When I was a kid, my mother had a lavishly illustrated encyclopedia of the saints she would sometimes flip through with me, and I remember how she always made a point of skipping over St. Teresa of Ávila. She didn’t want to talk about the illustration that went with it. It was a photograph of the sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa and it was pretty obvious to me even as a child why my mother disapproved. It was a sexy sculpture. The smirking angel prepares to pierce Teresa’s heart with his holy spear and boy oh boy is St. Teresa ready. Her eyes are closed, her lips are parted, and somehow everything about her marble body, swathed in marble clothing, looks to be in motion. St. Teresa is writhing.

She’s writhing because this is what it is to be a Catholic saint. This is your fulfillment. The giving over. The letting go. The disappearance.

This is what it takes.

16

We sat taking in the weekend sunshine as neighbours came and went, picking through my mother’s possessions spread out on the lawn. I was only nominally presiding over the yard sale, because Jessica’s twelve-year-old son, Martin, had taken it over within minutes of arriving. Martin had stood by during the first sale of the day, watching me haggle listlessly with a neighbour over a technically “vintage” but unquestionably hideous desk lamp, and when he could stand it no more, he interjected with the ease of a natural-born salesman. Before I knew what was happening, Martin had talked the neighbour up by fifty cents on the grounds of “they don’t make lamps like this anymore,” and thereafter made himself the Monty Hall of the yard sale, rushing from one potential mark to the next, but only after negotiating a “cut” of the day’s earnings from me.

So Jessica and Kelli and I sipped beer while Martin ran the shop, and it was the best thing that could’ve happened that day. I sat at a distance as my mother’s old belongings were subtracted from the lawn piece by piece. Padded-shoulder jackets from the eighties; dishes of the variety no one used anymore (saucers, ornate dessert plates, the small utilitarian bowls my mother used to call “fruit nappies”); hardcover books bought or given as presents and never read; the bookshelves they dutifully lived in, neglected, for so many decades; endless end tables; unused linens, as stiff as when they were first purchased, because they were always set aside for some nebulous occasion described only as “good” — and good, somehow, never came around.

When we had hauled all this stuff out the front door that morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being a kind of executioner, dragging one item after another, each a physical representation of my mother’s existence on earth, out into the sunshine to be sacrificed. I had forced myself not to think about the crass next stage — the bartering, the transactions. Some ruthless, practised picker nickel-and-diming me across a table of my mother’s clothes, my mother’s jewellery, my mother’s dishes. I wasn’t sure I could handle it.