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I am in my eighties, and one of the things I find very hard about old age is saying good-bye to people I love.
These days I am sorrowing over the illness and likely death of a Sister with whom I have lived and worked in a house of prayer and solitude where we were available to all who came.
One thing that is coming to me through this is a deepening closeness to our Blessed Mother. She, too, had to say good-bye, and I have been meditating on one of her times of letting go.
I sit with her in her final moments with Jesus the day he “left home.” I imagine him holding her in his arms and telling her of his love for her. Perhaps he told her again that he had to be about his Father’s business.
If he did, she would have recalled how he had said that very thing long ago back in the temple when he was twelve and had been lost for three days.
Then I imagine her as she stood at the doorway and watched him walking down the road, knowing that was the last time he would be walking away from their little house at Nazareth as a home where he would soon return.
Then I think of her turning from that doorway and entering back into that little house that held so many precious and sacred memories.
There had once been three living there. Was she then recalling another separation, the death of her husband Joseph? They had been through so much together. He had always been such a support to her, and their hearts had been so at-one in their common love and faithfulness to God.
But Mary had had Jesus with her in that sorrow. Now she was alone. Everything in that house spoke of Jesus: the furniture he or Joseph had made, his carpentry tools, the neatness of the workplace.
Did that neatness remind her of all the other little things Jesus must have done for her before he left to make it as easy for her as he could?
She could see the clothes he left behind and the pots in which she had cooked his favorite foods. Nothing mattered to her now but him. She probably had no desire to cook those foods without his being there to enjoy them. She probably did not even want to eat.
In pain beyond words she would again have said her fiat, your will be done. But I imagine her feeling no consolation in doing so, until slowly, gradually, just a little consolation came to her because of her total surrender to God in this as in everything else that had been in her life.
And Jesus. What were His feelings as he walked away from his beloved Nazareth home and Mother? He knew the time had come for him to leave home and be about his Father’s business. He knew that his Father’s will was all that really mattered, no matter how sad his heart was.
Yes, Jesus and Mary, like me, experienced the pain of saying good-bye.
Sister Louise spent time at MH in the mid-1970s doing research in our archives for her doctoral dissertation about Friendship House, an apostolate Catherine Doherty founded before Madonna House. She also visited a number of times after that in order to get spiritually restored.
