The conformed copies of Michael A. Hess’s Last Will and Testament arrived in the mail a week later. Doris White’s covering letter was a little apologetic.
We have looked into the state of the law in the District of Columbia regarding the control of the disposition of one’s remains. Unfortunately, there is no statute or other law protecting one’s right to determine how one’s remains are treated. Your father, as heir at law, would indeed have the power to determine how to dispose of your remains. As a practical matter, however, prearrangement, including prepayment of costs, often helps to ensure that your preference will be honored. Once prearrangements are in place and costs are paid, family members are often unwilling to finance the additional costs to change the disposition arrangements. Thus, we recommend that you make prearrangements at this time and prepay the costs in full. If you do not have other connections, you might try DeVol Funeral Home at 2222 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC. Arrangements can be made through them for West Virginia also.
If we can help in any other way, please do not hesitate to call.
With kindest regards,
Sincerely,
Doris White
Mike sat in silence after reading Doris’s letter. Pete was at the breakfast table making a pretence of reading the Post, but Mike knew he was waiting for him to speak.
‘Well, that’s it, Pete. This paper here says you get my worldly goods.’ He sighed and smiled. ‘And my heart says you get my love forever. ’ Mike felt tears sting his eyes; his throat tightened. ‘I’m sorry we could never get married – what a wedding we could have had! We could have invited everyone out to the house – then you would have had an anniversary to remember and celebrate.’
Pete came to sit on the sofa. Mike could barely lift his arm to take his hand.
‘The letter’s about remains. Here, you take it and read it. But what will remain of me, do you think? Of the real me?’
Pete kissed him on the cheek.
‘Yo u’ll remain, Mike. You’ll remain with me. I’ll always miss you, and I’ll always love you.’
‘Thank you.’ Mike’s voice trembled. ‘I’ll miss you’ – the strangeness of the idea prompted an involuntary smile – ‘but I won’t miss myself. Because the truth is I never knew who I was. I’m looking back on my life because of this’ – he motioned to the document lying on his knee – ‘and it just feels like I never found anywhere I could fit.’
Pete made to object, but Mike shook his head.
‘I’ve always been an orphan. I never had any ties in this world, and when I wanted to find some the nuns turned me away. Then I tried to build an identity, but I got it all wrong. The party gave me somewhere I felt I could belong, but Rudy’s right – I had to sell out to get it. And most of all I wanted the love and solace of being with you, Pete; but I ruined it by doing . . . this.’ He gestured weakly to his wasted body. ‘I love you, Pete. I always loved you, but I blew it, and it’s death that puts an end to love.’
The last week Mike spent at home in Shepherdstown was hard. He listened to music, started drinking in the mornings and spent the afternoons calling friends. Frequently he called them back the following morning to apologize for the rage, the despair or the self-pity of the previous day’s call.
In the evenings Pete came home to find Mike stretched out on the couch. He offered his hand; Mike sometimes took it and sometimes not. It seemed pointless to ask, ‘Are you OK?’ but Pete asked anyway. If Mike was willing to be comforted, he smiled and asked how Pete’s day had been. But more often he was not open to sympathy, pulling a bitter face and turning to the wall. Pete knew not to insist on talking; he found other paths – subtle detours, tender subterfuges – that would allow him admission to Mike’s inner world. Sometimes he simply went to the kitchen and prepared the ingredients for their favourite dishes – a bouillabaisse or saddle of veal with ginger and spring onions. The power of the aromas – the sharp sea-tinted tang of the bubbling fish, the enveloping warmth of the slow-cooking meat – wakened memories in Mike that roused him. He lifted himself from the sofa and shuffled through to the kitchen in his thick felt slippers. Silently he would put his hand on Pete’s shoulder – a signal of truce, a signal that now he wished for the comfort he had rejected.
On Monday 7 August, in the middle of the afternoon, Mike fell and lay helpless on the wooden floor of the living room for over an hour before he could drag himself to the phone. Pete immediately drove out to the house and together they took the familiar trip into DC, along the Parkway, over Key Bridge and down K Street to the ER entrance of George Washington Hospital. The specialist who had been treating Mike grimaced at his condition. He was taken to a private room in the monitoring unit and remained there for the next six days. By Sunday morning, 13 August, his condition had improved a little and he was transferred to a regular ward. The move seemed to lift his spirits and he talked optimistically about a vacation in Italy. Pete went home for a few hours, but in the afternoon the hospital called to say Mike had crashed and Pete should get back as quick as he could. He found Mike semi-conscious and on life support in the intensive care unit. The doctor said they had had to resuscitate him with oxygen and were uncertain about his outlook. When Pete squeezed his hand, Mike responded. He could nod or shake his head, but he could no longer talk.
Pete called Mary in Florida and she made the last flight that day up to Washington. She asked Mike if he wanted her to tell Doc and the boys what was happening, but he shook his head, his eyes bright with fevered determination. She asked him again and his response was unmistakably negative.
For the next twenty-four hours Mike hovered in a limbo of unknowing. Then late on Monday night alarms sounded on the monitoring equipment by his bed and the emergency resuscitation team came running. When the panic was over, a doctor told Pete and Mary he had slipped into a coma and asked if they wanted to consider switching off life support. For the rest of the night they discussed it by his bedside. Mike had made a living will asking not to be kept alive, but for Mary the situation brought back sad memories of the decision they had taken with Marge. Pete agreed and the machines were left to grumble and bubble.
Early on Tuesday morning Pete mentioned Mike’s dying wish to be buried in Sean Ross Abbey, and Mary said he had told her the exact same thing.
‘Look,’ Pete muttered, rubbing his face. ‘Sorry for being practical at such an emotional time, but we need to discuss arrangements. I got a bunch of stuff . . .’
He handed her a booklet he’d picked up from the Irish embassy and pointed out the section about transferring human remains: ‘Documentary evidence of the cause of death must accompany the coffin . . . and in the case of death from an infectious disease the Chief Medical Officers have special powers to dispose of the remains.’
Early on the morning of Tuesday 15 August, after thirty-six hours at Mike’s bedside, Mary and Pete went to the cafeteria for coffee. They returned at 11.30 to find Mike’s bed empty and the doctor writing up his notes. Mike had suffered a series of cardiac arrests. He had died at 11.10 a.m.
TWENTY-FOUR
1956–89
Thursday 22 November 1956
The waves were tossing the boat with a roar that seemed to rise out of the darkening depths of the heaving water.
The girl pulled her raincoat tight around her neck and ducked into the warmth of the bar. The place scared her with its smell of stale beer and the men singing and shouting all night, but it was nine hours from Liverpool to Dublin and she had to shelter somewhere. The storm had overtaken them around midnight, with the wind and rain driving across the Irish Sea, and the SS Munster was rolling in the swell. The girl felt nauseous and lonely. She had on a thin cotton frock under a translucent pakamac with the hood pulled down over her jet-black hair. In her hand she clutched a bag with her passport and ticket and a bunch of photographs. When they made port in Dublin she said a Hail Mary.
The Irish customs officers, instructed to question girls travelling alone on Irish passports,
picked her out as the passengers disembarked.
‘So were you over there for an abortion, then?’ the senior officer asked. ‘Did you go and kill your child?’
But she shook her head. The other customs man was young and not above flirting. ‘So, what is it? Been gallivanting over in Liverpool, have you?’
The girl stayed tight-lipped.
‘Well, you’ll have to tell me – I can’t guess.’
She looked at him with accusing eyes.
‘I’ve come back here to look for my baby.’
At Sean Ross Abbey Mother Barbara was dismissive. She remembered the girl well enough and had always suspected she was a troublemaker.
‘I have no idea what you want from us,’ she said. ‘You gave away your child and the Church found a home for him. The Church acts on its duty of charity; sinners like you should be grateful.’
‘Oh yes, I know,’ the girl said. She was twenty-three now and out of Sean Ross for ten months, but she felt the same panic and dread. ‘I am grateful, very grateful . . . I just wondered if you would tell me where he’s gone, so I can—’
‘Listen to me, girl,’ Mother Barbara cut in. ‘You seem to have forgotten what you promised. You signed a pledge in the eyes of God to relinquish your child. You promised you would never to try to see him or make any claim to him. Do you not remember that? Because we have everything written down in our records, you know.’
‘But Mother Superior,’ Philomena said, ‘I tried . . . I tried to forget him, but I couldn’t. As the Lord’s my witness, he’s been in my thoughts every hour of every day since he drove away from here in the back of that car and I was sent to England. On the ferry last night when the storm struck us, I could see his little face in the clouds every time the lightning flashed, and he was calling out to me, so he was!’
‘Oh, don’t talk nonsense, girl.’ Mother Barbara’s patience was wearing thin. ‘Your child is miles away from here and he can no more speak to you than the man in the moon.’
‘But he did, Reverend Mother. He called out to me and I heard him. He’s missing me and he wants his mammy back. A mother can tell . . . And I need to know he’s all right – that he’s safe where he is, and not sad. I can never be at peace until I know.’
But Mother Barbara had no time for the feelings of sinners.
‘You can find no peace because your sin weighs upon you. Your sin will be with you always and you must make amends for it. Pray to God that He will forgive you, for I cannot.’
Philomena bowed her head. Her sin was with her and it soured her life. Because of it she felt her confidence drain away. She wanted the interview to be over now, before Mother Barbara made things even worse. But the nun had not finished.
‘You must forget your child, for he is the product of sin, and above all you must never speak of him to anyone. The fires of hell await sinners like you, and if you go talking about your baby to other people you will burn in them forever. You have not spoken of your sin, have you? Or of what was done with your child?’
Philomena had spoken to no one.
Her joy and her shame were buried deep within her. Because of them her existence had been changed forever; because of them she was taking the night boat back to England now, condemned to live in a foreign place.
After Anthony left Roscrea in December 1955, Philomena had cried for two weeks. To get her off their hands, the sisters had put her on the ferry from Dublin, and on 14 January 1956 she had begun work in their school for delinquent boys outside Liverpool.
The Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary had run the Ormskirk Approved School for decades. Generations of sinful girls from Ireland had worked there, caring for the lads and repaying their debt to God. Philomena hated it; she pitied the boys and sympathized with their fate, but at the first opportunity she left.
In January 1958 she applied to train as a nurse and was accepted by a psychiatric hospital in the town of St Albans just north of London. She worked with disturbed patients at Hill End Hospital and came to recognize the terrible impact mental trauma can have. The more she learned about the men and women in her care, the more she understood the mental cruelty she herself had been subjected to. Every day she thought of her lost child and every night she saw him in her dreams. For a dozen years, first in Liverpool and then in St Albans, she lived with her pain and loss. She had a drawer full of memories – the tiny black and white photos from Sister Annunciata’s Box Brownie; a child’s first pair of shoes, black leather with a little chrome buckle that was loose from wear; a lock of jet-black hair that she treasured like a holy relic.
In the 1960s she worried Anthony might be in Vietnam fighting for the country that had taken him from her; in times of economic hardship she worried he might be in jail or on skid row. But it was the absence of knowledge, the absence of certainty that haunted her most – if she knew nothing it meant he could be anything or anywhere, and the thought was immensely disturbing.
Philomena married a young male nurse by the name of John Libberton and had two children, Kevin and Jane, but she never told her new family her secret – Mother Barbara’s warnings of hellfire were still too vivid. She did not stop thinking and planning, though, and in September 1977 she went back to Roscrea.
Philomena did not know why she chose that month of that year – she had no inkling that Anthony, now Michael, had been there just three weeks earlier – but when she sat in the nuns’ parlour with Mother Barbara she sensed something strange about the way the woman spoke to her. It was not that she was any more helpful – the mother superior still refused to speak about the fate of Philomena’s child – but she was quieter now, less categorical in her opinions and more hesitant in condemning the sins she had denounced so fiercely in the past. They parted with a sense that something had shifted between them, that they had become linked, not by friendship or understanding, but by a mutual interest and a shared need for forgiveness.
Philomena saw Mother Barbara for the last time in 1989. She had divorced John five years before and was now married to Philip Gibson. She was in her mid-fifties, no longer the naive young girl who had been bullied and coerced by the nuns, and Mother Barbara was an old woman with less than a year to live. The conversation was strained. Philomena wanted to ask, ‘If my son had been here looking for me, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ but she did not, and the nun volunteered nothing. In her eighties, crippled by arthritis, her eyes filled with rheumy tears as they drank tea and spoke about the past, the fire had gone from Mother Barbara – she appeared sad and resigned. Philomena wondered if she regretted never having children of her own and the thought made her feel sorry for her. A couple of times Mother Barbara seemed close to apologizing for what had happened, but each time something held her back. It was only later that Philomena learned questions were starting to be asked about the Church’s role in the baby trade with America – and that, perhaps, was why she had hesitated.
Philomena returned to England convinced this had been her last visit to Roscrea.
Epilogue
Pete Nilsson’s speech at Michael Hess’s funeral service,
St Peter’s parish church, Washington DC, 21 August 1995
I have spent the last few days trying to understand Michael’s passing. I’m not sure I’ve succeeded because deep down I know Michael did not want to go . . . He had so much he still wanted to do . . . For someone who looked forward to achieving so much more in life, how do you justify his passing? The answer is simply – you can’t. Michael left us before his time and fought hard all the way. He wanted to go on living until the very end. Keeping his illness to himself was his way of focusing on life and not giving in to death. When he finally went, he went very quickly. One of the great mysteries of death is where does all this knowledge and intensity go when someone closes their eyes for the last time? I hope it has gone to each of us in some way. I know that I am a different person for having known Michael over the past fifteen years – a better person. It is with that comfort that I say g
oodbye to him now, knowing that – through us – he will live on. Many of you who have shared a drink with Michael know that he liked to quote a toast from Yeats, and I’d like to end by making that toast to Michael:
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Until we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
When Jane Libberton came to meet me at the British Library that New Year of 2004, she brought with her the snaps of Anthony that Sister Annunciata had been caring enough to take all those years before. She told me everything she had gleaned from her mother – the name of her lost brother; that he was born on 5 July 1952; that he had been taken to America by an unknown woman; that he had blue eyes and black hair.
We agreed that we did not have much to go on. The name of Anthony Lee would not help us – he would almost certainly have taken the name of his new family – and Philomena’s experience of seeking information from the nuns at Sean Ross did not bode well. I was close to concluding the whole thing was a wild goose chase. I was about to tell Jane I wasn’t interested, but I didn’t.
Philomena’s family had grown over the years. Every time a grandchild or great-grandchild was born – especially when she found Jane pregnant and a single mother at the age of seventeen – she had been desperate to tell her children they had a brother in America. Philomena’s own brother Jack had told their sisters Kaye and Mary about the little fellow from Sean Ross Abbey and they had all urged her to tell her family, but the hold of the Church was abiding and cruel and Philomena kept her secret for fifty years.
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 40