There stood by the cross of Jesus his mother Mary, who knew grief and was a Lady of Sorrows. She is our special patroness, a woman who bore much she could not understand and who stood fast. To her many sons and daughters, … she tells much of this daily cross and its daily hope. (Constitutions of Holy Cross #120)

By Laura Kelly Fanucci ‘03

The night before he died, I went downstairs to show him my latest stash of basketball cards, tucked into a red plastic cross-stitched box I had made at Girl Scout camp.

I was ten years old, and basketball was the most popular sport among the girls at St. Robert Bellarmine Elementary, so of course I was going to pretend that I was good at it. And if my big brother faithfully collected baseball cards in skinny cardboard boxes on the top shelf of his closet, carefully marked by season and team, then of course I was going to save up my $1.25 weekly allowance to buy a glossy carton of my own cards, complete with the slick swoop of the NBA logo.

I carried the box into his bedroom, dimly lit in the darkening evening. I perched on the corner of his bed and started spreading out the cards in piles by teams. The Chicago Bulls were my favorites, and I wanted to show him the Scottie Pippen card I’d discovered in the slim silver pack I opened that morning.

“Dooley,” he croaked with a smile, his voice hoarse as he rasped my nickname, “that’s awesome.”

Those were the last words I remember him speaking to me.

He died the next morning. He was 21 and I was 10.

***

Ten is still a tender age, capable of fierce loyalty and fiercer love. I was a sensitive kid, and I caught on quickly that the quiet conversations between my parents in the evenings, when they talked about oncologist appointments and chemotherapy rounds and medical bills while they stacked up dishes after dinner, meant that things were not going well.

But faithfulness to Jay was my hope. His gait grew painfully slow and his waist shrunk painfully thin, but still he loomed larger-than-life. He was my big brother. And I was stubbornly determined to stick by him.

I drew him brightly colored pictures and sang silly renditions of his favorite Billy Joel songs and let him mock my New Kids On The Block obsession—anything to make him laugh. I carried plates of my mom’s lemon bars into pediatric hospital wards plastered with Sesame Street characters and balanced brimming glasses of homemade health concoctions, carrot-apple-celery juice, down the spindly spiral staircase to his bedroom.

From what I could gather as an eavesdropping child, Jay needed good doctors and good prayers and good company and good food. I figured I could help with at least three of those.

He got all four. It wasn’t enough.

***

Every night that last summer, while our house of seven wound down with endless rounds of bedtime stories upstairs for we three littles, my parents would pray the Memorare downstairs with Jay.

Remember, O Most Gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to thy protection,
implored thy help,
or sought thy intercession,
was left unaided.

Most nights I would sneak out from under the pink flowered comforter where I had been tucked to sleep, setting off in search of one last goodnight kiss and song.

Inspired with this confidence,
I fly unto thee,
O Virgin of Virgins, my Mother.

But I would always pause outside Jay’s bedroom door when I heard their three voices rise and fall in quiet cadence.

To thee do I come,
before thee I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.

I knew what the words meant--that things were bad and they would not be good.

O Mother of the Word incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in thy mercy, hear and answer me.

But I did not want them to know that I heard them—to know that I knew.

***

When I think back on the two years that Jay was sick, I wonder if they might have been the most authentic Christian witness I will ever be able to offer another person.

I was unburdened by the grim details of every test result that haunted my parents and older sister. I was undaunted by the oxygen tanks in the hallway, the cannula in his nostrils, the cane that bore the weight of his uneven steps. 

I just saw Jay.

Could I ever see so clearly again? Or witness another’s withering and untimely death with such untarnished faith?

Now when late-night fears creep into the corners of the darkened bedroom where I listen to the quiet slumbers of my husband and newest baby sleeping soundly, I worry that if a cross so heavy were shoved on the shoulders of my family today, I would be crushed by the weight of what one knows as an adult. The statistics and the stories and the suffering seem to lurk around every corner.

I knew none of that as a child. Which allowed me to care for Jay in the smallest ways I knew how. The child’s works of mercy. Boxes of basketball cards and lip-synch laughs and funny drawings scribbled with Magic Scent markers. It was not cancer-fighting chemotherapy or miracle-summoning anointing, but then again, maybe it was.

Maybe the only thing we ever help each other to do is to bear the darkness. And hope in the darkness is only born of imagination—the kind of imagination that says next year we will go to a Pistons game and sure I can take you to the mall next week to buy that tape and Dooley, that’s awesome even when consciousness itself is already fading and flickering like a summer evening dying into the last thin lights of a stretching sun.

He taught me hope, my big brother with the thinning hair and the sunken eyes and the crooked smile.

Maybe I did the same for him.

Laura Kelly Fanucci ’03 is a writer, mother of three, and Research Associate with the Collegeville Institute Seminars. She blogs about spirituality and parenting at Mothering Spirit, and her book Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting is available from Liturgical Press in November 2014.