We would light candles for the dead and as we did so we said our prayers for them, an Our Father for Uncle Frankie, a Hail Mary for Michaela, my mother’s mother, a series of prayers for my mother’s brother Ralph. I believe my Mother felt that he needed a little extra help to get to Heaven, or perhaps she just loved him more than the others.

The alcove where we performed our rituals was dark, but not somber. Thinking back I feel its darkness intimated and conveyed a sense of mystery and sacredness, as if we were at a shrine, though the alcove held no relics. As a boy I got an eerie feeling when I was there. But I remember that the small statue of Saint Anthony seemed kindly, forgiving, as if the saint understood human frailty and understood as well that both the living and the dead were in emotional pain. And I think he knew this was not just because the dead were mourning the loss of their lives, and the living were mourning the loss of the dead, but because life and death were both emotionally painful affairs.

The statue was placed in a fake grotto of sorts. Water would drip down the sides of the saint’s alcove and collect in a small basin at the statue’s feet. I remember that the statue was also surrounded by some artificial vegetation that looked to me a lot like wet twine. The water and vegetation signified the washing away of sins, but also rebirth and hope. On an emotional level I believe they symbolized the hope that both the living and the dead would let go of all resentments, all the anger and disappointment they perhaps still felt toward one another. I see now the message that we could only help the dead purify their souls if we let go of our own negative feelings toward them, and thus became able to express pure and honest concern for their welfare through our prayers. So, in a sense, we were getting rid of our own sins, our negative feelings, as we lit our candles and said our prayers for the dead.

It was all of a piece doing things like lighting a candle for Uncle Frankie, or, before he died, visiting him and caring for him – my mother helping carry him to his bathroom, trying to sooth him as he suffered the agonizing pain of trying to defecate though the cancer was eating through his colon. Lighting the candles was of a piece with going to the weddings of family and friends, the baptisms of children and the wakes and funerals that one attended to show respect to the dead and to their families. It was all of a piece with being present at a nephew or niece’s first Communion or Confirmation, and at all the other life cycle rituals that at some point or other I just stopped going to. The concern shown for the living and for the dead was all of a piece.

Looking back on all this I believe I was learning that observing the continuum of life cycle rituals and remembering the dead were both about self-transformation. This was the bit of folk wisdom that was encoded in my mother’s religious practice. There are folk philosophers of mourning like my mother, and there are learned philosophers of mourning like Martin Buber. But I see that my mother and Buber, sort of an odd pair to think about it (one a Neapolitan-speaking Italian-American housewife from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the other an intimidatingly learned Austrian Jewish philosopher and biblical commentator), were both concerned with mourning successfully.

Buber considered mourning to be successful if it resulted in an enlarged emotional perspective or in a deepening of the self. In his philosophy of mourning, outlined in his great work “I And Thou,” loss prompts an imaginative reaching out that leads to greater self consciousness and even, self transformation. But what is one reaching out for I asked myself as I read Buber. It is the essence of the person who has been lost – the deceased’s way of feeling about the world and her way of looking at it – a perspective that ideally could broaden and deepen one’s own emotional experience. The gift of loss and of mourning for Buber is ultimately then the gift of a wiser and more sympathetic self. In his melancholy ontology, as the scholar Roy Steinhoff Smith writes, “Loss is characterized by three fused moments: loss, imagination and recovery.”

Recovery, getting over the loss of someone dear, is made through the imaginative and feeling attempt to recover, or rather to create, one’s own understanding of the presence that has been lost. One recovers something of her essential humanity and somehow makes it one’s own. I believe that was what my mother might have been trying to do as she would light candles for the dead.

For me, recovering the valued essence of my mother has meant developing the sensibilities of an anthropologist. Ultimately, I think this is how I came to mourn her. Somewhat ironic, as my mother found my profession incomprehensible and could not imagine what possessed me to move to the far side of the globe for years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. I think she experienced my adventures as abandonment of her, although she and my father were outwardly supportive. She died suddenly when I was living in Hawaii, writing a book about ritual and religious life and trying to make sense of a mound of ethnographic data, a lot of it on mourning behavior.

My first cogent thoughts as a professional anthropologist reflected my mother’s belief that the dead have something of value to offer us, and that is the promise of a deeper, more feeling self. I was trying to understand why the dead should be so prominently featured during New Guinea initiation rituals. Why, I asked myself, should the dead be remembered during rituals that were ostensibly about forging the waxing strength of a new generation of youths? Then I perceived that the feelings of power and accomplishment of the senior generation as they celebrated a new generation’s coming of age were tinged with nostalgia, memory and gratitude. The contributions they were making toward strengthening and celebrating the clan’s youth could not have been possible without the contributions that the dead had once made to their own lives. Remembering the dead was in this instance also a celebration of the possibilities of the present. When I understood these rituals as representing the desire to incorporate the memory of a lost presence into the present moment, I was seeing through my mother’s eyes. Buber perhaps had given me the vocabulary to formulate my interpretations, but it was my mother’s sensibilities that brought me to the emotional meaning.

So, in a way this is how I became an anthropologist. This may seem a somewhat removed, perhaps overly aesthetic account of how I mourned for my own mother. It may seem removed from the brute fact of her death, from the depth of my feeling about her. But that is not how I would characterize the process of my grieving. This grieving certainly did involve that call I got from my sister telling me my mother had died. It involved my initial feelings of panic and disbelief at the news, my scream and my temporary madness.

There was the rushed trip to the Honolulu airport, my wife and I both breaking down as we explained to the ticket agent why we absolutely had to get on that plane back to New York for the wake. There was the month spent in New York at my father’s house trying to help him survive his grief, as we dealt with our own, and helping him adjust to his new and achingly lonely day-to-day. There was the unbearably sad return to Hawaii and to my writing. For me these experiences and memories were in fact too powerful to live with. I had to make something else of them. I made anthropology out of them, or at least my particular anthropological sensibility, a sensibility filtered through a memory of my mother. And this sensibility was my way of remembering the dead, incorporating the lost presence into the fact of my day to day life. My sense of my mother’s way of feeling about the world of death and the dead, and many other matters, does define me in a very real sense. But recovering, remembering, creating-however one wishes to put it-my mother’s sensibilities took time and a certain distillation or distancing of feeling. It took thinking and writing to put my pain into context.

As I think back now I see how thinking and writing about mourning during this time brought me back to the sorts of feeling I experienced at Saint Anthony’s shrine as a child. As I wrote I felt a certain fear, even a certain awe at confronting the poetry of another people’s mourning rituals-as at Saint Anthony’s I had felt a child’s fear of the eerie atmosphere of the shrine and a child’s awe of the rituals for the dead that my mother was teaching me to perform. Yet at the shrine there was the kindly image of Saint Anthony’s statue to give me a feeling of safety. As I wrote, the memory of my mother gave a similar feeling of protection and reassurance, as if she was telling me that I was going to figure it all out and not to worry. As in a dream I was brought back to my child self. And as in a dream I was continually brought back, as I wrote, to a memory of one particular mourning ritual that I saw in New Guinea.

One dawn during those New Guinea years I was startled awake by dramatic and powerful singing and by the first rays of the sun coming up over the Pacific. I remembered that I had been fighting sleep for the previous two hours as I tried to observe and record the mourning and song ceremony for Rauatio, a New Guinean man. It was one of many times that I had to stay up all night during those two years that I spent in the field. The singing for many of the ceremonies I was studying would begin at dusk and would last until dawn.

The man Rauatio had died the previous day after a lingering sickness. His clansmen had arranged the scene of the ceremony, placing a coconut frond awning over the corpse, covering the body with a pandanus mat and placing sweet smelling flowers and herbs on it. A space was cleared for the singers in the village plaza in front of the bier. Kin from Rauatio’s maternal line in another village were invited to come to the song performance. They sang the mourning songs along with the people in our village, their singing alternating with ours. The songs and the singing were powerful and beautiful, filled with nostalgia and reminiscence – alluding to the experiences one had shared with the dead in life. They seemed to represent a certain contemplative wisdom about the nature of loss and longing; their collective meanings and themes seemed to represent an example of successful mourning–extracting some element of wisdom and understanding from the brute, wrenching fact of death.

Yet as I listened to the songs that dawn and later, when I came to understand their meaning more clearly, I had the uncharitable thought that I really had not liked Rauatio very much when he was alive. I resented the way he forced himself on me, coming to my hut unannounced and asking me for gifts of various sorts, taking a very keen interest in my possessions and generally lacking social graces in his dealings with me most of the time. I felt that the ceremony was ennobling him in a way I might not have been inclined to do. But if my mother was present at that ceremony she might not have felt this way.

I remember that some of those my mother had lit candles for back in New York had not been the nicest people. Uncle Frankie drank a lot, cursed up a storm when he did, and was rumored to have slapped his girlfriends around every once in a while. Uncle Tony was just plain nasty a lot of the times – I was afraid of him as a boy. There was the rumor that he was even a little bit mobbed up and that was how he got his no show job down at the Brooklyn docks – he was a real stereotype, a stock character out of the Italian American experience. I was sure too that not everyone in my New Guinea village was so fond of Rauatio either. And yet there we all were singing and mourning for him from sundown to sunrise in this beautiful tribal ceremony.

One of the mourning songs describes a soul visiting his old village and sighing that the place was no longer his home, that it belonged to the living now. His nostalgia for life and the pain he feels at being separated from life make him a sympathetic figure for the mourners. They realize that, in Aeschylus’s words, “the sun is sweet”, that despite the difficulty of life, being alive, just feeling the sun on your skin can be the greatest joy.

The last song was sung as the dawn began to break. This tells of a conversation carried out between a ghost and his kin. The ghost asks his kin to take his possessions and to hold them as remembrance of him. His kin become angry with the request, wishing to avoid the pain of memory, of caring anymore for the dead, for their possessions, for the memories those possessions conveyed. But in the ceremony itself the mourners are made to take possession of some of these things, while letting go of others.

I think the idea being expressed here was the same one that my mother was expressing when she lit candles for Uncle Frankie and Uncle Tony back at Saint Anthony’s alcove. We shouldn’t ignore our responsibilities to the dead or to the living; we should make our peace with the dead by helping them along their way – by letting go of some memories we have of them and holding on to others – thoughts that both my mother and Martin Buber would basically agree with.

The next day Rauatio’s young son showed up at the door to my hut. He was grieving the death of his father and was out of sorts. He asked me for an old picture I had taken of his father some years before when I recorded and photographed another ceremony. The boy told me that he was making the rounds through the village and was asking people if he could take back from them some things belonging to or associated with his father. He told me that his feelings of sorrow and grief over his father’s death made him want to hold and to view these things. I went into my strong box and got out the old picture of Rauatio and gave it to him.

As I looked at the photo I remembered that Rauatio had been helpful to me at that ceremony, instructing me in a finer point of meaning. I also remembered him laughing at me good naturedly as I kept getting in people’s ways while I was trying to photograph this or that part of the action. And when I was just a small boy Uncle Tony had once dipped a piece of fennel in some home-made wine and let me nibble on it. He was glad to see that I liked the taste and that he and I were colluding together against my mother’s wishes that I not be given any wine. I had lit a candle for Uncle Tony, and I was glad that I had sung a mourning song for Rauatio. That had been all of a piece.

I had been making my way out to the North Fork for the past few years, visiting a friend and then trying my luck with the bass and blues that follow the baitfish up into Hallock’s Bay, past Peter’s Neck point and up into the channels around Orient Park. That year the thought of the bass coming into the bays was giving me a real push to get out to Orient. In May I had packed up the stuff left from my marriage, and I had emptied out my father’s house. My father had died in mid January, and my wife had left sometime before that. I thought a move out of New York City was in order, and I was out on the North Fork by mid-May.

I lived in Greenport that year on the top floor of an old house on Sixth Street. In the spring and summer I spent almost everyday driving out to Orient State Park and fishing both sides of Long Beach all the way out to the Bug Light at the very end of the park. That season Bob up at Wego fishing sold me a pair of waders and a nice Penn reel and we exchanged theories about the striped bass and blues in the bays. Bob has since died, but for me that year he was a sort of native guide, telling me how I should fish the banks, and how I should offer my lures to the bass. And Bob was someone to report back to about my fishing luck, the where, how and when of it. It seemed that for weeks on end the only conversations that took place in my life were between Bob and me and they were about the bass and the lures and the tides and the baitfish. I don’t really think that Bob would remember any of these conversations, or me for that matter, if he were still alive. The things he knew most about were the bass, the tides the lures and the baitfish and he talked about those things with most of the people that came into his shop.

The light out on the fishing flats in Orient from mid-May to early June is soft. Summer is easing its way in politely and so all the colors of the wild flowers and the beach rose bloom seem vivid, enhanced by the sunlight rather than bleached out by it. The ospreys out in the park have been raising their chicks for some time now, and every once in a while you can see the chicks raise their heads above the nests’ branches. I always like watching the male circling the nest and calling out to the female after he has caught a fish. I think he is proud of what he’s done and would like to show off to his mate, but maybe I’m just reading too much into what’s going on from the point of view of a fellow fisherman. That year there were five osprey nests along the walk out to my favorite fishing spot in Orient State Park.

The common terns usually rest on the sandbar that curves out into the bay that creates the narrow outlet to Hallock’s that is called Peter’s Neck. From there they head out to the middle of Hallocks to scoop up baitfish bits left by the schools of small bluefish that hit the bays like murder at this time. Sometimes the blues feed right near Peter’s, ranging up and down the channels the boaters follow past Peter’s Neck and into the heart of the park waters. The blues are temporary residents of the bay. The bass feed more steadily up and down the lengths of these same channels, and some times right up close to the grassy banks that hold the fiddler crabs, killifish and spearing the bass love to eat. Out in the channels the bass take up feeding stations like trout. A particularly good lie for the bass is the Hallock’s Bay side of the sandbar. The sandbar offers a good place for the bass to lie in wait for whatever the tide sweeps out of the park waters into Hallocks and the sandbar produces a small rip that sometimes traps the baitfish. When fishing this spot I’ve often caught bass no more than a few feet from the sandbar by letting the current sweep my lure around the end of the bar, and then reeling the lure back against the current and back through the rip.

The first day I was out that year I went to Peter’s and fished the channel from the neck to the second wooden pile marker that leads into the park waters and that marks the curve of the channel for boatmen. The current was swift but I could still walk the banks along the channel easily. Every little while I would stop and look over the channel and the bay trying to see all the colors and the shades of color. Bright patches marked the sand bottom spots. These set off the shades of green and blue that showed the different depths of water. That day I didn’t have to fish very hard by trying to place my lures at different depths, or retrieve them at different speeds. I had managed to be out at just the right time, on just the right day. Everywhere I cast there was a blue or a bass and they all took the lure. I used diamond jigs with plastic tubing around their long bent hooks. I used colored plastic shad fish that I attached to jig heads, I used the lures that resemble both squid and eel that are called dirty dicks, and I used some fly streamers. I caught on all these that day at all different depths. I hit mostly bass but some blues would rip into the lure and they would jump and shake their heads trying to throw the lure and then make a couple of powerful runs when they saw the water get shallow close to the sand bar or bank. At those times I let out line to make sure I didn’t lose them. And then I would coax them back onto the beach. The bass would hit powerfully, but their fight would be steady rather than wild like the bluefish.

The bass looked silvery and neat with their black pinstripes and silver skins and their strong tapered athletic bodies. The bluefish were just as handsome with their iridescent blue-green backs and sides and their bright white bellies. On that day I felt the strong life energies of the fish. They were all light and shimmer and quicksilver in the water and their color and flash and fight reawakened some of my own vitality and energy after so many dark months. I think it must be the same for many fishermen at the beginning of the season, especially if they are lucky enough to have a great first day, and especially if they are after bass and blues at some place as beautiful as Orient. I didn’t want that day, and the many fishing days that followed during that season to end.

Out of the thirty bass and blues I caught I took home one keeper bass and one small blue. I wanted a reward, something to mark the day in my memory and to complete it properly, and so I took these fish. The bass would carry the flavors and the fragrances of the bay that first night and that was the fish I was going to eat. I had one entire fillet of the bass and saved the other for the next couple of nights. I grilled the blue for lunch the next day.

There have been times when I have fished these same places, at the same time of year, and have caught nothing after a full day of hard fishing. But the memory of that one first day is never spoiled by these trips.

Uncle Johnny, who lived next door (we called him uncle as a sign of respect though he wasn’t a relative) once told me that the tree had come from a cutting from Sicily. Lots of people on our block claimed to have gotten their fig tree cuttings from relatives in Italy, somehow managing to get them through customs when returning from visits there. As a kid I knew that the trees were a tie to the Old Country. Later I came to see that they also symbolized the sense of abundance and prosperity that these Italian-Americans associated with America. Many people of my parent’s generation had managed to scrimp and save enough money to buy their own houses and to have backyards of their own where they tended vegetable gardens and fruit trees. They had become property owners, just like the padroni back in Italy that their parents used to have to work for and basically genuflect to when they walked by.

My grandfather even told my father that back in the old country when the padrone belched in his presence, he had to say something to the effect of “God bless you padrone”. They didn’t have to do stuff like that in the States. And they had their own fig trees. Somehow those two facts were related.

I remembered that some of the neighbors had different sorts of trees from ours. Jack, who lived a few houses up the block, had three trees: one gave white figs, another green, and then he had a tree that gave black figs that were shaped differently from the ones on our tree. Jack kept a discerning, almost proprietal eye out for all the block’s fig trees. It was almost like they were all part of his grove. He’d make the rounds to neighbors’ houses, going straight into their backyards and looking over their trees. He’d tell people what sort they were and how best to care for them. If someone had gotten too old to care for a tree or if a neighbor was away traveling at summer’s end he’d come to his backyard and throw a net over the tree to keep the birds and squirrels away and of course he’d pick the trees.

Jack would also bring some of his figs for us to taste, and then we’d be expected to give him some of ours. Lots of people on the block would drop by once in a while with a small plate of figs. They’d stay and talk with my mother for a bit about the news on the block and what was happening in everybody’s families. My dad would put the coffee pot on and bring out some cake for them to have as they talked. Sometimes my mom would speak to them in Neapolitan dialect, a sing-songy form of Italian with seemingly no verb conjugations and a pronunciation style very different from the formal Italian I learned when I lived in Italy after college. I didn’t really notice it at the time but now years later in my memory, it sounds archaic and beautiful. And I very much miss my mother’s Neapolitan hand gestures. I never really learned that language either, a hand language used to punctuate dramatically the points of her speech. The figs were a catalyst for the spirit of neighborliness.

When my mother died and my father got too old and sick to tend to the garden and the fig tree, Dolly or Rose, two other neighbors, would drop by to help. Jack would also come over to put the mesh net over the tree. Sometimes the birds would tear the net and Jack would mend the torn section. Once I was visiting when Jack was doing that. I remember my dad looking out the backyard window, surveying the scene. I remember him sighing and saying to himself, but out loud, “Oh geez, I can’t do stuff like that anymore, everything’s just gonna go to pot from here on in.”

During the last year of his life I moved back in with Dad to keep on top of the household chores. I’d go shopping, shovel the snow off the sidewalks and shovel out the alleyway. That last summer I planted tomatoes, basil and some eggplant in the garden, and I tried to keep on top of the weeding and the fig tree situation. It struck me, living there, that I didn’t see many of the old neighbors anymore. Many had died or moved in with their kids out on the Island or in New Jersey. Jack came by once or twice that summer to exchange figs, Dolly helped me with weeding the garden if she thought I was dropping the ball a little bit with regard to my weeding duties. Everything seemed so quiet in the house; no more boisterous conversations in Neapolitan, no more neighborhood gossip fueled by coffee, cake and plates of figs. By the time my father died all that seemed like it belonged to another time and a different place.

When my father died there were a lot of feelings about what to do with the house. In the end we decided to sell it. My brother told me that he wanted to uproot the fig tree and take it to his place in Long Island. But he never got around to doing that. I think we were all too saddened by dad’s death, and too exhausted from working out the details of inheritance to take on such a big task. So, we left the tree; we didn’t even take a root cutting. For years after at every family gathering we’d talk about the old house and the old neighborhood. Inevitably someone would bring up the subject of the old fig tree and then my brother would recount how he had once planned to take the tree to his place out on the Island.

After my surreptitious visit to the back yard that day I decided to take a drive around the old neighborhood. I especially wanted to see if there were any fig trees left. I saw one in the front yard of a house on 21st Avenue, past 65th street. I remembered that had been there for years and years. And I remembered that the owner would always rap the tree up in canvas in the winter. My father did that to our tree just a couple of times. But he thought it hurt the tree, or at any rate wasn’t worth the trouble. But one year the tree almost died. That was the year New York had all those ice storms. After that winter it took a year for the tree to come back and start sending out branches again. I was really happy that it did.

Anyway, I didn’t see any more trees. Most would have been in people’s backyards so I really don’t know why I was looking in people’s front yards, but I was. I drove back to my old block and stopped the car by Jack’s alleyway. I could see that his fig trees were still in his yard. He had also built some trellises for his grape vines, and I could see that the vines were heavy with fruit. I’ll bet he’s going to make home made wine, I said to myself, something my own family used to do at a little cottage they had out on Long Island. I wondered if Jack had managed to find some new fig trading partners with whom to share his fruit and to exchange news about the neighborhood. I hoped very much that he had.