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As a preview to the Family-Centered Learning Conference next August, Michele Quigley is highlighting speakers' writings. Just in time for All Saints Day, the Spoon Saints are out in force! I love the way Michele combined several posts and pictures, making the craft look so festive.
Thank you, Michele, I can't wait for August!
I hope to meet many friends at the Conference!
I am happy to say that my article, Mid-life Crisis Averted, is appearing over at Catholic Exchange today.
Still, it should be noted that the troubled man looking off into space in the picture is not my husband. If anything, that guy must be "the graying executive behind the wheel of a brand new Porsche."
What is bothering him, I wonder. It's hard to say. Perhaps he just found out he can't make the payments on the Porsche.
Maybe that's how he lost his shirt.
; )
This weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing the pro-life film, Bella, with Agnes and Theresa and a huge contingent of Catholic Long Islanders. [Our teen group was out in force, and I had the fun of sitting next to my good friend Heather.] The film was perfectly beautiful and hopefilled--everything a movie should be. Much of the action was shot right here on Long Island, so the beach and train scenes struck a special chord of interest.
If you have an opportunity, be sure to see this wonderful film, bringing your older children along (teen and up). Our family has been discussing it all weekend and will continue for many days to come, I am sure.
By the way, we are big fans of Goya products in our house (my husband makes the best tacos of any German Irishman I know), but we will be buying even more from Goya after reading this press release: Goya Foods Launches Promotional Sponsorship of “Bella.”
My very dear friend, Cay, is hosting a Book Walk at the Cajun Cottage. What is a Book Walk, you ask?
Well, it involves the prize of an upcoming book destined to become a Christmas classic! However, because I have been asleep at the switch all day, the contest will be over in about half an hour!!! Still, a visit to Cay's blog is always a pleasure--the real prize is the woman who writes it.
Please click here to learn more about today's Book Walk.
I am sure it won't be the last!
I was visiting my mother in Intensive Care when a patient several beds away began to struggle and shout. An emergency code was issued, bringing medical personnel running from far and wide, and all visitors were ushered out into the hallway to allow the staff to work.
It was already about nine o'clock in the evening, and I made my way down the elevator to the front of the hospital. The air was temperate for October, so comfortable in fact that I parked myself on an outdoor bench, opening my cell phone to update the family at home. A pair of automatic doors parted, and two men emerged from the building, deep in conversation. As they shook hands to say goodbye, I heard one say to the other in the most heartfelt of tones, "Thank you, Father."
The priest was wearing a collar, and, slipping the phone into my bag, I could not resist smiling and saying, "Hello, Father" as he passed. He returned my greeting and paused a moment, as if he was used to strangers wanting a word with him. Given the opportunity, I added, "Father, I wonder if you could pray for my mother--she had an extensive stroke yesterday."
"Yes, I will pray for her," he said, looking sorry to hear the news.
"Are you a chaplain at this hospital, Father," I asked hopefully, "because I know she would love to see a priest."
"No," he said, "I am from St. Boniface and was called in tonight because someone died, but I will come back to see her tomorrow. What is her name?"
"Alice O'Brien," I told him, welling up at this kindness, my voice wavering a little, "she is in Intensive Care."
"Alice O'Brien," he repeated, "I will see her tomorrow," and I thanked him heartily as the two of us parted ways.
Still reeling from the shock of my mother's stroke, I had not yet cried over it. Alone in the car a moment or so later, the tears flowed, tears of sorrow to be sure, but also tears of affection and gratitude for this good priest. I prayed that God would bless him always and thanked Our Lady for putting one of her faithful sons in my path when he was so needed. A crescent moon beamed above the hospital rooftop, casting a pleasing glow upon the night that had began so bleak, warming me through like a smile.
A great deal is often said nowadays about the environment. Americans are reminded that we must learn to be better stewards of the earth, preserving our forests and fossil fuel and purifying the air and water so that we will have something left for our grandchildren. There is something else we must also preserve, holding onto it and nurturing it for dear life, praying that we may pass it along as the most sacred of all legacies--the Catholic Priesthood.
Saint Padre Pio once said, "It would be easier for the world to exist without the sun than without the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass."
St. Pio speaks with his customary clarity, offering an analogy that is both shocking and obviously true. Without our priests, we would have no Mass--we would have no Confession for the forgiveness of our sins--and our world would be bleak indeed. Let us treasure the priesthood as the greatest gift humanity has to offer, praying for vocations and asking God to bless our families by calling our sons to the altar.
Twenty years ago, my grandmother lay dying. My mother and I stood at her bedside with a holy priest on hand to offer her the sacraments. Now, an impossibly short time later, it is my mother who is gravely ill, and a priest was there for her. Someday all too soon, my time will come, as it did for the last two Alices before me, and I cannot help but wonder: Will my daughter be able to find a priest right outside the hospital?
The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few--may the Lord of the harvest send forth more laborers . . . and may we never find ourselves without one of these chosen ones in our time of need.
*******
The following afternoon, I asked my mother if a priest had been in to see her. "No, I don't think so," she told me, "I would have remembered."
This was disappointing, but I thought perhaps he had forgotten her name or had been busier than expected. No one is pulled in more directions than the average parish priest.
A nurse came in to check my mother's IV moments later and mentioned off-handedly, "Your mother had a visitor here earlier--a priest."
"Really?" I said, feeling a throb in my heart, "thank you for telling me." My eyes and the bridge of my nose stung and I swallowed hard, once again more from gratitude than sorrow. Turning my mother's hand over in mine, I offered a prayer of thanksgiving from both of us for good Father Fred.
I can't thank you enough for the enormous outpouring of prayers for my mother, not only here on the blog, but on friends' blogs, at the 4Real Message Board, and in our local homeschooling group. My mother is so very grateful for your prayers and said they are the most important thing to her right now. Her condition continues to be very serious, and she remains in intensive care with little to no movement on her left hand side. She is capable of conversation and easy to understand, although she has forgotten a great deal and struggles to remember, asking me to repeat the children's names, for example.
The reason I called this update "The Perfect Storm" is that I realized my mother's illness came at the exact time she would get the most possible prayers from faithful readers online. It just so happens that a condensed version of the story about Patrick on the cablecar appeared in Catholic Exchange's Touched by Grace column, causing quite a few people otherwise unfamiliar with this blog to click through. Lisa Hendey, founder of CatholicMom.com was kind enough to post a link to the Spoon Saints craft on CatholicMom's Halloween page, bringing many new visitors. Also, thanks to Lisa, Saints of the Season, the first installment of a new column on Living the Liturgical year appeared at CatholicMom.com.
This very unusual and temporary increase in traffic here was perfectly timed for more people to read the prayer requests and storm Heaven for my mother.
Deo gratias!
Last night, at about nine o'clock, I was putting the baby to bed when I noticed the answering machine in my room flashing. I listened and heard a message from my mother's rehab facility, saying they were trying to reach me urgently. (I had had my cell phone with me all day, so it never occurred to me there might be an important message on the machine.)
We had been out all day--violin, ballet, doctor's appointments--leaving the house at 8:30 in the morning and not returning until 5 o'clock. On our way home, Maureen had asked to go see Grandma, and I hesitated, but decided to go home and make dinner instead. Little did I know, Mom had spent the morning in the emergency room of yet another hospital and was already in intensive care.
As you know, she has a sore leg from the accident with a large hematoma. Because she is on blood thinner (Coumadin), it was not healing, so the doctor in the rehab suggested taking her off this drug for a few days. He told me the chances of her having a stroke from this would be one in a million.
Yesterday, she lost movement on her entire left side.
I am heading over to see her now, but wanted to put this post up quickly to ask you to pray. Thank you so much for the many prayers you have been offering for her the past few days.
The morning of the Feast of St. Francis, my local police department called with the news that my mother had been in an accident on her way to my house. She'd been paused at an intersection with her foot on the brake waiting to make a left hand turn, when a nineteen year old in the oncoming lane changed a compact disc, swerving just enough to hit her head on. The police said they were taking her to a local emergency room, but assured me her injuries were only minor.
Daddy rushed home from work to look after the children, and I headed for the hospital. Brushing aside a curtain in a dimly lit room, I found her sitting up in bed, wrapped in a blanket and looking reasonably well. Her leg was sore, but she remained upbeat, telling me the details of the accident, saying how nice the teenage boy had been and how sorry she felt for him. [He had already been discharged from the same emergency room.] More than anything else, she wanted to know if The Long Island Catholic had come out with my new column in it. [In other words, she was completely herself.]
A nurse bustled through the curtain with discharge papers, surprising us with the good news that Mom was ready to go home. My big black twelve passenger van, affectionately known around here as "the monster truck," is difficult for my mother to mount even on her best day, so there was no way she could get into it with a sore leg. I raced home to switch cars, returning in less than an hour and parking in the emergency room circle, hoping she would be ready to go.
Setting aside the faded curtain, I did not find my mother dressed and ready, eager to stop for a cup of soup on the way home, as she had been planning only an hour before. She was sick and dazed, her face red and puffy. Although she knew me, she could no longer recall the accident, acting surprised and alarmed each time she heard it mentioned.
Needless to say, the doctor on call would not send her home, but ordered she be taken to another hospital with a trauma surgeon. The fear was that she might have taken a bump to the head in the accident, causing a bleed on the brain. Personally, I thought she had had a stroke, brought on by the ordeal of the accident and just being in the hospital. As sweet and friendly as she is, my mother is a quiet person who craves privacy. I couldn't help feeling that if I had gotten her out of there in the first place, she would have been all right.
I returned home in the empty red Saturn, stopping to nurse the baby and grab a bite to eat before heading to the second emergency room. Night had fallen and there was a chill in the air. The hospital loomed before me, billowing smoke in crazy wisps, so that it seemed there could never be a more oppressive looking building. Six times before, Daddy and I had arrived at that same hospital at all hours, joy and excitement quickening our every step. How different was this lonesome walk, plodding toward the emergency room and a bleak unknown.
My mother was lying in a bed in the hallway. Other people's loved ones were lying in beds too, and a janitor made his way around them with a mop. Mom's cheeks looked redder than ever, making her eyes seem small and almost childlike. I stood trying to explain what had happened to her, waiting for someone else to come around and try to explain it to me. Eventually two young doctors took me aside, their speeches peppered with words like "dementia" and "loopy," concluding with a regretful, "she may never come out of it."
Back on the pavement outside, I felt sick to my stomach. Harsh lights beamed down on my head as I passed two hospital workers paused for a cigarette. An ambulance blared in the distance, drawing closer, so that the scene took on a surreal quality. I fancied it to be a movie set of an emergency room and wished I could tear it all down to reclaim the bright, hopeful morning that seemed so distant now.
The next day, I tried teaching the children in the cottage, the familiar routine somehow reassuring. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept catching glimpses of my mother walking up the driveway as she so often did, each time feeling a stab remembering that this might never be again. The younger children did not quite grasp the seriousness of Grandma's condition, mostly because I could not bring myself to tell them. In spite of my silence, Theresa's jaw twitched, and Agnes shed quiet tears, looking at me with round, understanding eyes. Those girls of mine are growing up.
By the time I was able to return to the hospital, the sun was just beginning to set, and I was driving right into it. It was enormous on the horizon, round and orange, the kind of sun no driver wants to face--yet somehow it made me think about "the woman clothed with the sun." I half remembered another experience in the very same hospital and the woman "with the moon under her feet." She had seen me through the bleak unknown before and had given me reason after reason to trust. I thought about that recent column and its bottom line: "The Blessed Mother always takes care of us."
All right, I decided then and there, I am going to trust. Not trust in the outcome I wanted, mind you, but in the Blessed Mother's care, no matter what the outcome.
I made my way to my mother's room and found her sitting up in bed. Something in the glimmer of her eye made me ask hopefully, "Mom, do you remember the accident?"
"Yes," she said, "I remember it, but it only came back to me a little while ago. A group of doctors was in asking me questions, and I kept telling them there had been no accident. I insisted I had come to the hospital after my doctor's appointment on Wednesday. The moment they walked away, it began to come back to me, and I realized what they were talking about."
She proceeded to tell me all the details, every bit as lucidly as she had during that first hour in the hospital. She began cracking jokes that had me howling, describing how the doctors had looked askance when she denied the accident, each one jotting down the same note in his or her book: "N-U-T-S!" [In other words, she was completely herself.]
Mom's leg is still in bad shape, and she cannot walk, but time and rehabilitation will take care of that. I have been taking sub-groups of the family to visit her at the rehab center every day, and there is currently no higher aspiration in life for my children than to be the one to carry the mail in to Grandma. Everyone is waiting hopefully for the day the red Saturn will bring her home to stay with us.
And, yes, as this title tells, there was a third emergency room in my future, but that, I'm afraid, is a tale in itself!
Is it possible that a year has passed since the spoon saints made their appearance? It seems only yesterday we were creating our first procession for the mantelpiece!
My friend Lorraine writes from the heart in a way that makes me think perhaps the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary ought to be known as "Mother's Day": October 7th--Mothers.
Our San Francisco adventure kept me away from the 4Real Conference, but The Family-Centered Learning Conference will be here before we know it, promising to be a memorable and faith-filled event. Michele Quigley was kind enough to ask me to speak, and, when you see the line-up, you will know what a joy it is to be in the company of some of my favorite home educating mothers.
My talk is called A Garden Well Tended: Living the Liturgical Year in the Catholic Home:
"Following the pattern set out for the year by our beautiful Mother Church, parents are like gardeners sowing seeds of faith in the fertile hearts of children. This talk will show how prayer, family tradition, and happy memories take root during childhood, blossoming into a deep and lifelong love for our Faith."
This will be my first time speaking at a conference, and I thank Michele for the opportunity.
I hope to meet many of you there!I am very pleased to say that I will be writing a new column at The Long Island Catholic called "The Catholic Home."
Here is the debut piece, a story about our first (of three) visits to see Our Lady of America during the visit of the statue to New York City: Our Mother's Care.
[Please click here for archived column, "Our Mother's Care."]
Much more needs to be said about the graces received during this time, and I hope to post pictures here, but for now, thank you for clicking over to read the column!
[The organizers of the event encouraged the children to touch the statue, lest they appear too presumptuous in this picture!]
