Photos of my mom and Sean Ritter who killed himself 11 years ago.

How beautiful my mother looks in this photo with her new fiery redhead granddaughter Tiffany, and her son Sean, who ended his life 11 years ago, today, rather than face a draconian 3 strikes prison system. He went to prison at 21, on two counts of drug possession charges. He got into a fight in a parking lot, thus breaking his parole, so he went home and shot himself in his garage rather than return to Pelican Bay.

Sean was my half-brother, but raised as a cousin as my childless aunt Toddy who desperately wanted children and couldn't have any, or so she thought. After she adopted Sean, she had three kids of her own. Sean's father was a Dublin man, that's all we know. Somebody my mother met at the No Name Bar in Sausalito. Perhaps he was a sailor, a carpenter, or someone just passing through. He must've been a redhead or a strawberry blond like Sean. My mother never saw him again, but I'm sure she was reminded of him every time she saw Sean. Is the father still alive somewhere in Dublin, we wonder. What was his name? Who were his people? Did he ever know he had a son in America?

In the photo, my mother has no breasts, a cancer survivor, the implants will leak and bring back the cancer, it will grow undetected behind that wall of silicone. She will die of a heart attack after her first round of chemo October 23, 1994. This month is such a melancholy time for me, as my grandmother, and mother also died during the final days of October, also the end of the Celtic year. My grandmother died Oct 28, not quite Samhain, Summer's End, but close enough for the transition when the door to the Otherworld opens. Half way between the equinox, my mother's birthday, to the solstice, Samhain is the beginning of winter, or the dark half of the year. We will light a bonefire for them so that they may see the way forward.

My mom, Maureen Reilly, sister Kathleen (Toddy) Ritter, sons Myles, Sean, baby Tiffany & Judy Ritter.

A BROKEN HALLELUJAH FOR SEAN RITTER

A BROKEN HALLELUJAH FOR SEAN RITTER

Someone once said in order to tell the poetic truth
sometimes you had to stretch it a little to get to the deeper truth.
My beautiful and tragically flawed mother was a poetic soul
and when her sister Toddy couldn't have children
she got right down to the heart of things.
She was a woman way ahead of her time.
She created a small bundle of poetic truth and gave it to her sister.

When I was young, my mother often dragged me into churches,
not on Sunday, but in the middle of the week to pray to St. Jude.
Her only wrongdoing was sharing the genetic coil
that unwrapped in Sean the addiction and the burden of California's third strike
that led to this premature shedding of his own mortal coil.
Sean's middle name was Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

Sure Sean was a teenage terror, and a troubled young man.
His actions put strain on the family and occasionally the law.
But my mother loved Sean with a fierce mother love
that transcended and forgave his flaws.
For Sean also inherited her talents and good qualities.

Sean was a carpenter. After the Loma Prieta earthquake
he restored fallen landmark buildings of Santa Cruz,
and he built showcase homes for myriad families
though he could never build a home within his own soul.
When my mother died, Sean stepped up to the plate to share the burden.
He was there to sing praises to the crazy hallelujah that was his mother.

But from that tragically flawed miracle called Sean Jude Ritter
other miraculous lives were formed.
I give my mother thanks to Sean
for his brothers, Barney, Myles and for Katie.
And from that miracle, I give thanks for
my nieces Tiffany, and little Emma Rose,
for Brittany, brand new Sean Logan, and of course, for Taryn.

Before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Irish poet Seamus Heaney
once said to me that as a tribe, we are a genius of poets.
Genius runs in the family but the flip side of the coin,
is that the piper has been well paid for his time.

When my mother died, she had a tape of Leonard Cohen's songs,
it was set to the song Broken Hallelujah—which became the Shrek theme.
I kept on playing that song all through the night
and when I got the news of Sean, that song played through my head
wouldn't let me sleep, so I downloaded three versions of it
and when I peeled away the onionskin layers of language
I realized the music was telling me that Sean was a broken hallelujah
and that I should praise him.

We are all connected by the deeper truth of family
bonds that cannot be broken by death alone.
Sean was a broken hallelujah. I will remember his strengths.
I hope that he will find a great scaffolding project in the mansions of God
within the folds of giving up of the individual self to the greater self
and to that vast ocean of love.

10/27/07

Sean Jude Ritter was my half-brother, but, because my aunt thought that she couldn't have kids, my mother, who was in no condition to raise a child, gave him to her to raise, and so he was raised as a cousin.

Being his half-sister, I wrote this piece, expecting to read it at his memorial, but my cousins and nieces completely ignored me, and didn't even acknowledge that Sean was my half-brother. I was polite, as I realized it wasn't about me, but, their grief. No need to feel snubbed—we were all grieving. So, I let it be. I lost this writing and, while cleaning out old files, I only now found it Jan 2/2014. It's lain fallow long enough. Time to let it go.