Farewell, Father Sullivan

“…the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

– John 1:5

On the morning of June 4, 2012, as family gathered around my grandmother’s bed to keep watch as her life slowly ended, my uncle and I went down the street to look for Father Francis X. Sullivan, our longtime friend and neighbor. We walked three houses down toward Father’s house – no sign of him. We went back up the street to his sister Jane’s house; she called him for us and got ahold of him, and back we went to explain the situation to Father Sullivan: Nan was dying and, good Catholic that she was, she needed her last rites from a priest. Father, though his walking had slowed and his vision was impaired, didn’t hesitate. I held his arm as we walked back to my house, and stood behind him, my hands on his back, as he made the 17-step ascent to my grandmother’s deathbed.

Nan was delighted to see him. He was a friend. He was “one of the good ones.” He read the prescribed prayers and gave her communion, and offered warm words that gestured toward their decades-long relationship. As he walked away, Nan looked to the other relatives gathered and whispered, “He’s so cute.” About two hours later, Nan was gone, and the love of God, made tangible for her by Father Sullivan’s visit, was what remained.

When I received the news on Christmas Eve that Father Sullivan, at the age of 91, had died, this was but one of many memories that bubbled up in my mind. His passing felt like the end of something essential, something big. It seems unnatural that the city of Holyoke will just keep humming along without him.

In conversations immediately following the news—with friends, other neighbors, members of Father Sullivan’s family—a recurring theme was the poetry of the death’s timing. “He gets to enter heaven on Christmas Day,” one neighbor said. “Not a bad deal.” I thought of John’s Gospel, which, by my lights, tells the heart of the Christmas story—not with Wise Men or mangers, but with a poetic vision of a reality in which God loves and cares for us. And the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us. This is a vision of reality that says, yes, suffering and death are always with us, but they don’t define us, because God remains with us, and for us, through it all.

To know Father Sullivan was to know that he was with you and for you. When I was seven years old, scared to death of a Catholic Church that felt more punishing than welcoming, he sat with me in his living room, lovingly listening to my questions and helping me have the courage to live with my limited understanding. When I got a little older, and I was sure I’d figured out all that was wrong with the Church, with the country, with the world, he listened some more, and offered some occasional thoughts of his own. In his attentive listening and loving acceptance of me, exactly as I was, he showed me far more about life than my adolescent musings could approximate. It was good to be reminded that I’m never quite as smart as I think I am.

As years went by, I felt less of a need to run all of my opinions by him, but I still felt reassured, more secure, in the fact that he was just down the street. I’d step outside to greet the day, and I’d look right, and see him standing on the curb, waiting for his sister Jane or one of his other faithful friends to pick him up for mass or a meal. I’d walk my dog toward the park and see him out on his porch, walking back and forth, his hands behind his back, thinking something through and waiting for a visitor. When my dad died, he was there. When Nan fell ill, he was there—by her hospital bedside more than once, and on the last day of her life. When a botched operation nearly killed my dog, I followed up a sleepless night with an early morning mass in Father Sullivan’s living room; ever Christlike, he welcomed me in my sweatpants and disheveled hair and dark bags under my eyes, and let me take communion with his better-dressed companions. (He even offered to pray for the dog.) With me, and for me—there was Father Sullivan, my beloved priest.

Last winter, I attended a ceremony at the Marian Center in Holyoke, where Father Sullivan had recently moved. Post-ceremony, I found him awaiting lunch in the dining room, and I joined him for what would be our last conversation. He had the same light in his eyes. We talked for maybe an hour. He forgave me, again, for choosing Williams over Holy Cross. He talked about his family. He marveled at his grandnephew Colin. And then we were off, him to his room and me to whatever I’d planned for the day.

As I write this, I am watching the snow fall outside my Allyn Street home. I am struck by the familiar ordinariness of this moment: it is a scene I know well. The house is quieter than it used to be. Nan’s chair is empty. My dad won’t be calling me upstairs to watch an insufferable John Wayne movie. I look out the window and see a neighbor’s house; the people who used to live there have since died, and new, rather wonderful neighbors have moved in. The grass withers, the flower fades. The weight of this loss, these losses, is heavy on my heart. I think of Father Sullivan, the “Bishop of Holyoke,” a man who rejoiced with those who rejoiced and mourned with those who mourned. I think of him ascending my stairs, one determined step after another, becoming vulnerable, moving toward pain and transforming it; offering blessing to a dying woman and testifying to a light that darkness can never overcome.