Part of the last chapter, Joan’s Bell.

(To guide the reader: Joan’s mother is sitting in the sling of a crane that has just put a bell in the belfry of the church across the street of her home.)

The cable stopped its upward motion. I opened my eyes. The big brass bell in front of me looked like the sun itself: brilliant. It emitted currents. My body picked up the vibrations and I forgot where I was. Against the dark louvers the bell appeared like a dazzling, glittering chunk of gold, as if the sun had followed it inside the belfry.“Hello, Joan,” I said, not doubting for a moment that she could hear me. Her name cast in bronze became more than letters. The bell was transformed into a living spirit and I was communing with that spirit on a light, airy plane between heaven and earth sitting on a narrow canvas sling. I floated with Joan’s spirit on a crest of love, as a burst of warm feelings washed over us. In a flash I saw her, all she had been and all she had become. Below me was the room where she had died. All around was the village that raised her, where she played, fought, laughed, argued, and suffered her way into maturity. Our home, flanked by the library and the Old Town Hall on one side and the stately Wakefield Inn on the other, looked exactly like the aerial photograph on postcards sold to tourists in the local grocery store.My eyes turned from the street back to the bell. This is her perspective now, I thought. From this lofty height Joan will sing of our highs and lows, our weddings and our funerals, births and baptisms. A deep joy settled in. Suddenly, a thick wall of separation turned into a gate. Through a blur of tears I made out the letters in the middle of the bell curve: Joan Mary Bozuwa, April 29, 1957 – June 12, 1986. At the top, in Roman letters and set within a band of ancient figures in high relief, the year the bell was cast: 1987. At the base a Bible quotation: Matthew 5:8: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” Joan had copied it into a little book with quotes she liked. What did she think it meant? Joan had been a rascal, a loveable rascal. It would have been unrealistic to call her pure in heart. Some of the time she’d been a devil, and she knew it. Yet, intuitively, I had known these were the words that should be on the bell. More than any others, they described the process of her acceptance, of her detachment. She had learned, in that last year of her life, to step away from the familiar, to become so free that she could go ahead and die. The pure in heart have no fear. To feel her courage was to learn about grace. There was a lot I didn’t understand, but I was sure of what I had seen a year ago, and at this very moment. I felt her purity of heart, allowing me to see beyond loss, hers and ours.

"It’s all right, Mom, it’s all right,” the bell whispered to me. The words dissipated my grief over the misfortune of having lost Joan before the mother-daughter tug of war could be settled. We’d both been robbed of the next phase: acceptance of how she had defined herself and the joy of being on equal, adult footing with each other.