FRAN WHELAN’S OFFICE, THE Catholic chaplain’s office, is a little cubicle with dirty red wall-to-wall carpeting. It’s on the second floor of the hospital, down the hall from the chapel. It’s quiet up here. There are a few straight-backed chairs and two somewhat battered metal desks in the room. There is a framed poster of the Virgin on the wall. When Sr. Fran finds herself spending a lot of time in this office, doing paperwork, she knows she is in mourning. She’s avoiding the wards upstairs. She used to feel embarrassed and guilty about this. Now she allows herself room to grieve.
Sr. Fran is a member of the Dominican Sisters of the Sick Poor, a religious congregation founded in New York in 1872. An Irishwoman named Mary Walsh, who did laundry, was going to work one day when she saw a little girl crying in a doorway. Following the child upstairs, Mary Walsh found a sick woman in bed with a dead baby beside her. Mary Walsh’s life was transformed by this event. She quit her job and devoted herself to the poor. She gained followers. They banded together. They took in laundry. They used the money they made to help poor families, setting aside a little bit for themselves. They vowed to live a very simple life.
A small woman in her fifties, Sr. Fran is a trained nurse and has a degree in social work. It has been part of her religious vocation to work in a variety of settings in and around New York City—as a public health nurse, in a mental health clinic, in a well-baby program—always with the poor. A few years ago, Sr. Fran’s congregation of some three score sisters went through a self-evaluation. If you could start all over again, its members were asked, what would you do? Sr. Fran decided she should go for pastoral training. Women were not then allowed to be Catholic chaplains in hospitals but they were permitted to carry out analogous functions. Sr. Fran got a job in pastoral care at St. Clare’s Hospital in midtown Manhattan. That’s where she first saw AIDS.
She first heard about it early in 1981. There was no name for it. She saw patients at the hospital who began to conform to a certain profile—they were all young men, they were all gay, and they all suffered from a wasting syndrome. For the most part, their disease went unacknowledged by the medical staff, who would treat them summarily for “undiagnosed allergies” or “white blood count trouble” and quickly discharge them. It slowly emerged that these patients all were suffering a loss of immunity.
It was Sr. Fran’s goal to work in a municipal hospital but it didn’t seem possible for a long time. Then in 1982, she heard about an opening for an office aide here. She applied for the job. Later, when the church decided to permit females to be chaplains, she approached the hospital administration and said, “I’m doing chaplain’s work and have church approval—I need a chaplain’s salary.”
When Sr. Fran trained as a social worker, she was taught not to get involved with clients beyond a certain point. Pastoral work, she says, is different. You must care. You must make yourself available as a person. You get hurt. That’s part of the price you pay.
Sr. Fran visits patients and talks to them. She tries to lend support to their families. She helps in ways that sometimes seem insignificant—turning a patient over or getting a glass of water.
Getting a glass of water. It sounds like so little.
And many of the people she works with are so manipulative and so demanding, she sometimes finds herself hearing only the manipulation and not the desperate plea behind it, of somebody half her age who is dying and is really terrified to ask for anything whatsoever.
Get me a glass of water.
Around the time that Sr. Fran first came to this hospital, one of the social workers was organizing a bereavement program aimed at women with stillbirths. Often these women left the hospital without any follow-up. Often the social worker found that one of the first questions they asked themselves was, Why did God do this? So Sr. Fran was asked to join the program.
In the beginning, they worked with mothers who had stillbirths—and sometimes with fathers, too—but after a while they found they were drawing too strict a line. There were women who had lost a baby but it was termed an abortion because of the fetus’s weight, so they were excluded, which seemed unfair. There were newborns who had taken one or two breaths. There were babies who had lived in the hospital one or two weeks. The program was reorganized to encompass all of these and its name was changed to “Paranatal Bereavement.”
There are almost 4,000 births a year in the hospital. When babies are born dead, the mother is given the baby’s footprints, urged to name the child, and urged to talk about the death. There is also an emergency burial fund for infants—Sr. Fran obtained the grant for it.
If the babies aren’t buried privately, they’re buried on Harts Island in Long Island Sound. Usually the bodies are taken from the hospital morgue to Jacobi Hospital, also in the Bronx, where they’re put in boxes. Each box has a number on it and the name of the mother. The boxes are loaded on a truck and the truck travels by barge to Harts Island.
Because she wanted to be able to describe it to the women whose babies were buried there, Sr. Fran went to Harts Island one day. The burial ground is an open field with granite stones regularly spaced across it, square stones with numbers cut into the tops of them. A road runs through the middle of the field. Adults are buried on one side of the road, babies on another.
The day Sr. Fran visited Harts Island, prisoners from Rikers were digging graves. When they found out why she was there, one said, “You just tell those women we give those babies all the respect that we know how.” Another said, “Tell them there are flowers growing here.” Another said, “Tell them you can hear the ocean from where they’re buried.”
Sara’s baby died almost a year before she did. It was spring. After the baby was born, Sara was discharged from the hospital but the baby stayed behind in intensive care. Sara had been on drugs. She still was. She visited the baby and saw it in the incubator a few times. When the baby died they had trouble locating Sara.
The day Sara came to see her dead baby, the social worker asked Sr. Fran if she would help. In the mortuary there are a bassinet and clothing people have donated. Sara, Sr. Fran, and the social worker laid out the baby and dressed her.
It was a baby girl. Sara had not even held her.
They dressed the baby in a pale green dress with smocking and embroidery on the yoke. Sara gave the baby a name. They said a prayer for the baby. Then Sara asked if she could hold it. She held it—not over her shoulder, but up, to look at it. They all cried.
They took Sara’s picture with her baby.
Sara was about five-foot-three. She was very thin. She had freckles and long straight brown hair. She had big brown eyes. She was very near-sighted and wore glasses. Some of her teeth were missing.
Sara enjoyed clothes. She loved vivid colors. She knew where to buy designer clothes at discount in very small sizes. She loved food. She enjoyed life.
She had a delightful personality. Everyone she met was entranced. Social workers and psychologists, even nurses from her methadone program, adored Sara and went out of their way to do things for her. They would find themselves doing things for Sara they would never do for another client.
People would do things for her?
Yes, myself included.
Sara was artful. She had a way of asking questions about you to keep you interested. She would remember what you liked and where you were yesterday. She had an intense way of looking at you—not just weighing what you were doing now but calculating how it fit into what you might do next. There would be this way of asking, then watching to see, Is it working?
After Sara died, Sr. Fran met her sister and the sister said that meeting Sara late in life was like meeting another person from the one she grew up with. They were like two different people. If Sara hadn’t reminded her of some of the things they’d done together when they were children, her sister wouldn’t have recognized her. Sara had changed her way of speaking, dyed her hair, cultivated a carefree manner at odds with their strict Catholic upbringing.
Sara ran away from home in her teens. She took heroin and cocaine. She was a prostitute. She did time on Rikers Island. She got a black eye there for refusing to have sex with a guard. She and her pimp, The Old Man, lived flamboyantly. They were very showy. They dressed in the same color.
She had a number of relationships with men. She gave up two babies for adoption. After she went on methadone, then, she had three children, two girls and a boy. For a while she lived with a man named Stanley and shared needles with him. Stanley beat her, so Sara left him and took the children to a shelter. Stanley was the father of the baby girl who died.
Sara saw Stanley again when he checked into the hospital with AIDS during one of her stays there. Stanley died in Montefiore Hospital in March 1986.
Sara loved her children. She was good with children. She had a good grasp of their development and their needs. By the time Sr. Fran met Sara, she had made a home for them.
There was Sara, not long out of the hospital, obviously very ill. They all thought the first thing was to get Sara back into the hospital but they had a terrible time doing it. They tried to get her in through the emergency room but she didn’t have the patience for it. Someone crossed her and she walked out. She was, of course, terrified to find out that what she suspected was true—that she had AIDS. But on one visit she gave them permission to run a blood test on her. She was positive for the HIV virus.
Once they got her into the hospital but she had an argument with somebody on the floor and disappeared.
Sara was still shooting drugs. She had a strong habit. She was taking at least 80 milligrams a day of methadone alone. She was not about to check into the hospital until she knew she’d get her methadone there. And she knew from being on the street what AIDS meant. So she took her time doing the things she had to do before she came in.
She gave up her children to foster care.
Sara finally checked into the hospital to stay in June. When Sr. Fran heard she was there, she went up to visit her. All the people who knew Sara flocked to her room.
Sara made friends to survive. Getting her methadone, for instance, was a big event in her day. If she didn’t get it on time, she would get cramps and pains in her joints. The longer it got delayed in the morning, the sicker she got and the longer it took her to get over it. So Sara made friends with the nurses. When they came on the floor in the morning, Sara would meet them and ask them to give her her methadone early.
Sara was in the hospital to build up her weight but they did a lung biopsy and found she already had pneumocystis pneumonia, so they treated her for that. She was in the hospital but she was still shooting drugs. Around 5 p.m., there is a change of shift and the staff is busy giving medicines. Sara would put on a coat over her pajamas, sail out the door, walk up to Third Avenue, buy the stuff, and come back.
Now Sara was homeless. Cured of pneumocystis, she had to stay in the hospital until the Department of Social Services found her a room in a hotel downtown near Times Square. A taxi service took her back and forth to her methadone program every day.
Sara didn’t like the hotel. The neighborhood was strange and sometimes she was so disoriented, she would lose track of what day it was. So when she started feeling better, she sought out The Old Man, who lived in the Bronx. He owned his own home. Sara moved in with him. She was feeling better. She’d pulled herself together. She came to the outpatient clinic at the hospital regularly.
During this time, Sr. Fran kept in touch with Sara. One day in August, she even took Sara out to lunch.
Sara appeared at the door of Sr. Fran’s office high as a kite, but pleasantly so.
They walked to an Italian restaurant not far from the hospital. Sara was stylishly dressed—she always dressed up to the minute. Sr. Fran wears somber skirts and sweaters, plain patterned blouses, but Sara loved to give her advice on clothes. Sara never missed a chance to tell Sr. Fran whether she looked good or not and she gave Sr. Fran her opinion walking to the restaurant that day.
“That looks nice with that.”
When they sat down at the table, strangely enough, Sara was talking about contagion—reassuring herself by telling Sr. Fran how foolish it was for people to be afraid of catching AIDS when there had to be an exchange of blood and so forth. Bread was set on the table and Sara took a piece out of the basket. For example, Sara continued, no matter how many patients with AIDS Sr. Fran saw in the hospital—well, she’d have to have an open cut to catch AIDS from one of them, wouldn’t she? Even then, she probably wouldn’t catch it. People were funny. Sara broke the bread in two and handed a piece to Sr. Fran. Sr. Fran took the bread, and she realized, she was afraid to eat it. Of all people. She was not as free of prejudice as she’d thought she was.
Sara came back into the hospital, with pneumocystis pneumonia again, in September. Sr. Fran visited her room often. She was attracted to Sara. She enjoyed being with her.
Sara told Sr. Fran about the hurts she’d received from the Catholic Church when she was a little girl in parochial school—how when her mother couldn’t afford the tuition, she took her children with her to see the nun to ask if they could postpone the payments, and the nun said no, and her mother cried so. Sara said she never forgot that.
There are always a lot of people circulating through the hospital promoting different creeds, and one of them told Sara she must pray constantly.
“Now why would you want to do that, pray always?” she asked Sr. Fran.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think that’s what God wants us to do. I think you’re supposed to enjoy life and, like, know God is there.”
Walking down Broadway one day, on impulse, Sr. Fran bought Sara a nightgown. It was wild. It was purple.
Sara was in and out of the hospital. She always had lots of friends on the ward. She was especially close to one man—Raphael Hernandez. He’d been in the hospital with ARC a long time. Anyway, Raphael said, he couldn’t return to Puerto Rico because he’d shot someone and they were looking for him. Sara and Raphael would sit in the dayroom and talk and smoke cigarettes. Raphael had been on drugs a long, long time, too. People teased Sara and Raphael and said they were a hot number.
The Old Man visited Sara religiously. He was an avuncular kind of person, quiet, in his early fifties.
Sara was out of the hospital before Thanksgiving, back in before Christmas.
Sara avoided talking about death. When a boy she knew on the ward died crying out in pain, it frightened her. But deep down, Sr. Fran thought, Sara felt she would pull through. She talked as if AIDS were much more fatal on the street, as if being in the hospital afforded her special protection. She told Sr. Fran that people on the street with AIDS were staying out of the hospital longer than they should because they knew what was going to happen in the end and they wanted their freedom.
Even so, Sr. Fran sensed a kind of letting go in Sara. One day Sara mentioned Mother Teresa. “Is there anyone on earth who looks that peaceful?”
“What would you do if you met her, Sara?”
“Oh, I don’t think I ever would.”
But Mother Teresa came to the hospital on Christmas Day.
Fran went up to fetch Sara.
“Time to go to church.”
“I don’t think I want to go.”
“Oh yeah, you do.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You really do want to go, Sara.”
So Mother Teresa came and talked to all of the patients and Sara was right up front.
She left the hospital against medical advice the next day.
Around this time, Sara’s little boy, Aaron, was tested for AIDS at King’s County Hospital in Brooklyn and found positive for the HIV virus. He was three and a half. The two little girls, six and eight, were in a foster home. When Sara returned to the hospital after New Year’s, she began to fret about her children. “I can’t do any more for my kids,” she would say. She had kept phone numbers in a notebook—her social worker, Aaron’s social worker, the social worker for her two little girls, the agency. She talked about putting her children in God’s hands.
Sara got weaker. Her muscles were deteriorating. She fell out of bed. She could barely walk. She tried to use a walker but was too weak. Finally she was confined to a wheelchair.
It was arranged for the girls to visit and they came, accompanied by a worker from the foster-care agency. Sara was brought down in her wheelchair to Sr. Fran’s office, where they could say good-bye in private. Sr. Fran had set out coloring books and crayons. She suggested to the agency worker that they step outside.
“Is it all right? Can they touch her?”
“Why don’t you come with me and we’ll let Sara visit with the children here.”
The children stayed half an hour.
After a certain point, Sara couldn’t hold up her head. A CAT scan showed that the trapezius muscles across her shoulders had broken down. They gave her a brace to wear but she refused. She was too proud. At the end, when she was comatose, they had to prop Sara’s head up on the pillows so the weight of it wouldn’t cut off her airway.
One day Sr. Fran went up to see Sara. She just lay there like a one-hundred-year-old person. It seemed to have happened overnight. When Sr. Fran talked to her, Sara made some noises but her gaze was fixed. There was no recognition after that.
She slipped—to me it was like someone falling off a hill.
Sr. Fran sat with Sara and held her hand and told her how much she was going to miss her.
After that, Sr. Fran found it hard to go back.
Sara Rojas died in the hospital on February 8, 1986. She was 32. In death, as in life, she managed to bend others to her will. Sara had a church funeral with a full mass, and her sister, a dental hygienist, quit her job in order to care for Sara’s girls, whom she later adopted. No one in the hospital can say what happened to Aaron.
Sr. Fran lives in East Harlem. She shares an apartment with a group of other religious women who also work with the poor. One woman works with women prisoners, another is an educator for school dropouts, another is a visiting nurse. The apartment is above a social club where men play cards and gamble all day.
Last night, as she often does, Sr. Fran walked home from the hospital. She isn’t afraid. She doesn’t take chances.
When it snows, the avenues are spread with salt. On winter nights like last night, when the wind blows, a residue of salt and dust swirls up off the street. The acrid dust and salt get into your eyes and nose.
Last night, nearing 125th Street, Sr. Fran smelled another smell, something peculiar, and soon she came upon the charred wreck of a van, the kind with a luggage rack that shuttles to the airport and back. The driver, she learned later, had burned to death in the van, but the body was no longer there. The wind was blowing the white powder from the fire extinguishers into her face and that’s what she’d tasted.
A glass of water. It seems like so little.
Sometimes Sr. Fran comes home laden with grief, so it’s good that she doesn’t need to explain a lot to the women she lives with—that someone died who was on a respirator for six days, had pneumocystis pneumonia, or whatever. She just needs to be able to say it’s been a tough day, that she lost someone.
One Sunday when she didn’t feel like working, Sr. Fran visited a young man dying of AIDS. He was very weak. His mouth was caked with secretions and he couldn’t talk, so she put on gloves and wound her hands in gauze and cleaned out his mouth, cleaned off his tongue and the side of his face. No one had bothered to do that. He thanked her.
He said, “You take time.”
“Yes, I do want to take some time with you.”
“I think I’m dying.”
“Who would you like with you?”
“My mother.”
Sr. Fran doesn’t talk to patients about God in dogmatic terms. Her message is a simple one about providence and accompaniment. You are not alone. Sr. Fran tells Bible stories without the traditional characters—the story of the loving father who waited and watched. Simple messages. I will not leave you. You are not alone.