It Runs in the Family Read Free

he’d say. My sister would bring him a drink. “Thanks, love,” he’d say. My brother would spend time with him. “Thanks for giving an old man a lift,” he’d say. My mom, the Jonah House community, the continuous stream of friends and relatives who came to say hello, spend some time, and say goodbye all experienced the same thing—thanksgiving. Dad allowed no gesture, however small, to go unappreciated.
    When some of the day-to-day care became too much for us, we brought in hospice care. They were amazing. They respected what we were doing—loving our dad on his journey to death. Letting him die the way he lived: surrounded by people, surrounded by love, resisting the medical -industrial-complex.
    Dad stopped eating and did not want to drink. His breath grew labored. Magnified by the baby monitor in his room, his breathing became the off-kilter metronome of our days, as we planned the funeral, shared stories and memories, prayed, cried, and laughed.
    On December 6, 2002, sometime after dinner, he died. He died at Jonah House, and more than thirty of his friends, family, and community members were there. We had walked the last weeks with him.
    Each of us wept, probing the hole that his absence would leave in our lives. We stood around him and prayed, cried, and said goodbye. There was gratitude too—that his long, painful journey was over. We were all confident that we gained a powerful advocate in heaven. The pine box that my brother and friends made was ready, beautifully painted by the iconographer Bill McNichols. We prepared the body and laid him in the coffin in dry ice.
    The wake and funeral were at Saint Peter Claver, where Dad had served as a priest decades earlier. The night after the wake, we gathered around him one last time and then nailed the coffin closed. I remember my Uncle Jim, my dad’s oldest living brother at the time, driving nails deep with just two whacks of the hammer, in contrast to my own clumsy, off-center pings.
    The next morning was cold, clear, and so beautiful. Dad was loaded onto the back of a pickup truck and my sister Kate, our sister-in-law Molly, and I rode in the truck with him. Other people carried signs and banners as we processed the mile or so to the church for the funeral Mass. I don’t remember that much of the service, but it was a strangely happy occasion. Dad was gone, but he was still so present in the room full of people who loved him. That presence was the theme of the eulogy that Kate and I wrote, which read in part:
He is here with us every time a hammer strikes on killing metal, transforming it from a tool of death to a productive, life-giving, life-affirming implement .
He is here with us every time a member of the church communicates the central message of the gospel (thou shalt not kill) and acts to oppose killing, rather than providing the church seal of approval on war .
He is here whenever joy and irreverent laughter and kindness and hard work are present .
He is here every time we reach across color and class lines and embrace each other as brother and sister .
    We ended by saying, “Thanks, Dad, for lessons in freedom, inside and outside of prison. And thanks to all of you for struggling toward freedom and working to build a just and peaceful world. Our dad lives on in you.” I have only seen my mother cry a few times. She broke down at my dad’s grave—wept and sobbed as he was being lowered into it, with the torches and snow and music evoking some sort of timeless Viking ritual.
    She broke, and then she began to remake herself. For the last twelve years, she has continued a life of community, labor, prayer, organizing, resistance, studying the Bible, and innovation. She devotes time and energy to her prodigious gift for art. Donkeys, goats, llamas, and guinea fowl have joined the Jonah House community and now quarrel and push one another at feeding time. Six incredible youngsters now call her Grandma, showering her with sloppy kisses and clumsy