This week, two and a half years after my daughter Josephine died, our parish’s new church building was finally finished. I went in ahead of the first Sunday Mass, found a pew near the front, and pulled down one of the kneelers. It was padded. Comfortable. I knelt there for a while.
A boy came and knelt beside me, one of my good friend’s young sons. I asked him if he knew whom the kneelers in that church were in honor of. He didn’t. So I told him.
“These are the kneelers for Josephine.”
To understand why, you have to go back to when she was still alive, and still sick, and still trying to kneel.
Josephine’s leukemia was strange from the start. Instead of showing up stealthily in her blood, it presented itself as tumors. When she relapsed, one of them grew through her leg, near the knee, and the pain was excruciating. The kneelers in our old church had no padding left in them at all, worn down to bare wood, and kneeling on them had always been uncomfortable for everyone. For Josephine, in her last months, it became impossible. She could no longer kneel at Mass.
It bothered her more than she let on. I told her it was okay, that Jesus understood. My little bald-headed daughter, who by then had lost so much weight that she had almost no muscle left, kneeling on a plank of wood that would have hurt anyone. He understood.
Around that same time, our parish began a building campaign for a new church, at a new location, much bigger than the old one. So while Josephine’s body was failing, a new church was rising, though none of us yet knew what that would come to mean.
We asked her pediatric oncologist a hard question: how does a person actually die from leukemia? He didn’t spare us much. There are several ways, he said, and some of them are very painful. Pain, in some measure, was not avoidable. But there were better ways and worse ways, and we wanted, as much as we could control it, one of the better ways. Eventually her platelets would be gone, and she would begin to bleed, internally and then externally. The leukemia cells would crowd out her healthy blood until her heart simply could not keep working. That, we were told, was one of the more merciful ends.
A friend from our parish heard about the kneelers, about Josephine unable to kneel in her final months, and started a small fundraiser called “Kneelers for Josephine.” It told her story simply and briefly. By the time it was done, it had raised sixteen thousand dollars, earmarked for good kneelers in the new church.
Two weeks before she died, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, my wife brought her home from the hospital and took her to Mass. That evening I had invited some of her friends, along with their fathers, to camp out in the woods behind our house. Josephine made it just in time, but she could no longer walk. The pain had taken that from her, too. So I carried her on my back, from one campfire cluster of kids to another, weaving through the trees as they laughed and ran and told their stories.
At one point I set her down, and her friends scattered off into the dark to chase one another, the way children do, forgetting that she couldn’t follow. She sat alone and began to quietly cry. Had they forgotten her? she asked me. Eleven-year-old girls, caught up in a game, don’t always think of the one who can’t run with them. I comforted her, and a short while later, I found some of the older girls and tactfully let them know that Josephine would be happy to have company. Five of them came and sat around her, and they talked and laughed together for the rest of the night, until her tears had long since dried. Nothing warms a father’s heart like watching his child be made happy, surrounded by friends who came when they were needed.
The night before she died, two of her friends came to sit with her beside her bed. We had managed, through all of it, to keep her pain under control. But that night she began to lose lucidity, and the bleeding started, the kind we had been warned about and could not stop. Several times in the night she needed me, and each time I rose, lifted her from her bed, and carried her to the bathroom, where my wife and I cared for her together. There was nothing else we could do for her now but this: carry her, clean her, hold her. She was bleeding, inside and out, and she would bleed until she had given every drop.
The next morning, my wife and I sat beside her bed. Her eyes were closed. She took a deep breath in, let it out slowly, and her head turned gently to the side. We knew that she had breathed her last.
What a privilege it is to be a father! What dignity! To carry our children when they cannot walk, on our backs through the woods, in our arms through the night. To be the strong guardians of Our Father’s children, entrusted to us for a time, until he gathers them home.
After the funeral, I joined the parish building committee, because they needed help, and I needed something to do. At one meeting, someone floated the idea of saving money by skipping pews and kneelers altogether and using folding chairs instead. I said no. That money had been raised in my daughter’s honor, so that people could kneel the way she no longer could, and we were going to have kneelers, with padding, whatever it cost. On that point I would not yield. The members of the committee all knew and loved my daughter. They relented and agreed to buy pews with kneelers.
This brings me back to this week, to a finished church that Josephine never saw on earth, and a padded kneeler under my knees that she will never need. I think she would like it anyway. I think she would like that a little boy can kneel there too, worshiping Jesus, without ever knowing what it cost, or whom it was for.
These are the kneelers for Josephine.
Image credit: Vilensija via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
