My Story -- Chapter Four

Our parents both died of heart disease 5 weeks apart in February/March 1991. This was after a year of illness--angiograms, angioplasty, pacemaker, congestive heart failure, etc. My Mom was 76 and Dad was 83. My siblings and I (10 including spouses) spent the bulk of 1990 traveling to Maine from as far as California to spend one to two weeks in rotation to take care of them, offering support when one of them would be in the hospital, and generally seeing to their comfort. In December 1990, a major celebration took place over the holidays because they both seemed to be doing well and we were all together once again. But the day after Christmas while we were all still in Maine, Dad developed a blood clot in his leg and was hospitalized and died there six weeks later on February 19, 1991. Dad was basically a good man. He worked hard, played hard and made a difference in our lives. He was a self-starter, self-taught and a self-made man. With little education as a youngster (no high school), he managed to run the sales departments of one or two franchised auto agencies in my hometown. He was also a land developer and built houses. Above all, he enjoyed politics. He and his Sunday morning cronies would love it when Washington notables Edmund Muskie or George Mitchell would drop in on their discussion group. And former Senator Bill Hathaway lived on the second floor of our two-story home for a few years when he first moved to Maine to establish residency for his upcoming career in national politics. Dad ran for the local city council a couple of times and was part of the that council for one term. During the period he was in office, he noticed funny things going on with the city's books and exposed the information to the local media, cleaning up mess in Lewiston. He also enjoyed writing "letters to the editor" about various local issues. In fact, as he lay in his hospital bed in early February 1991 just before his death, he received an invitation from the Chair of the New Library Building Committee inviting him to be on that committee because he had expressed so much interest in the project via his letters to the editor. Dad did have some demons which manifested themselves in alcohol abuse. In light of recent revelations regarding clergy sexual abuse in Canadian boarding schools, some family members attribute some of his behavior to possible Roman Catholic clergy sexual abuse at a Catholic boarding school he attended in the province of Quebec in his adolescence. He had also prevented my brother from becoming an altar boy or even attending any Catholic all-male religious retreats, and he did not attend church with us for as long as I can remember. Mom was a homemaker and our "angel." She was loving, caring, spiritual and an avid churchgoer who put priests on pedestals. She was also a "gatherer" in the sense that she loved being around people. I remember as a youngster how she would load up the car with all the neighborhood kids and take us to the beach on a hot day. All we needed do was ask and help pack a picnic basket. Mom too, had a limited education. She had to quit high school in her senior year in order to work and help support a houseful of 13 children. She was an avid reader and particularly enjoyed historical novels, especially books on the Civic War, and would engage in discussions and debates with her closest brother, a disabled World War II veteran who was also a voracious reader. Because my husband Dick and I lived in Massachusetts and owned property in Freeport, Maine, we spent a lot of time with my parents before they died. We typically visited them one weekend a month during the winter and they would come to Freeport in the summer. They, as we, enjoyed playing cards so we always managed to include a few games of Pinochle after a feast of lobsters. In fact, the family buried in my parents' casket, their respective little card game "dime purses." Winters can be difficult in Maine because of many snow and ice storms and Dad's hospitalization in late December 1990 presented a problem in terms of my Mom's care. Her congestive heart failure was unpredictable and she would have difficulty breathing, landing in the hospital every other week it seemed. It was especially hard during my Dad's hospital stay because she would extend beyond her own physical energy in order to visit him daily. She could no longer live alone, did not want any other relative or stranger in the house and would not leave Lewiston to come live, even temporarily, with one of us. Hence, the family decision was made to find a suitable one-bedroom apartment in a nearby assisted living facility, providing there would be no problems if we came to spend a few days with her. The facility also assured us that any of her non-breathing bouts would be attended to professionally if she were alone. In our search for the most suitable place, it did not occur to us that there may not be a weekly Mass in their non-denominational chapel. Since 90% of the facility's occupants were Roman Catholic--mostly French--certainly a priest/chaplain would come to visit every week, so we thought. When I visited Mom after the first two weeks of her five or six-week stay and discovered that there had been no priest there the entire two weeks, I decided to ask around to see if someone would visit her. One priest agreed, but never went I later discovered, and she never saw a priest again until she was nearly comatose in the hospital three days before she died in March, 1991. Living in the Boston diocese where priest shortages were either safely hidden or not yet severe, I had no idea about the dire need for priests. That it was a problem in the Midwest and other parts of the country never made New England press unless someone were to read religious newspapers and magazines. At Dad's funeral, an old parochial school chum whom I had not seen in 35 years came to visit. She had continued to live in our hometown and was now 50 years old and divorced. During our conversation, I asked, "So what does someone our age do for excitement around here?" to which she replied, "Oh, my life is quite complete. I've been involved with a priest for thirteen years." My mouth nearly dropped to the floor. I had never heard of such a thing. That my friend should talk so openly about this, especially to someone whom she had not seen in this many years was a shocking as the message itself. My friend and I reconnected over the next few months when I would come to Maine to help clean out the old homestead and get it ready for sale. It was during these lunches and dinners that my eyes were opened to what I now know is a "farce"--celibacy in the Catholic institution. She told me that many "housekeepers" who walk the malls on Saturday afternoons with their parish priest are not really "housekeepers," that many priests were secretly married, a fact that was later confirmed to me by a Pentagon official especially among priests in the military. My friend also said that 20,000 married priests had left their clerical ministry since the late 1960s mostly to marry. As a devout traditional-bordering-conservative Catholic at the time who attended church regularly and was teaching CCD (religion classes to youngsters), this information astounded me. I didn't even know that there was such a thing as a married priest! (When a parish priest was replaced in a particular parish, I like others just presumed that he had relocated to another parish, not left to marry.) In order to prove to me that there were "sexual shenanigans" going on in the church, my friend showed me a very explicit book about the male and female anatomy. Written by a Canadian priest, it educated and discussed for other priests the combination of spirituality and sexuality. The little book was so worn, it was obvious that it had seen many hands. #