Flowers upon you, mãe / Sula Donnolo’s Celebration of Life // The Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg /// St. Pete, FL //// May 17th, 2025
Dear Ones,
I had no choice in what happened with my father after he died.
I wasn’t consulted about anything except my schedule.
Even though I am next of kin. Even though I am his only daughter. Even though I am his only child.
With my mother, I had all the choices.
Years ago, she told me she wished to be cremated. She was not willing to discuss anything else, not about illness, infirmity, or death, though I tried, many, many times over the years to broach these end-of-life conversations. But my mother was a stubborn ol’ gal and when she planted her feet there was no moving her.
Which leads me to Saturday. The celebration of her life, the ceremony, was for me, in her honor. In her honor, but for me. Given all the choices, I chose color, flower patterns, gifts, community, a ritual with roses, art-making, rainbow snacks, and joy.
Joy with a side of grief. Joy in-the-face-of. Joy.
I’ll probably share more photos from the celebration (as well as the Brazilian song I sang, accompanied by my old friend Nate Najar, one of the great young jazz guitarists) in another missive, but I wanted to give you my eulogy —
✨ in case you wished to be there but couldn’t
✨ in case you knew my mother and care to learn things about her you never knew
✨ in case you need to give one
✨ in case you want to witness it done differently
✨ in case your heart aches for me
I told the truth to the best of my ability. Whenever I write, whenever I do any kind of public speaking, I always ask myself:
Is this true? Could it be more true?
This was the truest true I could get to.
I hope it means something to you, and if it means something to you, I hope you’ll let me know — in some way.
Big Love,
Lila
Giving my mother’s eulogy / UUSP // St. Petersburg, FL /// May 17th, 2025
Transcript:
My mother was a storyteller in constant search of a story. If you did know her in person, you know she was incredibly colorful, theatrical, curious, and thoughtful.
If I was my mother's favorite person, and I was, then this was her favorite place.
There can be no better place to celebrate her life.
Here we are on the very same stage (before I had an iPhone) / UUSP // sometime between 2007 - 2016
My mom considers me her greatest creation. She loves to say that. She loved to say that. I think making me might be the accomplishment that she's been most proud of in her life... and I can't know for sure because I didn't have her life. But if I did, I think I might be proud of being such a survivor.
Here are some things you may not know about my mother. While she was in my grandmother Ana's womb, her 2-year-old brother died of tuberculosis. So she was fermented in that grief... and she survived.
Her father never touched her, so she found other ways to source affection, particularly from men, and she survived.
She moved from the little coastal town of Santos, São Paulo — which has the longest beach garden in the world. That was its claim to fame. It may no longer be true, but it does have a very long beach garden — to the big city of Salvador, Bahia, when she was a young woman, and she lived with roommates and she had adventures and in all the photographs from that time, she looks radiantly happy. And we know that photographs don't tell the whole story, and from moment to moment it could seem quite different, but I have many, many photographs because my mother was a documentarian like I am, and I think I can paint a decent picture of her life from that time.
She met my father at a child psychology conference in Brazil and she moved to New York, to America, without really knowing English. She also had a romance without really knowing English, and she learned English and she learned it so well that she was able to get a Master's degree in Drama Therapy from NYU, where I later graduated with A BFA in Drama (without the therapy).
No, I had therapy! I actually still, I actually still have my therapist from that time. I found her again 20 years later. Lemme tell you, it's a beautiful thing to, be witnessed, over such a course of time, so she knows how much I've struggled in my relationship with my mother over all of these years, and now she's with me as my mother has passed.
My mom had no depth perception, so if she was quite nervous about driving or being in your car, that's why, because she couldn't tell the curb from the road and yet she learned to drive, got her driver's license in New York City, so that she could drive me to the pool and to rehearsals and to school, and she survived.
She was ostracized in our suburban Long Island neighborhood, likely for being a foreigner, perhaps for being so ebulliently enthusiastic, aka a foreigner, a Brazilian foreigner in particular. She still threw parties and gave gifts and hosted play dates for me and my friends, and she survived.
When I was seven, eight, and nine, my mom had colon cancer. She had a huge part of her colon removed, which is why it was so difficult for her to find things that she could eat. And she survived. She used to call her I.V. Tango and dance with it so that I would not be scared. And truth be told, until two years ago, I still cried every time they took blood. But that is not her fault. That is not her fault.
She was... she was deeply neglected by my late father, in terms of affection, time, care, and probably intimacy.
My father dropped dead on April 4th of this year, 2025, 35 days before my mother. My dad was an introvert who worked a very difficult trauma job, people job as a child psychologist in the New York City school system. When he came home, he just wanted to go into his wood shop and be left alone. That didn't really work for my mother, but she survived and she divorced him and she moved us down here to Florida where I did not want to come. I tell you, I did not want to come. And I was imported. She forced me.
Just like my father imported her from Brazil; she imported me to Florida.
The life that I have now is only because she did that. I wanted to go to the High School of Performing Arts in New York, which is the most prestigious one. Instead, I went to Pinellas County Center for the Arts , and I had a world class acting education. I went to NYU, Tisch School of the Arts for Drama, and I got a BFA and... the education I had here at that time at PCCA (when I first met the love of my life, Zachary)... that education is comparable to the one I got here, which is pretty remarkable for the, you know, what I thought of as kind of a backwater town.
I no longer think that, and the town has also grown up with me, and I find myself delighted to be here. I find myself delighted to be here with you all in this beautiful place full of sunshine and flowery patterns and tropical vibes and breezes. I find that my, my creativity has flourished here, especially since my parents have passed. And I'm grateful, at last, that she brought me here.
The experience I had of religion before then was quite onerous, and I wound up concluding that religious people were bullshit and hypocrites, all of them, and I didn't want anything to do with it.
So when I was 15 and she said, "I found this new church. We're gonna go to the Unitarian Universalist Church in St. Petersburg," I was like... "I'm not going."
And she was like, "You're going."
I was like, "I'm not going."
She's like, "You're going!"
And I was like "FINE!"
And I walked in here and this is the first thing that I saw.
Windows, bamboo / The Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg // St. Pete, FL /// May 17th, 2025
My father was a Catholic, a really— turned out to be in the end, extremely evangelical devote— devout, devoted, Catholic. And so I experienced only stained glass windows in churches my entire life. And I walked in here and I saw clear windows, and bamboo behind them and I thought, "Oh, this is different." And then I walked in and I saw a queer female minister, and I thought, "This is different!" How wonderful! How wonderful. And it has been.
This is a part of my life that I rarely speak about to people. I don't feel like I need to because I, and because I have such a, a strong distaste for evangelicals, I would not speak about my own, my own faith system and my own religious home, but this is and has been, and I cannot think of a more beautiful place, that does away with creed and dogma and brings us together to worship or not in our own fashion, to be a community, to— the way I always describe it is a social justice-minded community.
And even in my mom's final stages of dementia, she always wanted to come here, every week and let me tell you, it was a pain to bring her here. It was always difficult, and she always complained but I knew that she loved it. And I knew that being here and even seeing you all momentarily, receiving an embrace from you, was the only thing keeping her alive.
My mother lived as a single mother in this strange Republican land and made sure I had everything I needed and some of the things that I wanted, and she survived.
She attended every performance, every award, ceremony, and every graduation right up until I left for college.
Many of you probably don't know this one. The summer between my second and third years at college ('cause I graduated in three years to save money), my mother here in Florida found her boyfriend dead in a swimming pool, by suicide. She did not date after that. She joined a bereavement group that she was part of for I think two years... and she survived.
All my mother cared about was love: capital L Love, and the truth of it was that she never received enough of it to feel satiated. Maybe you do know that about her. I, I think this is the great tragedy of her life… and I have been carrying the great tragedy of her life in my life, and respectfully, I'm going to put that down now.
My mother was the unhappiest and loneliest person I've ever known up close. It is my great hope... that wherever she's now, whatever is left of her swims in a vast knowing of enoughness and love.
Publix has the best balloons. This one was still floating in her apartment on the day she died in May. / St. Petersburg, FL // February 14th, 2025
Recently I read something that's been ringing in me ever since.
“Pain passes through generations until it finds someone who's willing to feel it.”
And I am that person on both sides of my family. So it's been a lot of pain. The only way I can be willing to feel it, the only possible way I can alchemize it is by being an artist. Is through my creativity. And I only have that creativity because it was passed to me from my mother... includes emotional creativity, as that's how I've been able to alchemize some of this pain from both sides of my lineage.
My mother is descended from Russian and Romanian Jews who escaped the Holocaust and went to Brazil. There is that generational trauma that lives within me as well, and lived within her prominently though she didn't identify with being a Jew.
I do. Because I feel it.
The beautiful thing about generational curses is that it only takes one to break a curse, and that's what I'm here do. And maybe that's what many of you are here to do, as well.
In fact, mãezinha, all of the best things about me, tudo que me faz... eu, comes from you, my love of beauty and aesthetics, my deeply personal style, my creativity that flows from medium to medium.
My mother was an actress in her youth and she was a social worker in her young adulthood and an interpreter in her adulthood and a storyteller in her twilight years.
I also inherited from her this vast pleasure in the arts at large.
The ability to intuit what is happening within people's relationships... just saying!
An insatiable desire to know about humans and how they relate, and how they process things.
And most of all, I got from her this boundless, unquenchable curiosity.
If you interacted with my mother, she probably asked you if you were married, where you lived, if you liked your job, and if you didn't maybe wanna do something different? She wanted to know, and this at times drove me absolutely bonkers! And yet it is, of course, naturally, the quality about myself that I find to be the most valuable, the most alive. My curiosity. It's what enabled me to conduct hundreds of interviews about people's intimate lives and turn them into podcasts and essays. It's what allows me to write through my grief.
Even now, more so now, I have six essays going, now that my brilliant friend Craig died in March, my father dropped dead on April 4th, my mother died on May 9th, and another friend died on May 10th. I have the capability to write to alchemize my grief. I, and you, can create all sorts of art in the wake of tragedy.
For instance, I'm planning to bedazzle my mother's urn. Because hashtag #urnssougly. You ever shop for an urn? They're so gross-looking!
I write to save my life, and my mother has encouraged my writing since I was a little girl, before I hit double digits. So... thanks mom.
I want to tell you just a couple more things this morning.
One was: the reason I was able to grow up and become a sex podcaster, an intimacy coach, somebody who's very comfortable with speaking about sex, death, relationships, money— it enables me to speak about all of the difficult and sticky subjects, and the reason that I can do that is because, when I was younger my mom had such a healthy... attitude about sex that the talk I got was this.
"Sex is a beautiful thing that happens between people who love each other, and I hope you won't want to have sex while you're in high school, but if you do, let me know, and I'll take you to the doctor and we'll get you birth control, and we'll get you condoms."
This is unfortunately revelatory. Very few people have had this experience. And I didn't have to fight against anything, any kind of shame in order to do my work. So when people say my work is brave, it doesn't seem brave to me because I'm not going against my conditioning or shame to do it. I've been perfectly placed and deeply privileged to be in the position I am, so that I can share so openly and so honestly, and that 100% stems from that conversation that my mom had with me when I was 15.
I was in the car with my friend Jon, coming back from New Jersey, and we had a house meeting that night. I used to live in an intentional community, a sex-positive, intentional community in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and I was heading back to the Villa. He was driving me back in time for my meeting and she said, "But do you have enough chairs?"
I don't know if anyone will ever love me like that!
Who would care if I had enough chairs at my house meeting? I wouldn't even think to ask somebody, do you have enough chairs? People will just sit on the floor! Do you have enough chairs? And I was annoyed.
"Yes, we have enough chairs, Mom."
I only have two recordings that I made of my mother, which is one of my great regurts. One of my regrets. I have one interview that I was going to put on the podcast and I didn't wind up doing so, and I have one of her looking through the photo album that I made her that's out there, of her as a, a young, young human, and growing human, and I just have her commentary on that.
My mother in her late 20s / early 30s & my Dad in the bottom righthand corner / Santos, Brasil // circa 1970
I wish I'd asked for more stories. I wish I'd recorded them before she lost bigger and bigger pieces of her mind. But as I wrote in an essay about my father called
You see, I thought I had time.
And I know as you know, that we do not know how much time we have or they have.
So if you have someone you love, don't forget, in the midst of the laundry and the dishes and the time cards and the bills and the oil change, to hold them close.
And if you have something to say to them, say it now.
And maybe if you think of it, you can footnote my mother in that moment.
Just a little "Thanks Sula" would be beautiful.
Thank you.
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