We held my mother’s funeral Mass last week at Our Lady, Star of the Sea in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the same church where she was baptized, took her first communion, made her first confession, was confirmed into the faith, and married my father. It was the same building, the same font, probably the same hard wood in the pews, holding every sacramental moment of her life except the last one, which happened about four miles away in a hospice bed with a borrowed priest and her husband, my father, receiving the host on her behalf because she could no longer swallow.
Father Bill gave the homily. He’d been her favorite priest at St. John The Evangelist in Swampscott in the 1980s before taking on the role of secretary for pastoral services in the cabinet of a cardinal. Despite being gone from the parish for nearly forty years, he remained my mother’s all-time favorite priest, and when she told us her wishes for her funeral, his name was at the top of the list.
As he gave the homily, I could hear in his words exactly where each sentence had come from: the obituary I wrote; the conversation when Father Bill came to the house to catch up with our family and learn more details about my mother’s life and illness; the Church’s clerical archive.
He did a good job with what he had, a homily based on the thesis of a faithful life and a faithful death, a woman who moved through the sacraments like water through a channel, without friction, without doubt. But his thesis opened a loop in my head that I’ve been struggling to close.
I am not criticising his homily but a fact about the form. If you give any priest an obituary and three days, he will build you a faithful life. The clerical archive he drew from is a record of bridges crossed, not of what a person believed when she crossed them.
My mother stopped attending church after the abuse scandal broke. She didn’t drift. She didn’t get too busy to attend. She read what the Church had done (especially in the Archdiocese of Boston) and to whom, and she left, and she stayed gone for decades.
She kept her faith. She lost patience for the people who ran it. She did not abandon her faith in Christ’s message; she stormed away from the people who were supposed to be its custodians.
And yes, in the 80s and 90s, she taught the catechism, CCD, even to the point of participating in the Master Teacher Program in the Archdiocese of Boston, where she finished specialized coursework in catechetical leadership and liturgy. That shows not just her intellectual heft and professional seriousness but her devotion to the faith. But when I finished CCD with my confirmation in the mid-90s, she stopped too, the way a Little League coach stops coaching once his son ages out. She hadn’t been teaching to serve the institution. She’d been teaching to serve her children and her community, and when that work was done, so was she.
My father’s mother, when she died, explicitly rejected a Catholic funeral. Her husband was Catholic; her children became Catholic too. But at the end, she made sure the record would show her refusal.
My mother was there for my grandmother’s death. She knew that given the same institution to reckon with at the moment it mattered most, one could choose otherwise. Her request to have a Catholic funeral at Our Lady, Star of the Sea wasn’t inertia. It was a choice, and she made it.
So what was it, then, that made my mother choose the Church, by name, ahead of time, for the last thing anyone would ever do for her?
It’s not about a return to belief, because belief never left her. I think it was more about what the Catechism means when it says the liturgy doesn’t just commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection but makes that passage present again—actually happening—for whoever is there to receive it. She was crossing through death herself; it’s no coincidence that she chose, at the end, to be surrounded by a ritual built entirely around a person having made the same crossing and come out the other side.
She did not choose the priest who administered her last rites. She wanted Father Bill, but he couldn’t get there in time, and I called one of his successors, a contemporary priest at St. John’s, a priest my mother never met, because I wanted the sacrament administered and I wasn’t going to let logistics decide. When the priest anointed her, and when my father received the Viaticum because Parkinson’s had taken her ability to swallow the Body and the Blood, the priest called it a spiritual communion. This is a real category, the Church’s answer for exactly this situation: a desire for communion that counts even when the body won’t cooperate.
That, I think, is the actual shape of this whole thing. It’s not faithful life, faithful death, but more: a woman who kept her faith while leaving the institution, her everlasting desire for spiritual communion with God still holding even when the men who run the Church do evil, and who returned to its rites at the last bridge that belonged to her, and who left behind a son who isn’t a believer and who is trying to close a loop he isn’t sure is fully his to close.