The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(105)

Somewhere over the Atlantic, they drifted off to sleep. The two nurses I’d hired to accompany us suggested Mickie and I also get some rest, and we lay down in the recovery room at the back of the plane, waking when the wheels touched down at the airport outside Lourdes.

One of the nurses knocked on the door. “The van has arrived,” she said.

My mother was already awake. She asked Mickie to help with her makeup and the special dress she’d brought to wear, one I knew she would ask me to bury her in.

“Why are you putting on makeup?” I said as Mickie held a mirror. “It’s impolite to be the most beautiful woman in a foreign country, and makeup will only make the contrast between you and every other woman more noticeable.”

That comment brought a crooked grin from my father.

My mother swatted at me with a towel. “Go away, you. I can’t have the Blessed Mother see me looking like a ragamuffin.”

The morning weather in the Pyrenees was forty-three degrees with a light mist. We bundled my mother and father in knit hats, heavy coats, and gloves, loaded them into their wheelchairs, and wheeled them out of the plane. After passing through customs, we boarded a van I had hired to accommodate wheelchairs and set out for Lourdes. I had done research before our trip. Lourdes was a small town in the mountains not far from the Spanish border. It had been a quiet and unassuming city until February 1858, when a fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous went into the local garbage dump to find firewood and instead encountered a beautiful woman dressed in blue-and-white robes. The woman would identify herself as the Immaculate Conception. For six months the woman appeared to Bernadette and eventually instructed her to tell the bishop to build a church above the escarpment. The bishop balked until the Blessed Mother instructed Bernadette to dig in the ground. As the story went, when Bernadette complied, she uncovered a freshwater spring that has flowed continuously for 140 years, though no one has ever found its source. Millions of sick and infirm pilgrims venture to the small town each year to be dipped in the waters of that spring, which are said to have healing powers and to have produced enough miracles for Pope Pius XI to canonize Bernadette a saint.

The drive to the Massabielle grotto, what had been the garbage dump before the Blessed Mother appeared to Bernadette, would take just under thirty minutes. We drove through rolling green fields with French cottages at the foot of the snowcapped Pyrenees. My mother was not interested in sightseeing. The drive was just enough time for her to lead us all in praying the glorious mysteries of the rosary. I sat on the seat beside my father, helping him move the beads through his hands and largely humoring my mother. I had not recovered my faith, but I had mellowed with age. I knew what the rosary meant to her. Mickie was also a good sport, and I was surprised she still remembered all the prayers.

“You never forget what’s beaten into you in Catholic grade school,” she whispered.

We drove through Lourdes, a beautiful mountain village of narrow streets, compact cars, and two-story stone buildings pressed side by side as tightly as impacted teeth. The road was free of traffic, but for an occasional scooter, and the sidewalks were virtually deserted, the shops not yet open. I rolled down my window and breathed in cool, crisp, pollution-free air.

The driver stopped just outside the gate to the grotto; cars were not allowed to proceed farther. We loaded my mother and father into their wheelchairs. I made sure I had a way of reaching our driver in case we needed him earlier than we had agreed upon, which, translated, meant if there was a problem. We wheeled my parents down the sloped road, past statues of the Blessed Mother and walls lined with cut flowers. The three gold-and-white steeples of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary loomed just beyond a huge square to welcome the pilgrims. Though there were already a substantial number of people in the square, it remained peaceful and quiet and had the feel of a college campus at spring break.

Father Pat Cavanaugh, the chaplain at Saint Joe’s High School when Ernie and I attended, was in Lourdes on a pilgrimage with a group from the Knights of Malta. In fact, it had been a conversation with Father Cavanaugh in the hallway outside my father’s hospital room after he’d suffered his stroke that led me to the idea of taking my mother to Lourdes. Father Cavanaugh had told me that he made an annual pilgrimage with the Knights of Malta. I had sought his advice planning my parents’ trip. He had suggested I coordinate the trip to coincide with the Knights of Malta’s visit, which would circumvent the substantial lines that would otherwise threaten to keep me from attaining my goals—having my mother go to confession, receive the Eucharist at Mass, and be dipped in the healing waters, all in a single day.

My worries were unnecessary. To my and Mickie’s astonishment, each time we wheeled my mother and father to a line, whether to light a candle or to attend Mass in the huge underground cathedral called the Basilica of Saint Pius X, the line of people parted and allowed us to proceed.

“Why are they doing that?” Mickie whispered.

“It’s in the Bible, Michaela,” my mother said. “In heaven, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. This is heaven, Mickie. You’re in the presence of God.”

I could not refute my mother’s assertion. In a world in which people would trample you to get a seat on a bus, it was miraculous to watch them spontaneously give way to the sick and suffering.

After attending Mass in the basilica, Father Cavanaugh’s group had arranged for a significant number of priests to hear confessions. Since the sun had broken through the cloud layer and the temperature had warmed, the priests set up chairs outside.