Deathbed image taken from “Catholic Last Rites” entry on Scripture Catholic
Friends, I lost my dad last week; we will bury him on Monday. This post is my attempt to understand the experience through a sixteenth-century Catholic lens.
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On the day my sister gave birth to my parents’ first grandchild thirteen years ago, my father had a stroke. My mother was driving us home from the hospital when dad began speaking gibberish; a minor incident, the hospital released him after only brief observation. A year later, hours after we baptized my first baby, my dad collapsed in the middle of the night unable to move his left side; cradling my newborn daughter, I watched the paramedics wheel him away. This stroke landed him in a rehab facility, the same facility where he spent the last few weeks of his life.
Historian Carlos Eire’s wonderful book, From Madrid to Purgatory: the Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995), provides the first full-length study of Castilian approaches to death in the years following the Protestant reform movements. For years, Eire’s analysis of deathbed ritual was my closest experience to Catholic end of life practices.
Over the years, my father’s health issues mounted: a brain bleed, a heart condition, more strokes, and eventually, dementia. The latter made it difficult for my siblings and me to build strong adult relationships with him; our spouses never knew the big, strong, silly Dad of our childhood. Even so, my children adored him. We spent every Christmas break at Mommy and Papa’s house in Phoenix. To them, my parents equal Christmas.
When my siblings and I arranged for an ambulance to take our dad to the hospital the Saturday after Thanksgiving for a suspected UTI, we never imagined he was entering his final days. On December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the doctor told us my dad was in kidney failure and we should shift to palliative care. Not expecting him to last until Christmas, my sister and I urged our brother to come. Our mother called a priest, who administered Last Rites and Confession.
With the end imminent, a priest and a notary would be summoned to the home of the moriens, or dying individual. After the priest heard the final confession, the notary would record the last will and testament, assisting in the ordering of that person’s life. In this way, the notary – who served a political rather than a religious purpose – was often drawn into the intimacy of the death ritual (Eire, 24). To a person overcome with illness, a notary might become as imperative as a priest, and a testament as essential as a confession. Indeed – as evidenced by the deathbed scene in Don Quixote – testaments became imbued with a transcendent religious purpose, so that sixteenth-century Spanish Catholics considered writing a will a penitential act preparing the soul to accept death detached from all earthly goods (Eire, 19, 20).
Dictating a will at one’s deathbed was not meant to prompt the first contemplation of death for early modern Catholics. Rather, the Church encouraged individuals to anticipate their death, making recourse to prayer and devotional literature. In this period, the act of writing one’s will came to possess a quasi-sacramental quality, leading the faithful to believe that preparing a will while in good health and re-reading it to renew one’s assent to its pious bequests could lessen one’s time in purgatory (Eire, 23).
Astonishingly, my father rebounded. He began to sit up, then to stand up, then to walk across the PT room floor with a walker and even do light exercises. My brother canceled his flight. I drove back home to Los Angeles.
When I returned with my family for a two-week visit, my children enjoyed pushing Papa around in his wheelchair in front of the skilled nursing facility. He was lucid and joked with them and ate all his food, even asking for more.
In God’s great mercy, we had a wonderful (80 degree!) Christmas, the entire family gathering for a group photo around my dad. I began looking for a Memory Care facility for him and returned to LA with a plan in place.
Then, early on January 4, he pulled out his catheter and ended up in the ER. Frightened and alone, he needed to be restrained and sedated. I was devastated. Driving back to Phoenix, the hospice nurse called with her assessment that my dad had mere days left and we should take him home. The moonlight had begun slanting into my Camry when my sweet twelve-year-old daughter phoned and sang me the final hour there: Salve Regina, The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came, and – since it was Three Kings Day – We Three Kings of Orient Are. Her voice rose and fell over me, swilring about me, enveloping me, and guiding me past the looming, darkened shadows of red rock formations in Papago Park and right into the hospital parking lot.
Despite having lost the ability to open his eyes or swallow, my dad was feisty when we transported him home the next day during a light desert rainfall. Me duele, he said as we wheeled him into his bedroom. I hurt. I held his hand and told him he was home. Soothed with pain medication, he soon fell into a peaceful sleep and a beautiful stillness settled over the house; the evening becoming a sacred vigil. Per hospice instructions, I provided my dad with water on a sponge at the end of a stick, a gesture reminding me of Christ’s final agony on the cross.
The deathbed process in sixteenth-century Spain was highly ritualized. Family and friends would gather to assist the bedridden individual in the recitation of prayers or read aloud devotional material. Confraternity members might be summoned or paid to pray for the sick person’s soul, or, if the moriens belonged to a specific cofradía, fellow members were obliged to appear. The arrival of the cofrades in procession was often marked in the streets with the tolling of bells and the chanting of hymns (Eire, 29).
My sister opted to go home to her family, my mother settled beside my father to pray, and I headed upstairs to rest. Christ jolted me awake at 4:40am. My heart tight with pain, I rushed downstairs, relieved to hear my dad’s soft open-mouthed snoring. Climbing into bed beside my mother, we held hands as I listened to my father’s steady breathing. Every three seconds. Then five. Then seven.
I was at my father’s side in a moment. Slathering some ointment onto a sponged stick, I soothed his chapped lips. My mother wondered if he needed water. I could not feel a heartbeat. My sister’s voice on the phone. He is hardly breathing. Veronica, pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy! Christ promised eternal salvation to those who died while it was prayed! Fumbling with my phone. Pulling up a chanted version on my Hallow app. Leaning in. Mom and I are here. You can let go. 12 seconds. A snore.
Then nothing.
Collapsing onto the bed, I held tightly onto my daddy’s hand. Wailing emerged from deep within me, sounds I did not anticipate and could not control. My sister arrived. The priest arrived. We knelt. Latin prayers for the dead, softly intoned.
The approach of the priest followed a similar ceremonial pattern, as bystanders would drop to their knees as he passed with the consecrated host, sometimes even emerging from churches to do so. Upon arriving, the priest would administer the sacraments considered necessary for a holy and peaceful death: confession and absolution, the last communion known as the viaticum (Latin for “take it with you”) and at the last possible moment, the rite of extreme unction. The sacrament – which was meant to guarantee the soul’s entrance into at least purgatory – was approached with a trepidation, for it was believed that if one recovered after receiving it, one was meant to live a semi-monastic life (Eire, 32).
The notary would prepare the testament “as the dying person stood on the rim of eternity, poised between heaven and hell.” This document, believed to aid in the achievement of a good and holy death, might also mitigate one’s stay in purgatory. In this sense, a will served as a “passport to the afterlife” (33-34).
During the first hour post-mortem, my father’s grayish appearance began to pale, the pink lips on his open mouth tightened and turned white, the dark circles beneath his closed eyes became more pronounced, his hair seemed to stand on end, and his face registered a look of terror. My sister placed a crucifix in his hand, repeating, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
Often the poor would be brought into the death chamber to receive alms from the dying in exchange for their prayers until expiration. Then came the moment of death, when early modern Spaniards believed that the soul was rendered from the body and guided to heaven by the guardian angel of the deceased (Eire, 33-34).
We kept watch. My thoughts turned to Eire’s sixteenth-century testators.
Of the 436 wills from Madrid that Eire analyzes in his monograph, most request burial in Franciscan robes. Similarly, in the cache of 26 wills dating to the 1590s that I uncovered in the archives of Puebla, Mexico, 21 testators request burial in the habit of St. Francis.
Would Francis, whom I loved, and whose friars in colonial Mexico I had studied for over two decades, advocate for my father?
Eire’s testators believed that the Franciscan habit would spiritually cloak their personal sins and that St. Francis would serve as their advocate during their personal judgment immediately following death. With Christ sitting as judge in the heavenly court, who wouldn’t want the Christ-like Francis as their “defense attorney,” he who was the first recorded person to receive the stigmata?
Slowly over the next few hours, my dad’s face softened, his expression became more peaceful, his color returned and his mouth began to close. Even his hair seemed to relax. We took pictures because we couldn’t trust our eyes. Overcome with grief, I looked up at his face and began laughing through my tears. My dad was smiling!
What an incredible mercy and gift, and potent testimony to the beauty of our Catholic faith to witness my father’s soul pass before Christ the judge and be invited into the Beatific Vision.
Requiescat in pace, Daddy. Te amo.
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