Fit Month for Dying Read Free Page A

ten minutes beforehand. I’ll hold it in his hand myself. With a death grip, you might say. So you go on to bed. And leave everything to me. ’Pon my soul, I won’t let you down.”
    Philomena pulls herself up in her chair, squares her shoulders as if readying for battle. “’Pon your soul! My Jesus, Mary and Holy St. Joseph, b’y. Me depend upon your soul! Your word! Where in the name of the Blessed Mother of God would that leave me? Let alone your poor father.”
    Yet the childish sincerity of his pledge upon his neglected soul reawakens some warm memory in Philomena. “Yer right, me son,” she says, abruptly getting up out of her chair. “I thinks I’ll go to bed after all. And I’ll take a pill before I goes. Tess, you’ll place the candle in Dad’s hand!” I am a conscript, not a volunteer. As an extra precaution she threatens, “Remember now, Tess, I’ll hold you accountable for Dad having a proper death. I’m putting my trust in you.”
    In my eagerness to get her to go to bed, I almost cross my heart and say ’pon my soul, like Danny did. Instead, I say with all the assurance I can muster, “You can count on me, Mrs. Phil. I won’t leave Mr. Hube alone for a minute. I’ll be right beside him the whole night.”
    â€œI wants ye to remember that if Hube’s condition worsens, ye’ll rout me right away. At the slightest change for the worst, I want ye to rout me. Even if I’ve jest fallen asleep.”
    I promise her I will remember to do just that. So does Greg. So does Paddy. As she is leaving the kitchen, Danny reaffirms, “’Pon my soul, Mom, I’ll remember to call you even if the others don’t. And I’ll ride herd on Tess to get that candle underway. Trust me on this!”
    â€œThat’s good,” she says over her shoulder as she opens the door and steps into the unheated hallway that leads to the cold upstairs. “Because I’ve got enough to account fer already without letting yer father die and not doing all in my power to get him safely to the other side.”
    Each word holds a lifetime of self-chastisement, a lifetime of unpurged guilt.
    Philomena is a stout Catholic, all the more stout because she unhitched herself at the age of twenty-eight from the Church’s centre when she mix-married Hubert, a Church of England Protestant. Even though she had gotten married in the Catholic Church — and that was no easy feat at the time — she believed then, and continues to believe, that her mixed marriage constituted a form of disloyalty. In the intervening years, as a way of making amends for her betrayal, she has always adhered strictly to form and format, rite and ritual in all things Catholic. In fact, once in the confessional a priest told her in a way that wasn’t complimentary that she was trying to be more Catholic than the Church itself. When she called him on his remark, he explained that she was being overly scrupulous and that she should ease up on herself.
    But she tossed away his advice the minute she stepped out of the confessional. As she explained to me years afterwards, she felt she had no right to ease up on herself. She had failed with both of her sons. Failed miserably. Despite all of her efforts to bring them up solid Catholics, they had thrown off the Church. One son threw it off when he was little more than a child, and he had grown to manhood without hanging on to as much as a shred of her religion. The other son shut himself off from receiving full benefits of the Church by marrying a “grass widow” — a woman whose husband was still very much above the sod.
    Philomena takes her sons’ straying from their religion as her just punishment for having watered down her religion by marrying outside it. She also takes it as her just punishment that Danny has never been able to grab life by the neck and hang on to it. She