It’s late Saturday afternoon. I’m drinking a glass of wine and staring at a photograph in the local paper. I’m somewhere in that crowd of mourners. I could be any one of the grey-haired women that stood in line for hours as the sun fell away and a wan cold descended, but I’m the only one in a beautiful black cloche covered in black flowers of ribbon and beadwork.

“Are you coming to St. Mary’s?” I begged a co-worker, a woman of my own generation, and like me, a Roman Catholic. “I’m not going to that goddamn sucking rich white-ass church,” she replied. I had laughed nervously and spoke of my love of the huge statues that shine like wet candy; she was unmoved and glared at me. When my mother’s coffin lay in St. Mary’s, her well-traveled brothers and sisters declared it as pretty a church as anything they’d seen in Europe, and I was unreasonably pleased and comforted.

Like these four lovely children and their mother and father, my mother died violently, and I found her body. Eleven years gone now, but that moment can never fade for me; I remember thinking that my chest would explode from the weight of what I saw in her bathroom.

Outside her apartment building with my Kim beside me I pushed against the cinderblocks of the building and screamed like an animal. In the long quiet that followed I felt hollowed out and dark, almost uninhabited. That she should die as she did demoralized me completely, utterly. I imagined her panic and her knowledge of what was to come a thousand times, my heart burning for her, burning helplessly, blaming myself for not having the power to save her.

“With a wave and a tear, we say goodbye,” says the brother of the man who bludgeoned to death his four children and their mother, just before killing himself. I’m just not made of this stern and lordly stuff and I admit I am amazed by it, nearly undone by the force of this cheerful faith in the eternal, in what may be possible for us as human beings. I don’t share this vision at all, and it stuns me deeply, in my very blood.

I dream that Kim and I are being led on a tour of these North Side neighborhoods by a patient of mine. She has secret access to small exquisite shops that open to her touch. We enter them abashed and excited, acolytes to the woman I have served in my hospital for twenty-five years. She is an artist like me, and an alcoholic, like my mother.

In the wide-awake world, Kim and I stand in line outside St. Mary’s Friday night and the artist trudges past us across the street, carrying a twelve-pack. She’s a frightening woman, but I think the world of her anyway. She’s poor and exhausted, and she glitters with intelligence and creative fire. She has a terrible fierce beauty made all the more so for me because it is largely unseen and unwitnessed. I stand in line and stare at her as she makes her way down the street. She shows no interest in the crowd. Although I watch her until she’s out of sight she never looks back, never gazes at the throng that covers two city blocks standing six abreast, blocking the alley traffic.

When she disappears I turn my attention again to the woman standing in front of me, a forty-something in Blahnik boots with five inch heels. She has a Prada bag tucked under her arm, and she’s tanned and blonde and on her cell phone whenever she isn’t hailing other expensively dressed underweight women to her side or rushing over to theirs. Although she’s in a gauzy dress she shows no signs of strain or discomfort. I’m in a coat and hat and aching from the cold, so much so that I can’t keep my thoughts where they belong – they rush away from me like badly behaved children. I am staggered to see the obvious wealth and privilege surrounding me, people in garments clearly inching into four figures. They run across the street for lattes and chatter to one another about their plans for Saturday brunch.

From time to time I am filled with thoughts so uncharitable I deserve to be smitten dead where I stand on the sidewalk. It was the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron that taught me to regard the filth of my brain as garbage floating in a clear running stream.

Inside the church we sit quietly and wait for our time to walk to the family and give our condolences. On the way there I look at the posted photos of the children. I put out my finger to touch the image of the child Mira, a child I have never met but love against all reason. Here she is in a green fairy costume, there she is in a violet one. No wonder I love her! Mira was born on the birthday of Bela Bartok and Aretha Franklin, a day of exceptional power and energy. When the long year turns again I will recreate her beside her sister and brothers on my altars for the Days of the Dead, and she will live forever in my imagination.