He was in love with everything about this place, from the restored bell tower to the two-hundred-year-old floors and the new, hand-carved crucifix over the altar.
And he loved the people of this town.
He adjusted his stole and was beginning to receive Holy Communion when he felt a sharp stabbing sensation behind his right eye, more stunningly painful than anything he had ever felt before. The chalice jumped from his hand. He stepped back, lost his footing, and dropped hard to the floor.
What is happening? What is wrong with me?
He felt hands pulling at him, heard questions being shouted, but he couldn’t comprehend any of it. The fierce pain obliterated words, his vision, and, struggling to get up, he realized that he had no control at all over his body. He vomited onto the floor.
James tried opening his mind to God as Brigid had described to him, but all he felt was the astonishing, unrelenting pain and the certainty that he was drowning. James heard himself say, “Not…going…to make it.”
He didn’t want to die. Not yet.
He lost consciousness and came back to the pain, still roaring through his head like a runaway train.
James heard his name shouted right next to his ear.
“Daddy!”
He opened his eyes and tried to smile at Gilly; then he rolled his eyes up and glimpsed Brigid’s stricken face.
She said, “James, the ambulance is coming. Hang on to me. Hang on. Please. We’ll get through this.”
“I can’t,” he said. “Last. Rites.”
She screamed “No!” but he knew she understood. He dropped away again, and when he opened his eyes, Brigid was there, making a cross on his brow, forgiving him for his sins, slipping a drop of wine between his lips.
The immense pain dragged James back again into nothingness. His last thoughts were, Brigid has prepared my soul. And, The pain.
Chapter 107
GILLY AND I were at Sloan’s Funeral Home, sitting in the front row of the reposing room, empty except for my beloved James, lying dead in his open coffin before us. It was good that Gilly and I had this private time to say good-bye to him, to pray for him before his funeral.
But even prayer was knocked down and sucked under by my grief. Gilly, too, was devastated, switching back and forth between choked sobbing and long, sad silences. It felt as though my heart kept beating only so that I could be there for our daughter, who had watched her father die in agony.
I knew James’s cause of death before we got the M.E.’s report. The suddenness and severity of his pain, the seizures and tremors, the dilated pupils and strangled speech, had told me that a brain aneurysm had ruptured, that his blood had rushed through and flooded the space between his skull and brain. If there had been time to get him into surgery-if only there had been time-maybe, maybe, he would have lived.
I looked at my husband in his coffin, with so many tall vases of flowers banked around him. Knowing that he was beyond pain gave me no solace or consolation. We had loved James so much. Gilly would grow up without him, and he had been deprived of so many things he had wanted to do. How could I sleep again in our house without him?
Gilly was lying across two chairs with her head in my lap. I dropped my hand to her head, buried my fingers in her hair. As she stirred, air rushed past my ears, and I saw a soft light arcing over James’s coffin-but he wasn’t there. The body lying on white satin was mine.
I was dead.
It wasn’t James who had died, it was me.
What had happened to me?
Had I died in South Sudan?
Or was I immobilized in a hospital, my body paralyzed while my brain lived in a dream world? Had everything that had happened after I’d been shot been an illusion? I was more confused than during the times when I’d connected with God. I was no longer sure where I was, what was real.
It was happening now, the warmth inside my chest, the breeze from nowhere, the split locations and overlapping scenes.
There I was, sitting with Gilly on a folding chair, and there I was, enclosed in a wooden box with diffused light all around me, cool satin behind my neck. I smelled lilies close by. And I heard the indistinct sound of voices.
God. What is happening?
You know.
I know what?
I saw both dimensions in the round. Gilly and I were in chairs a few yards away from the casket. James was with us, too. James. He was alive. His cheeks were pink, his eyes were bright, and he seemed-happy. He took me into his arms, and I held him tight while sobbing into the crook between his neck and shoulder. I smelled his skin and hair. This was reality. This was real.
At the same time, I could see from where I lay in the coffin. I didn’t have to sit up or even open my eyes as others came into focus. Colin knelt before my coffin and winked at me. I felt an indescribable pressure in my chest when I recognized the child sitting over there behind Gilly, kicking her seat-that was Tre.
Karl was beside Tre. He apologized to Gilly. I couldn’t quite hear the words, but I saw the kindness and love in his face. My father approached the coffin. I heard him say, “You were a good girl, Brigid.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks, and still the overlapping images persisted.
I saw refugees I’d known and who had died at BZFO, and the dead patients at Kind Hands, and soldiers who’d been massacred on the killing field. Father Delahanty knelt before my coffin and prayed, then he stood and crossed my forehead as I had crossed his.
He said, God has a plan for you.
That tore it completely. What was this plan?
I cried out, “God, why? Why did you let James die?”
When I’d asked God, “Why?” He’d given me birds. A baby who’d been run over in the street. The death of my own child. Of Karl. God had told me, He lived the full extent of his life.
Now the resonance came to me, the words, Be with Gillian. Feel what it is to be alive.
Gilly’s voice cut through the vision, coming to me clear and strong at my side. She tugged my hand.
“Mom. Mommy. We have to go.”
The vision dissolved. Sloan’s dim reposing room was lit only by candles and sconces, not divine light. Earl Sloan Jr. walked stiffly toward me.
“We should be going. But do you need another moment?”
I was shaking all over. “Please.”
I said to Gilly, “Let’s say our good-byes to Daddy.”
I put my arm around Gilly’s waist as I knelt before James’s coffin and said the Lord’s Prayer. I was thinking, What just happened? What am I supposed to understand from this? Was that really the Word of God? Why has He left me to suffer again?
It came together as our car followed the hearse to the church. I had a lingering sense of what I’d experienced in the funeral parlor. I was sitting in the backseat of a hired car with Gilly beside me. And some vestigial part of me was lying in the coffin instead of James.
I understood.
God was showing me that life and death were transient states, indivisible parts of a whole.
I would see James again. I would be with my love.
Part Five
Chapter 108
IT WAS forty-five nippy degrees in New York City this Sunday morning in February, and I was excited that I would be saying Mass at the opening of the three hundredth JMJ church.
St. Barnabas was a stately, gray stone church in the East Village, built on a green in the eighteen hundreds, which over the last two hundred years had become a neighborhood.