Personal Impressions II
The pope coverage was oceanic and it bothered me that I couldn’t be everywhere at once; I constantly felt like I might be missing something. But I didn’t. I “got it”. I got the simple, stark beauty of God taking him in such a telling way: following on the heels of the first Holy Week he couldn’t attend after a long illness that somehow felt exactly long enough*, and just after the vigil Mass of the Divine Mercy, the beloved feast he gave the Universal Church and which, like much of what he gave us, we ignored. (How many parishes celebrate it the way it should?) The ending was storybook, a touch of “The Natural”, God's gentle probing of the wounds which so wound us today: our death-fear of suffering and our strange allergy to Divine Mercy. Yet subtly but surely He poured out a teaching medicine in the end of our pope's life.
The networks all went to live coverage beginning Friday night because the Vatican had admitted the gravity of the Holy Father’s situation. That never happens. The Vatican always puts a mild face on papal illnesses and never cries wolf. So the news divisions kicked into overdrive. But the Pope stubbornly lived on into the wee hours of Saturday morning and the on-air types wondered whether he’d already died and the Vatican was waiting till morning for greater publicity. Maybe God and not the Vatican was arranging greater publicity because Saturday morning came Rome time and there was no announcement. Then Saturday morning New York time and there was no announcement.
There was the oddity that he was dying and he wasn’t going to hospital and I felt cheered by it, by his desire to die at home (or at least in his papal apartment) and there was the sense that he navigated well over the rough terrain: avoiding both the mountains of dehumanizing medical procedures that prolong life by a matter of hours but also the valley culture of death that would deny a brain-damaged woman a feeding tube.
Finally, around 3:30pm I heard the news on the radio while going to pick up some food and I'd wished I could have heard it when it happened. I wanted to turn around and head back home immediately to see if I could pick up the announcement via Tivo (which automatically tapes the previous thirty minutes). But that wasn't what was important. What was was a bishop speaking for us all when he said that "we all feel like orphans now". I'd lost the earthly Papa who was looking out for my spiritual welfare an ocean away.
* - His suffering was long enough to get the attention of the least attentive while at the same time showing his resiliancy and endurance. Like a fighter who got knocked down over and over, he kept getting up.
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