Yesterday J and I went to Boston’s North End for the 100th annual Saint Anthony’s Feast. As a good little Catholic girl in Ohio, I grew up praying to Saint Anthony whenever I lost something. I remember my Mom explaining that praying to Saint Anthony wasn’t a magical guarantee you’d find whatever you’d lost, but repeating Saint Anthony’s prayer would help you stay focused while you kept searching. The purpose of the prayer wasn’t to find your lost things for you; the purpose of the prayer was to keep you from giving up hope.
It’s been years since I’ve prayed to Saint Anthony…and truth be told, it’s been years since I’ve been to church. But whenever J and I go to a religious festival in Boston’s Italian enclave, the pomp and iconography feels natural, like returning to one’s motherland.
Both J and I are a mix of Italian and Irish, we both are lapsed Catholics, and we both wonder how outsiders–that is, people who are neither Catholic nor Italian–react when they see a large statue being paraded through thronged streets, trailing ribbons pinned with money. What would a proverbial man from Mars make of such a spectacle? What, for that matter, do two lapsed Catholics make of it?
I don’t personally believe Saint Anthony is a man looking down from a cloud, making sure people’s prayers get answered. But that doesn’t mean I make light of Saint Anthony’s Feast. Regardless of our own lapsed Catholicism, J and I made sure to stop at a makeshift shrine where a smaller statue of Saint Anthony stayed throughout the festival, pinning a donation alongside everyone else’s and accepting a small button in return.
Because I was raised Catholic, I know every dollar pinned to Saint Anthony’s train represents someone’s sincere prayer: a wish for something lost, a hope for something denied, or an expression of gratitude for something granted. (When my Mom taught me how to pray to Saint Anthony, she also explained that if your prayer was answered, you were obligated to thank Saint Anthony as many times as you’d petitioned him.)
Seeing all the prayers pinned like a cape to Saint Anthony’s statue, who am I to hold myself aloof from those who search, seek, hope, and sometimes lose hope? Haven’t we all lost things, and don’t we all continue to search? One person loses their car keys, another loses a ring, still another loses an important document. It is a universal fact of life that anything that can be held can just as easily be lost. Isn’t any of us lucky to reach the end of our days without losing our faith, heart, or mind?
Anne Lamott once said there are only three prayers: help, thanks, and wow. Pious Catholics appeal to Jesus, Mary, or Joseph when the Big Stuff is on the line, but even those of us who are feeble in our faith trust Saint Anthony with our trifles. As the patron of lost things, Saint Anthony is privy to our mundane frustrations, and he knows more than anyone the tiny trinkets we hold dear. How can anyone who hasn’t lost all hope belittle him for that?
Click here for more photos from this year’s Saint Anthony’s Feast. Enjoy!
Last month, right after J and I put Toivo to sleep, I flew to Columbus, Ohio to visit my family, as I do every summer. This year’s visit was bittersweet, however, since my Dad is slowly dying there.
During my visit, my Dad was in the hospital, again. My Dad has battled many medical ailments over the years–I am being purposefully vague, as my family never asked to have a writer in it–and this year alone, my Dad has been rushed to the hospital a half dozen times. During this most recent hospitalization, we had no illusions: all of us (my Dad included) know there is no getting better this time. During my visit, my family and I discussed Dad’s end-of-life wishes, and he made it clear to both us and his doctors that he is ready to die.
When I visited my Dad in the hospital the morning before I flew back to New England, I knew I was probably saying my final goodbyes, and as far as final visits go, mine was a good one, with nothing I wanted to say left unsaid. Since I returned from Ohio, my Dad has moved from the hospital into a nursing home for hospice care, and now we wait for his body to shut down.
Now that I’m hundreds of miles away from my Dad, I’m finding that this waiting for him to pass is worse than actually saying goodbye to him in person. It’s not the dying that’s difficult, but the waiting to die.
While I was in Ohio, I emailed J to update him on my Dad’s prognosis. Since we had just put Toivo down, it was impossible not to compare her end-of-life, with both of us there to comfort her, with my Dad’s impending passing. I told J that if my Dad were a dog, we could choose when to say goodbye rather than waiting for nature to take its course, and J replied that when a pet is dying, you have the power to control the narrative because you are able to decide when and how the story ends.
I have never (yet) lost a parent, but I’ve lost many dogs and cats over the years, and in every case, my grief has been mixed with relief. When you decide to euthanize a pet, you know you are choosing the most merciful option. You might wish for more time, but your gut knows that more time is not the same as good time. When you euthanize a pet, you are relieved to be done with the futile fight to keep a creature alive who is ready to be Gone. After every pet’s death, I have wanted to embrace the vet who administered the fateful injection. After suffering in the limbo of anticipatory grief, it is a relief to begin the honest work of actually grieving.
If human euthanasia were legal, my family and I could have arranged a storybook passing while I was in Ohio, with all of us gathered at my Dad’s bedside during his final moments. Instead, I am 700 miles away, waiting for a phone call saying my Dad is gone. It’s not the way I’d want to go; it’s not the way I’d want anyone to go. I have chosen time and again to be present when one of our pets is put to sleep because I don’t think any creature should have to die alone…and this is a courtesy I can’t extend to my own father. My father’s impending death is a narrative I am powerless to control.
Today’s photos come from the Franklin Park Conservatory, where my sisters and I went walking one day while I was in Columbus.
Hoarded Ordinaries 