughing. She has shown me what Our Lady always has. There is no way to outrun sorrow. We are not created to put down grief. We can visit our husband’s grave and chase our son to the car. We can hold grief and joy in each of our hands, at the same time, and know peace.

Photo contributed by Veronica Marrinan

A Deeper Intimacy in the Holy Mass

Considering grief has lifted a veil from the mass for me, too. When you grieve a loved one by integrating the reality of their soul into your life, it becomes staggeringly apparent that eternity is happening right now. In the mass, we are invited to step beyond time and to be completely held in the Eucharist. Every time I go to mass, I go with my dad, my adoptive father, my mother, my siblings, and everyone I’ve ever had to say goodbye to. Yet the sacramental presence of Jesus in the Eucharist fades away as the accidents of bread and wine are integrated into my person. There’s a grief in this, too. It’s sad to think that the sacramental presence will dissolve. But He dissolves into us. We are now invited to dissolve into Him.

So, my sister, you will not lose yourself by opening your grief to the Lord. He will not leave you to dissolve into nothing. He is there, waiting for you in your capacity for the sorrow you encounter. He is waiting to be completely dissolved into you.

You are not less of a woman for feeling pain. You are not less of a woman for feeling things deeply, for not having a pretty face forward as you unravel so that you can be woven into the image of God’s love.

You are worthy of the freedom and peace that a simple “and” brings: joy and pain; grief and love.

You are worthy of the “and” that is your womanhood. Authoritative and nurturing. Commanding and calming. Radiantly joyful and achingly sorrowful.

Your human experience is eternal. We are not mortal souls, so why would you think yourself incapable of containing these multitudes? There are as many ways to be a woman as there are women. And the particular way that you are a woman is good.

Photo contributed by Veronica Marrinan

Lean into your grief. It will unravel you from all the lies that kept you hidden from yourself. It will rend you and knit you and draw you near to the Beloved. It will not unhinge you from your particular call of womanhood. It will crystalize it.

You have a room in my heart.

Love,

Veronica

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About the Writer: Veronica Marrinan is a cradle Catholic and graduate of FIT who holds degrees in Fashion Design and Entrepreneurship. After working in the fashion industry throughout college she co-founded a contemplative clothing line called Litany NYC to create a healing space in the fashion industry. You can find her headbanging to Bleachers with her cats, hosting the Litany podcast "Beyond the Stitch," or at https://www.litanynyc.com/meet-the-makers.