Prologue: Writing/1 (Opening Chapter)

I knew it was coming, but I just kept putting it off.

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s, I suffered from the debilitating condition of not being able to get far on an assigned composition unless I really liked my opening sentence and first paragraph. In the era before PCs and laptops were commonplace in homes and at universities, I ripped up innumerable sheets of looseleaf paper until I could get the right beginning.

A few years later, when working as a lay minister in two Catholic parishes in Louisville, Kentucky, I was given a copy of Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones. Natalie’s advice for would-be and stalled writers was to do “writing practices” and keep the hand moving across the page for a certain length of time. I took great interest in her serene advice, “Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, ‘I am free to write the worst junk in the world.’” And hoping for the kind of liberation she promised, I proceeded to fill notebook after notebook with uncensored scurve and silliness. That college paralysis had become a thing of the past. I trained myself to be able to write about any topic and not care what anybody thought, especially my own smug, nefarious internal critic.

But that January 1996 there was a short writing task that I had been avoiding. After all, there were seemingly more important things to do than sit down at my desk, now often stacked high with winter coats, as the St. Louis temperatures had taken a chilling dive. There was my new role of apartment maitre d’ and host: welcoming the family, friends, acquaintances, voyeurs, do-gooders and merely curious who had been arriving and moving through the modest five rooms of our home.

There was reviewing the phone log that a neighbor often kept for us, freeing me from returning each and every phone call, a draining chore that would have necessitated far more coffee than I was already consuming.

Then there was the major labor of translating: not from one language to another, but from wordless raised eyebrows, moans, giggles, stares and screams to English for the many people who were congregating in the first floor flat in this Forest Park Southeast neighborhood.
Realizing what was upon us, my mother-in-law gently encouraged me: “You’ve got to do it. You’re the one to do it.” She was right. And I took heart in her own difficult determination: She had gone to Kriegshauser’s to make the necessary casket selection with a Visitation nun, a friend of the family. How could my mother-in-law pull that off? I realized she had an indomitable will, even as her heart was breaking all over again each day she walked into our apartment.

One of our recent out-of-town visitors had been a Catholic nun, KC, who was a wise companion when we had lived in Oakland. Coming on a pilgrimage of sorts, she stayed with my in-laws at their comfortable home in the suburbs. KC later told me how, one night, she came upon my mother-in-law weeping as she was knitting a frayed blouse. Mrs. Puleo looked up at KC and said, “A mother shouldn’t have to knit her daughter’s shroud.”

No. She shouldn’t.

And a husband shouldn’t have to write his wife’s obituary three and a half years into their marriage, either. But that second week of January, as we kept vigil through the night, we were expecting Mev to die any minute. And, reckoning that I would have far more urgent matters to attend to within a few days, and with the New York Times obituary page as my guide, I finally made space at my desk and took a stab.

Mev Puleo, a photojournalist whose work focused on the lives, struggles, and dignity of poor people around the world, died _____ at her home in Forest Park Southeast in Saint Louis. She was 32.

Ms. Puleo, who received the 1995 U.S. Catholic Award for furthering the cause of women in the Catholic Church, began her work as a social documentary photographer in 1982 in Tijuana at the California-Mexico border where she taught during summer vacations while a student at St. Louis University. She also traveled to Haiti several times during the mid-1980s with the local Haiti Project; there she volunteered at Mother Theresa’s Home for the Dying. Photographs from these travels appeared in the book she co-authored with Jesuit Father John Kavanaugh, Faces of Poverty, Faces of Christ, in 1990.

She traveled to Brazil on photojournalism projects in 1987, 1989 and 1990. After conducting interviews in Portuguese with lay Church members, theologians, and bishops, Puleo published a book on the Catholic Church in Brazil, The Struggle is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation, in 1994. She recently adapted the book to a video of the same title. In her more recent work, she participated in fact-finding delegations to Haiti during the period of the military coup government in 1992 and to Chiapas, Mexico, after the Zapatista revolt in early 1994.

Ms. Puleo was one of three emcees at the 1993 World Youth Day in Denver that hosted Pope John Paul II. She also served as board member of the activist organizations, Brazil Network and Christians for Peace in El Salvador.

Ms. Puleo was born in St. Louis and attended Our Lady of the Pillar Grade School and Visitation Academy. She recently received the first annual Visitation Academy Award of Excellence. She graduated from St. Louis University in 1985 with a B.A. in Spanish, Latin American studies, and Political Journalism. She received her Master’s Degree in Theological Studies from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1990. She was enrolled in the doctoral program in Worship, Proclamation, and the Arts at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, when she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in April 1994. In honor of her work and service, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley presented her with the Pedro Arrupe Award.

She is survived by her husband, Mark Chmiel of St. Louis; her parents, Peter and Evie Puleo, of St. Louis; two sisters, Laura Krueger, of St. Louis, and Rose Kocis, of Houston, Texas; a brother, Peter A. Puleo II, of St. Louis; and three nieces and two nephews.

I would write these paragraphs, it turned out, the day before Mev died.

What are we supposed to do, those of us whose beloved, soul-mate, dynamo of delight, and poetic muse, has trekked on, passed away, died? We are here, but they are where? Absent, yes, definitely absent, then preternaturally present at the most eccentric times, times, yes, we’re off-center, because they – these treasures of pulse and synapse — centered our lives, in grace, with gratitude. What to do?

I wrote, I wondered, I redacted.

And so, this work is an eccentric response to awe and ache, a daydream after a nightmare came true, a mishmash of memories, and an affectionate writing-down-my-bones beyond that obituary.