Darkness to light

The night after we buried my mother, three years ago, two shafts of white light passed at high-speed before my eyes. I must have been dozing. I called out her name.

Library

Somewhere between the sprawling S. João hospital and a granite steeple church, within walking distance from the Medical School lies a low-rise, rectangular building, a relatively humble structure which houses the College of Psychology and Social Sciences. It is easy to miss it as one drives along the roads crisscrossing the northeastern campus of the University of Porto. Last week I drove by it twice before I found it.

I had been there once, ten years ago, when the building first opened its doors; the halls and rooms still smelled of fresh paint then. What strikes me now, as I enter, is the honey-colored wood and the glass walls, some tinted a faint white for privacy. I am welcomed by one person after another, some I recognize from a long time ago, and some I have never met. There is warm light everywhere.

I am there as a guest to attend a board meeting and share in the last stages of preparation of the month-long tribute the college will pay to their first Dean, now deceased. Her presence remains strong in the affectionate way people say her name, the smiles sent my way, the color of the wood (her favorite), and the ‘clinics’ where children and adults are helped by trained psychologists for a very small fee.

“I wonder if you would like to read the opening speech,” says the current Dean. “You might want to add something, perhaps?” I am humbled by the question, and begin to read the handwritten pages: The College wishes to remember the woman who fought for the creation of a Psychology degree at a time when the fascist regime looked upon the discipline with deep suspicion; who put together a faculty and a curriculum, and borrowed a crumbling building in the old city center where the first professionals were taught; who left the comfort of family life to train for two years with Jean Piaget in Switzerland; who wrote her Ph.D. on the then emerging field of developmental psychology; who published the first text books on the subject in Portugal; who, through more than thirty years, helped train countless men and women, establishing the field solidly in the country.

I feel their eyes on me as I read. When I come to the end of the last page, I hesitate. The speech is so complete, and yet … But this is their Dean, after all. Their tribute. “It is wonderful,” I say. When the meeting is over I am shown the high-tech auditorium and the beautiful multi-layered library, where a wall is filled with the old Dean’s books – the ones she wrote, and the ones recently donated. “Do you like it?” asks the Dean. “I do,” I say. “She would have loved to see her books here.”

Next Tuesday I will walk there with my ailing father to see her name on a plaque on the wall. Then we will sit in the auditorium where the President, former colleagues, and friends will speak about her. We will go on to the exhibition of her life and work  in the main hallway where some of her things will be arranged neatly in glass cases: writings, mostly, but also photo glimpses of what she was to him (a young wife smiling on the ski slopes, an older wife walking towards the Egyptian pyramids), and to me (a young mother helping my brother and I decorate the Christmas tree; an older mother holding her twin baby granddaughters).

“Is there anything else you would like people to see of her personal life?” asked the librarian a few days ago. I went looking for pictures of her beloved son, gone so long before her, and also for something of her that was neither the wife, nor the mother, nor the strictly professional: her favorite sunglasses; her black evening gloves with tiny beads sown into the lace fabric; one of her many silk scarves; her miniature Bible, whose existence was unknown in our secular family until her death; and a note written by one of the many troubled teenagers she helped. It reads, “You let light into my darkness: I love you.”

And so I hope my readers will forgive me for my silence these last few weeks. I needed much inward gazing and quiet time to rearrange my Mother in my heart, to finally heal the seemingly irreconcilable: my adolescent pain at being left behind and my anger at Piaget, who stole her from us for two long years – we saw her only on school breaks and summer vacation; her deep bond with my father, their love and their fights; most of all, her often happy, yet contradictory, even at times torn self. On the other side, the gift all this was to others – and to me.

She would have been proud to see her sunglasses among her papers. She was never one thing, or another, but many all at once. This was her legacy, the best that I inherited. And now I want to write my own note to her: Mother, you brought me from darkness to light: I love you.

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