Question: How do you get over it?
Answer: You don't. You don't want to. It makes you who you are.

Sean Murphy lost his mother days after her fifty-ninth birthday, following a five-year battle with cancer. In this eloquent memoir, he explores his family history through the context of grief, compassion, faith, and the cultivation of an artistic sensibility. Unfolding in a range of voices, brutal and tender in its portrayal of terminal illness, Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone is an unyielding love story, in which devotion and memory are capable of transcending death.

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When my mother died in 2002 at the age of fifty-nine, I found myself both shattered and honored to have been a witness. In order to live and to keep her memory alive, I needed to make sense of her death. I knew I would inevitably write about her, but I wasn't certain what form the material would take.

Eventually I realized it could be --it had to be-- a memoir. The result is Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone. The antagonist of this particular tale is cancer, but implicit in the narrative is an appreciation that a struggle with illness—and the ways it can unite or disintegrate families—is a true story for too many people. It can be a horror story or a ghost story, a love story and a real-life fairy tale, where memory and devotion are capable of outlasting death.

The memoir unfolds in a range of voices—first person, second person, third—from the points of view of a mother, a father, a son. The story of one woman’s life and death is interpolated with meditations on the causes and effects of alienation and empathy, faith and friendship, and the cultivation of an artistic sensibility. The whole is an examination—and interrogation—of sickness, grief, love, and remembrance. My experience has reinforced a belief that nobody should (or need to) go through this alone: if my memoir builds solidarity and empowers anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation, I know I'm honoring my mother's memory in a way she would advocate. 

Sean Murphy discusses the book and his writing career in this extended interview: www.indieauthornews.com

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Encomium

Obviously you’ll deliver the eulogy, my father said.

It wasn’t a demand, but it wasn’t a question. Whatever it was, it was the most meaningful thing anyone has ever said to me. Yes, I said. Obviously. Or maybe I just nodded. Of course I would, and without thinking about it (because nobody who is normal thinks things like this), I understood that I’d been preparing all along for this moment. 

August 30, 2002. I thought: Everything that is good about me is because of my mother.

I was in a church for the first time in forever. The church where I served its first-ever mass as an altar boy. The church where I received the Sacrament of Confirmation. The church where my parents celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The church where my sister was married. The church where I almost got married.

My father said: Obviously you’ll deliver the eulogy. 

Question: How will I get through it? 

How did you get through it, friends and family asked. 

Answer: I don’t know. 

It had been half a lifetime since I’d experienced this vantage point. Standing on the altar, looking down at a church filled with somber, expectant faces. All those years as an altar boy, hearing the words and receiving the ritual on its austere terms, the practiced movements and mannerisms that sought to convey the meaning—and purpose—of existence in sixty minutes or less. Carefully studying the priest who presided over the congregation, routinely looking up at those stained-glass images that looked down at us, filling the room with an inexpressible piety and approbation.

Periodically I would be called on to serve a wedding and less frequently a funeral. Weddings were preferable for both obvious and selfish reasons: happy events, pretty women, and typically a few extra dollars for my time. The funerals were, in practically every sense, the opposite. I’d only been to one funeral before becoming an altar boy, and while I’d been old enough, at ten, to remember it, I mostly recalled how surreal it was to see my grandmother in an open casket, and the way my mother, her siblings, and their father wept; not being able to console them or fully grasp the depth of my own sorrow.

“Listen to the words,” my father had told me, sensing my ambivalence before I prepared, at age twelve, for my first funeral mass. “It’s actually a very beautiful service.” I listened to him, and I listened to the words. I listened to everything, then. The passages and prayers—some familiar, some not—were carefully chosen, and went a considerable way toward impressing upon my adolescent mind how communal, and inevitable, this rite of passage was for everyone who drew breath. Someday each of us will watch a loved one die, and eventually all of us will pass on from here to there. That’s where the meaning of the words—and whether or not you believed them—came into play. I believed the words; I believed everything, then.

She said: I’ll never leave you.

Neither of us realized, then, that in addition to comforting me—like she always did—she was also preparing me for this moment.

She knew what it was like to leave. How, she must have wondered, did I end up here? First in the dry expanse of Arizona, and later just outside the nation’s capital, while the rest of her family—brothers and sisters and all those nieces, nephews, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law—remained just outside Boston. All the questions she learned not to ask. Or, rather, she came to realize there are no good answers for. And more, if we’re lucky in life, we don’t need to ask after a while.

Looking out, all my familiar faces: my father, my sister, her husband, my nephew and niece, the two aunts—my mother’s sisters—who had been with us for those awful, awe-inspiring final two weeks, and behind them the confidantes, colleagues, childhood friends, grown-up acquaintances, friends’ parents, and all the less recognizable faces I hadn’t seen in so many years. This is the closest we come to witnessing our own funerals. The same people there to support us, smile and cry with us, becoming part of the moments that become memories; an event that connects us and brings us closer, no matter how far away or disparate our lives might otherwise be.

Looking out at my family and understanding that they helped shape me, that I wouldn’t change anything even if I could. We learn to put away childish things and earn the chances we’ve been given, the responsibility to carry on the work that has already been done on our behalves. Equal parts fate and good fortune, we look at those familiar faces and understand what they have done, and what we need to do.

I think: Everything that is good about me is because of my mother.