Day 7: Where I Was. Where I'm Going.

Their home will be disassembled as the estate is sold and their things dispersed. The home died too. And I was in its corpse all week.

The writing is done. I have a six-week review and editing process ahead of me, but it amounts to combing tangles out of hair to coif it for publication. The fun is beginning. I sorted out the clashing views of modern chemistry and ancient Aristotelian-medieval Thomistic natural philosophy and metaphysics, and I wrote it down into something new that I am proud to present as evidence that a master’s degree in systematic philosophy should be conferred upon one Stacy Trasancos.

Part of the reason for the urgency was that I have a lot planned for the rest of the summer. I am speaking at the Fort Worth Legatus Chapter dinner on Thursday. My mom and I are visiting my oldest daughter in CT and her five children for a good and full week-long visit next week. Then I have a short speaking engagement in San Diego, where I think I am going to be on Catholic Answers Live, live! My husband and I, along with my good friend Angelina, host the East Texas Pro-Life Teen Leadership Camp each summer in July. Then I speak at the Ignite conference in Portland. And then my husband and I go to Budapest for two weeks to teach a short course on Christian heritage and relax together before the school year gets going. Not sure you needed to know all that, but there it is.

The other reason for the urgency is that I accepted an offer to a doctoral program in philosophy, contingent on my completion of this master’s degree this summer. I’m going for it. Why? Because I hate philosophy. Ha! And because I want to and I can. I want to do more writing, and studies will help me achieve that goal.

Where was I this week? Now that I’m almost home, I’ll tell you. I was at my in-law’s home. My husband’s mother passed away in February this year. His father passed away three weeks later. They were married for almost 66 years. The isolation was my husband’s idea. Go and write in peace.

I had a hard time this week writing, no doubt. Aquinas’s insistence that living things are most properly called substantial form and matter composites, and that the substance’s form configures all the parts and prime matter — well, that all threw me for a loop. I always thought of atoms as little bodies. I never thought of them as not remaining the atom upon bonding, but at the same time, I know that atoms are changed to become part of the whole. I have better language now. Atoms lose their form but are not corrupted. They are not substantially present in the living thing but present to give their ‘powers’, changed but still there.

Another Thomistic tenet is that for artificial things, the parts of the artifact do retain their substantial form because the artifact is not a living thing. It is an aggregate. Here’s the thing…

I did all of this thinking and learning in my in-law’s home all week. All around me were the treasures they curated over their lifetimes. My mother-in-law had exquisite taste. She was a lady, always beautiful and elegant, jewelry, nails, hair. Her home was full of art, crystal, and decor. My father-in-law collected coins and fine liquor. (I stayed out of it.) They made a life together — a LIFE. Their marriage was something living. All the things they treasured were not just things; they were parts of the substantial form of a marriage generated and well lived.

And now Mr. and Mrs. Trasancos are gone from the home, bodies separated from their souls. They were devout Catholics from Cuba. Their ashes sit together at a cemetery. Their home will be disassembled as the estate is sold and their things dispersed. The home died too. And I was in its corpse all week. It became painfully clear to me what Aquinas means about the part becoming into the whole. Something living is so much more than the sum of its parts. All the beautiful things around me had lost the soul of the marriage that bound them together.

I couldn’t have known the thesis-writing week would play out as it did, but I will never forget the experience. I hope you won’t either. Thank you for joining me.

I’ll continue writing. Now that I am looking forward to doctoral studies, I’ll have a lot to power squat and scream my way through.