With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir by Christine Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

my sister, who wasn’t home, and I left a message with her fiancé that she had to come home right away. Then I called a high school friend and made plans to spend the night at her house. I was ready to leave by the time she came to get me, and as we left the house, the ambulance was just arriving.
    As devastated as I was that my mother had died, I wasn’t sorry that she died before the ambulance arrived. At that stage of her illness, the hospital could have done nothing other than extend her life for a few hours or days, which would have been torture for her.
    T he funeral was held on Christmas Eve at McLaughlin Kramer and St. Patrick’s in Glen Cove, the same place where we later had my grandmother’s and my aunt’s funerals. Not long before she died, my mother had given Ellen an envelope with all manner of instructions. She’d already made her own funeral arrangements, picked out her coffin, and prepared her funeral card. In the instructions, she told Ellen what clothes she wanted to wear and asked that the coffin be closed. She cared very much about how she looked, and the ten years she’d spent fighting cancer had taken their toll. It turns out, however, that Julia wanted an open casket. As my sister, Ellen, recently observed, “We had a distraught live lady who wanted it open. And a demanding dead lady who wanted it closed.” Julia won that argument. We had an open casket.
    The funeral card my mother designed was not your typical mass card. It was printed on cream-colored wedding-invitation card stock. A gold Celtic cross adorned the front on top. In the middle was a quote from Saint Paul, with his name underneath. When you opened the card, it said on the inside, “Gratefully, Mary Callaghan Quinn, December 21st, 1982.” It was printed in such a way that Saint Paul’s name on the outside of the card lined up perfectly with the date of my mother’s death on the inside, so when the card was closed, Saint Paul’s name sat directly over the date.
    I stayed fairly well composed during the wake’s three sittings, but I lost it at the funeral. Even before it started, I remember my father and sister walking up to the front of the room to pray at my mother’s casket. I was standing in the doorway in the back and couldn’t move. I watched from behind as Ellen turned to my father, crying, “Oh, Daddy.” I must have joined them at some point, because I remember the coffin. I’d already said no to the funeral director when he’d asked me if I’d bring the wine and the host up to the priest during the mass. I’d pointed to my first cousins and said, “They’ll do it!” I just couldn’t.
    It was a typical funeral mass, which is similar to a regular mass: two readings, a gospel, and a sermon. There were two priests doing the mass. One came from my family’s church, St. Patrick’s, and one came from St. Rocco’s, a church that my mother liked and attended on occasion. The priests both gave eulogies as well. No one else spoke, which was typical in those days for Catholic funerals.
    I had to be taken out of the funeral at one point, because I was so upset. My mother’s friend Mrs. Gorman (the mother of the family I was always sent to visit) walked me around outside. One of my friends said later that since I’d held up so well at the wake, she was surprised when I fell to pieces at the funeral. I begged my father and Ellen to let me skip the cemetery. It was such a long drive, and I just wanted to go home and go to bed. But I had no choice. When we got there, we watched as the plain wooden box was lowered into the ground. The coffin was inside the box to protect it from the dirt.
    The priests recited some prayers, we were each given a rose to throw on top of the coffin, and then it was over. Everything went off as my mother had planned, except for the open casket and the fact that we ran out of funeral cards. She hadn’t counted on the huge number of people who would attend. We also didn’t have a gathering