Mrs. Laurent Goes to Purgatory: A Meditation for All Souls

From that day forward I refused to jog after the person with the ball but walked in a ladylike way. If I ever did manage to get the ball anywhere near me, I did the opposite of what I thought she wanted with it. Once, by a complete fluke, I succeeded too well at this and  kicked a soccer ball into my own team’s goal.

This didn’t stop the bullying; it made it worse. But it also made it more tolerable, because at least I was earning my punishments.

One day, the topic of the class was gymnastics. Mrs. Laurent called me forward to demonstrate a head stand, which I couldn’t do. Mrs. Laurent helped me over onto my hands and head while holding my ankles. She did not make sure I tucked in my shirt first, though she must have seen it was untucked. The resulting very short, accidental striptease was entertaining to my classmates, as they let me know. I never went to school without a camisole on under my Oxford shirt again.

One afternoon, several days after the tragic Oklahoma City bombing, I was sitting in a math class when the principal came over PA system to address the whole school. The PA system had a speaker in every single room except the gymnasium. Everyone in the school, except the people in gym class, could hear the PA system. The principal delivered a prayer and then announced a “moment of silence” for those who had died, and we complied. The whole school was silent as a tomb.

In that silence, the school heard Mrs. Laurent slam open the doors of the gymnasium. She was reaming out another child, another inept athlete from another class. “Now you are going to SIT OUT HERE for the ENTIRE CLASS and I don’t want to hear a WORD OUT OF YOU–” she was screaming.

Then we heard footsteps running from the principal’s office, which was beside the gym, and the principal hissing “Shhh! We’re having a moment of silence!”

Then we heard Mrs. Laurent, loud as ever but humiliated, say “Oh.”

That was one of the only moments in my time at that school that I’d like to live over again. We all tried so hard not to laugh– but oh, we were laughing.

I have to go into this much detail to get my point across: Mrs. Laurent was a cruel, vicious, ugly person who liked to make people suffer, and when she was embarrassed that was a good and just thing.

Shortly after that, I was taken out of school and homeschooled. About a year later, I heard from a former classmate that Mrs. Laurent had died.

I was happy.

That’s not a nice thing to recount, but I was happy.

I started to talk about what a horrible person she’d been, but my mother stopped me. “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” she said. I thought she was going to add some folk superstition, but instead, she said something quite reasonable from a Catholic perspective. “Because in purgatory, everyone can see exactly how their choices hurt everyone else.”

I pictured Mrs. Laurent, the worst person I’d known to that point, sitting in a lava pit in her pink and gray track suit with her whistle around her neck, smoke billowing around her. I pictured her realizing in the depths of her soul what she’d done to me and to everyone else she’d ever encountered.

Maybe she was saying “Oh” in that cowed voice she’d used when the principal hushed her during the failed Moment of Silence.

I think of that often during November, the month for remembering All Souls.

I’m not going to claim I understand exactly what purgatory is; nobody does. Nobody understands what happens after death exactly, though we’ve been told about certain things. But I believe that there’s a time that is coming to every soul, when we will have to know exactly what our choices were, how responsible we really were when we made them, and how they hurt every other human on the face of the earth. I suppose that some of us are going to be very embarrassed at that point. I assume I will be.

I wonder if the burning fire we often see in depictions of purgatory is that shame– not a toxic, lying shame that we sometimes experience on earth, a shame that cripples us and makes us feel we’re worthless. This is the honest shame of knowing how precious and special and capable of good we actually are in the eyes of God, and how good it would have been if we’d lived up to that, and how painful it was for others that we didn’t.

That particular shame is justice. If you do a bad thing on purpose and it hurts someone, you ought to be ashamed of that action. And then, I suppose, on earth or in purgatory, you learn to be someone who wouldn’t do that, and the shame fizzles out as you are transformed, and finally you’re not burning with that just embarrassment anymore but have been taken up into the bliss of life in Heaven. I don’t believe that’s all that purgatory is. I could never explain any part of the afterlife adequately in human language. It’s necessarily far greater and richer than what I’m saying. But that’s something of what purgatory is. The suffering of purgatory is the shock of shame that rockets through you while you learn to be a person who wouldn’t act shamefully anymore.

I suppose that when we pray for the souls in purgatory, we are merely loving them. Love is the best way to help a person through being ashamed.

Do I love Mrs. Laurent?

Well, certainly not as I ought.

But I’ll try to remember to pray for her during the month of November. And for all souls, that their process getting unstuck from shame is very quick and easy. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

(image via Pixabay) 

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