“Blessed Mother Mary does everything for me”

My mother died during COVID. She lived out her final days at Sunrise, an assisted living place that I wish I’d been able to better appreciate than I did at the time. …. The place was “nice”: usually clean with walls adorned with photos of nature, employees mostly devoted and kind and deserving of far more pay and recognition than they’d ever receive. … Still, the residents often looked so abandoned; it was hard not to feel a sense of heartbreak.

But what a great place it was to remind us of where we were ultimately headed — even if we win the lottery, live to play pickleball into our 90s and die at home. This was finitude writ large.

I steeled myself against it, resisting this new version of my mother; she had changed dramatically with her diagnosis of dementia. I was haunted by the memory of who she’d been for most of her life — a person in control who liked standing tall in her dignity. A beautiful teacher, librarian, storyteller and singer, whose many friendships had roots going back to grade school. My mother would have been horrified to see this new person she’d become, even while being wildly popular at Sunrise. She still had high spirits and could often be found serenading someone, one rosary around her neck, another clutched in her hand.

She told me she loved praying all day long: “That’s all I’m good for now.” She especially loved prayer requests, and we all ended up believing her prayers were powerful. Why wouldn’t they be? She now had an innocence about her one can only see in the truly powerless. She’d become a channel; along with the physical ailments and the loss of memory, there had been enough emptying of self for the Holy Spirit to shine through as never before.

[...] My husband’s years spent in monasteries no doubt influenced how he saw Sunrise, but he was still amazed at how my mother managed. “How do you stay happy?” he asked her one day before we left. “Blessed Mother Mary does everything for me,” she said without a moment of hesitation. He and I both were shocked and moved by how fluidly and immediately she’d answered the question.

We often quote her, even though I don’t have the same depth of her faith, or her embrace of what is. But it seemed only fair that someone long devoted to Mary would be accompanied by her at the end of her life. A Mary who we too often forget was a body on earth, complete with all the body’s humbling betrayals and vulnerabilities, a woman who’d known intimately not only the finitude of herself, but of a beloved son hanging on a cross.

Jane McCafferty

www.jesuits.org