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By Rosalie Morales Kearns
I hear the story secondhand, but I picture it clearly.
My parents, visiting England in the late 1990s, must look like typical tourists: a cheerful couple in their sixties, hand in hand, attending evensong at Winchester Cathedral.
A British friend who’s been showing them around asks Mom whether she enjoyed the service.
“Yes, but it doesn’t count.”
She clarifies that the cathedral isn’t a consecrated space. “Not since your people took it.”
She’s referring to buildings and land owned by the Roman Catholic Church but later confiscated.
By Henry VIII. In the sixteenth century.
This gets added to the trove of anecdotes my siblings and I collect. If you’re ever in a fight, we joke, you want Daisy Morales on your side: centuries will pass, and she won’t give up.
And she does it with flare. Sure enough, even though she’s just repudiated the legitimacy of his entire religion, the friend is charmed by her dazzling smile and forgets to be offended.
~~~
Fast-forward to 2013, a beautiful May afternoon in central Pennsylvania.
Mom and Dad are now living in the house that used to belong to Dad’s parents, and I’ve driven three hundred miles to sit by my mother’s side and hold her hand.
The bedroom, the one she and Dad always used on our visits here when I was little, is large enough to accommodate her hospital bed, set at right angles to their own double bed.
She’s been suffering from a neurological disorder for at least ten years now. At the beginning, she would lapse into silence, staring vacantly, and then snap out of it. Over the years the outgoing, talkative woman, cheerfully bossy to husband and children, dwindled down, surfacing from that fugue state less and less often.
She won’t see another Christmas, the neurologist told us. That was five years ago.
She has a few more days, the hospice folks said. That was three months ago.
The latest prognosis came yesterday: she has twelve to twenty-four hours.
This one, it turns out, will be off by eight days.
~~~
I hear the front door opening downstairs, and someone greeting the new arrival, Pastor Lang from the evangelical church just outside town.
There’s a joke in here somewhere. A minister walks into a . . . okay, admittedly, “deathbed scene” doesn’t sound very comical.
Try again. Three people walk into a bar: an ardent Catholic, a fundamentalist Protestant—
And then there’s me.
I have a shorthand way of describing my religious affiliation: my parents tried to raise me Catholic but it didn’t take. I like to quip that when I hear someone mention “God” I want to run screaming from the room. People assume I’m joking.
Here in my parents’ bedroom, rosaries are everywhere: on the nightstand, on bureaus and shelves, draped on top of a Spanish-language Bible and daily missal that Mom can no longer read. Rosaries of all sizes, with beads of faceted clear quartz, freshwater pearls, intricately carved silver roses.
On the wall next to the bed are pinned saints’ medals: images of Bernadette of Lourdes, Mother Elizabeth Seton, Archangel Michael. There’s also a cross, two inches high; where the body of Jesus should be there are instead tiny yellow flowers against a background of luminous blue enamel, with an image of Mary at the center, her hand raised in blessing.
Once, when Mom had mentioned a new priest at her parish, I wanted to know what order he belonged to but couldn’t remember the word. “What brand is he?” I finally said. She knew what I meant. Luckily, she found me amusing.
An evangelical preacher, in this situation, is about as off-brand as you can get.
And we have so little time, she and I.
“He’s been here to visit a few times,” Dad says in the mild, reasonable tone he takes when he senses that I’m annoyed. “He’s a good man.”
He doesn’t need to worry about me being rude to the minister. One of the things my mother passed on to me, a part of my Puerto Rican inheritance, is the ethical imperative of hospitality. No matter what I think of someone, if they’re under my roof, sitting at my table, it’s unacceptable, unthinkable, to be rude or make them feel uncomfortable. Like many life lessons we absorb from our parents, this one never had to be spelled out. She modeled it in her graciousness to every person who came to our door.
~~~
This house, my father’s childhood home, is in a small Pennsylvania Dutch town. Twenty miles from the nearest Catholic Church. Fifty miles from Harrisburg, where our parents raised us. Almost two thousand miles from Daisy’s native Puerto Rico.
I was the youngest, the last left at home. During high school and college I came up here with them on summer weekends so Dad could work in his beloved organic vegetable garden. I pulled weeds while Dad turned over the compost pile or rototilled, and Mom got the meal ready. Later the three of us would sit at the kitchen table shelling peas, cutting up green beans to freeze, peeling peaches for canning.
I brought friends from college to visit. I remember Mom asking us about our freshman philosophy class. “I’m a Platonist,” she said, and then waved her hand dismissively at Dad: “He’s an Aristotelian.”
She ordered my friends around as if they were her own kids, and they were charmed.
“Nancy wants to see the museum,” she would announce to me, after earlier telling Nancy, “Rosalie wants to take you to the museum.”
Neither of us particularly wanted to go, but we went. It was easier that way.
~~~
Say the word “medium” and my first image is a huckster on a stage, picking up verbal cues from the audience: I’m with someone whose name begins with an M. [Gasps from audience.] Is it Mark? Maybe Michael? [“Oh my god, Uncle Mike!”].
But ordinary people also see things, and don’t charge money for it. Take the elementary school teacher who’s a friend of my brother Carlos. She visits the house just after Mom and Dad move in, and tells him that she sees a woman, middle-aged perhaps, sitting by Mom’s bedside.
Mom’s mother, Esther, died in her forties, as did Mom’s dearest childhood friend, Ela.
A couple of years later the friend visits again, and sees more people in Mom’s bedroom. Gathering.
Daisy had parents who adored her. Beloved aunts and uncles. Dear friends and cousins who died young and in middle age. Her brother Raúl died at sixty. There could well be a crowd of loved ones waiting for her.
I wonder about this sometimes when I sit down with Mom, whether I’m among ghosts, crowding them out. But if the ancestors are annoyed at me taking up their space, they give no sign that I can detect.
~~~
I would like to say that there was some defining moment in which I lost my faith. It would make for a better story.
There was the nun in first grade who yanked a child out of his seat, threw him to the floor, knocked his desk on its side.
There was the nun in fifth grade who said that non-Catholics are denied entrance to heaven—presumably with no loophole for my father, a Lutheran.
In eighth grade, there was the priest who responded with disgust and horror to my friend Toni’s suggestion that she and I help him since the altar boy was out sick: “Girls aren’t allowed to touch the Host.”
I’d like to say I took a principled stand—“Well in that case, I’m leaving”—but the truth is, I couldn’t bow out, because I had never truly been inside.
I made attempts to pray when I was little, but came away convinced that no one was on the receiving end of the messages I was sending out. Not that I didn’t have plenty of outrageous stories about—and anger at—the nuns and priests of my childhood. But I was a naturally irreligious child, simple as that.
In grade school we were expected to attend Mass and other religious functions (they dragged us, is how my child self thought of it; they herded us). But one time, at a vigil for the Blessed Sacrament, a nun explained that for every prayer you said during the vigil, a soul in Purgatory would be released early.
That got my attention. I would have preferred details (How early? Can I pick which soul?), and to this day I’m not sure if it’s official doctrine or folk Catholicism, but it was something that made intuitive sense to me. Not a big guy in the sky keeping tabs, but all of us in some giant interconnected fabric, failing to reach our potential and helping each other keep climbing.
There should be a word for someone with a jaundiced view on clergy and organized religion. “Unbeliever” isn’t quite accurate, nor is “skeptic.” The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that the word jaundice derives from the Proto-Indo-European root ghel, meaning “‘to shine,’ with derivatives denoting ‘green’ and ‘yellow.’”
So now we can complete the joke, those three people walking into a bar: a Catholic, a fundamentalist, and a person shining with hints of green and yellow.
~~~
Much as we clashed (bossy mother, stubborn daughter), my mother showed me, in ways large and subtle, what a wide world there is out there.
When I was seven she would drop me off at the public library while she went grocery shopping. I remember gazing up in amazement and joy at an entire bookcase full of fairy tale collections: Where do I start?
She used to gather us kids by calling out or singing, “Allons, enfants de la Patrie.” When I was eleven or so I finally asked her what it meant, and she sang me “La Marseillaise” in French, stopping after each line to tell me the English translation. After that, I responded to her call of “Allons, enfants” with variations on “Raise the bloody standard” or “Kill the aristocrats,” and she would laugh.
When I was in my twenties she shared a copy with me of a poem she loved, “El viaje definitivo” (The definitive journey), by the Spanish poet and Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez. The narrator describes how the birds will continue to sing in the idyllic walled garden, how the sky above will still be blue and calm, after his death.
“Y yo me iré,” the poem begins. And I will go.
~~~
Irreligious as I was, I was also fascinated by religion. I majored in theology in college, and after graduation I read voraciously from the work of feminist scholars of religion and other feminist authors writing about spirituality.
The history of Christianity was also a history of women finding their own way: gnostics, nuns, beguines, mystics, authors, scholars, at best ignored by the Vatican, at worst tortured and executed.
And of course they were never allowed into the priesthood.
More than anything else, that exclusion of women was what angered me about Catholicism.
You might wonder why. I wonder myself. It’s like resenting the star players of a team I’m not even on.
In the religious traditions that predated Christianity, I learned, a priest or priestess was, in a sense, a technician. They offered sacrifices to the gods, they performed rituals. They didn’t counsel or teach, weren’t role models or expected to be particularly moral or ethical. And thus, presumably, no one was left disillusioned when they turned out to be as petty and human as the rest of us.
But imagine it. A woman with the power to bless and to curse, to heal, to protect from evil. A woman who welcomes initiates and casts out miscreants, opens the door or slams it shut.
~~~
Another story I hear secondhand features Mom and her only grandchild.
I was twenty-one when my niece was born. My sister and her husband had their own New Age beliefs, which didn’t include baptizing their child in a church.
Since the little girl spent a lot of time in my parents’ loving care, you can probably guess how this story unfolds. One day Dad comes home from work and Mom announces to him that she’s baptized Lani herself.
It’s one of those exceptions, buried deep in a footnote of some rulebook, I imagine, that says in cases of emergency, any Catholic—or indeed any individual, ancient priestess, shining person—can perform a baptism.
I like to imagine the scene: the cheerful toddler, the grandmother kneeling down with her arm around her. She makes the sign of the cross, pronounces the requisite words. They smile at each other. Blessings in all directions.
~~~
I ended up writing a novel about a woman who became the Roman Catholic Church’s first ordained female priest.
She understood her priesthood in the older, pagan sense, with priestly energy that flowed through her, unrelated to how or whether she believed in God, whether she kept or broke her vows, whether she was still acknowledged by the Vatican.
She was a conduit for that energy when she performed the rituals/sacraments, when she spoke certain words and in the utterance, made it so: I baptize you. Your sins are forgiven.
~~~
As the pastor climbs the stairs, I remember a story Mom told me, about a man traveling in Spain who was passing through a small village and stopped to see the church. A funeral was about to get under way. The man said a prayer for the departed soul, signed his name in a visitor’s book in the vestibule, and went his way.
They traced him later, told him the deceased was a wealthy man whose fortune was to go to the first person who signed the registry at his funeral.
I don’t know where she came up with these bits of Catholic lore. This was long before social media, even before there were Catholic cable TV programs on everything from Marian apparitions to local diocesan news.
Pastor Lang greets us and I nod to him. He’s tactful and unobtrusive as he quietly asks my mother whether he can sit with her and pray.
I wish I could report here that I had a moment of magnanimous acceptance of all traditions, of all these men in clerical collars who tried to stifle the priestly energies of women.
Instead I rearrange the cushions along the side of the bed, pushing them down so that the saints’ medallions on the wall are clearly visible.
“Here’s your rosary, Mama,” I say loudly as I drape the beads across her palm.
The minister, unperturbed, opens his book and begins.
I can’t tell if he’s maintaining a polite silence about the rosary or simply hasn’t noticed he’s in the presence of saints and archangels, ancestral spirits, the Mother of God. Maybe he doesn’t know about the interconnected fabric, the mysteries joyful and sorrowful, glorious and luminous, the meaning of the rose-shaped beads in our intertwined hands.
~~~
Later in the afternoon we’re alone again, Mom and I.
“How about sharing some of that morphine, Ma?” I say. “I’m feeling kind of stressed.”
I like to think I can see the faintest arching of an eyebrow, the slightest upward tilt of her mouth.
We’re new at all this. This business of dying, this process of waiting at a deathbed. We’ll make our own rules for the rapidly dwindling time we have left.
Dad comes into the room and sits down on their bed. His bed, now.
“You look exhausted,” I say. “You should lie down and try to sleep.”
To my surprise, he does just that. Normally he never takes a nap during the day, but within minutes he’s snoring gently.
I realize that for the moment, no one else is in the house: my brother is out of town, the next home care attendant hasn’t started her shift, no neighbor is visiting to pay their respects. In the welcome quiet, I reflect that this is probably the last time my parents and I will be alone together in this house.
I’d like to say that I had the presence of mind to think about how lucky I’ve been, to have the parents I did, for as long as I did.
I do manage to be present in this moment, in these moments one by one, to witness the three of us together in this room, asleep, awake, semi-conscious, to witness our young healthy selves downstairs in the kitchen, outside in the garden, filling this house, these years.
My father raises his head abruptly.
“What’s that music?” he says. “Is it the radio or the CD player?”
“Dad,” I say, “there’s no music playing.”
“I hear music,” he insists. A moment later he’s asleep again.
Rosalie Morales Kearns (@RMoralesKearns), a writer of Puerto Rican and Pennsylvania Dutch descent, is the author of the novel Kingdom of Women (Jaded Ibis, 2017), about a female Roman Catholic priest in a slightly alternate near-future. She’s also the author of the speculative/fabulist story collection Virgins and Tricksters (Aqueous, 2012), and founder of Shade Mountain Press. She has essays and poetry published or forthcoming in Entropy, Yes Poetry, Witness, and other journals.