At the nursing home where she celebrated her 58^th birthday, my mother had secured holy cards of her favorite martyrs from the visiting priest, a baseball card lineup of champion sufferers—Saint Dymphna (beheaded by her father), Saint Lucy (throat cut by a spurned suitor), Saint Ursula (speared with an arrow), Saint Eulalia (rolled down a hill in a barrel filled with knives), Saint Lucy (eyes gouged out), and Saint Margaret (pressed to death by an 800 pound weight). 

“What are you wearing?” my mother asked as I arrived.

It was 1997. Grunge was au courant. I wore jeans, a red and black flannel shirt, and a ratty gray tweed man’s sportscoat.

“Clothes,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Not good,” she responded. “You know, it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man. But not dressed like one.”

“Am I going to meet a rich man here?”

“There’s widowers about,” she said.

She launched into her opening monologue, beginning with a report on her cats, which she had left so sadly at home—16 of them, each named and loved deeply. A few years earlier, she had noticed a pregnant stray in the backyard and brought it into the house. She did not have the money to spay the mother cat and would not give up any of the five kittens, which led to an explosion in the household’s feline population. She turned a blind eye to the fact that as the kittens grew, brothers and sisters bred together.

As she talked, I flipped through the cards and read their backs. I thought about how pain had defined my mother’s life. Solipsistic at 27, I also thought of myself. Was she hoping these martyrs would be an example to me? To remain virginal and avoid pain? Or to endure the inevitable pain of womanhood and dedicate it to Christ? 

My mother was quite fond of her martyrs, she was. She was a dedicated Catholic with a pagan brain. Although she was a second-generation Irish immigrant born in America, she was not worldly. The Irish way of thinking, enthralled with magic and the church, had been well preserved in her. The Catholic Church not only provided her structure and guidance in her life and days, but was also her main text, her body of imagery and metaphor through which she understood life. Catholicism was a scrim around her, through which we all needed to be filtered, a veil through which she communicated to us. 

As a girl in Catholic school, she feared nuns, whom she understood to be unhappy, suffering women whose cruelty towards children was a given. Every nun she had known had been unkind to her, and she loved them all. She loved the female martyrs of the church, those odd girls and women who suffered from mysterious pains and bleedings, whose pains were a doorway into transfigurement. 

Growing up, I spent many hours sitting beside my mother in mass. I often stared at the large statue of the skeletal, crucified Jesus that hung over the altar—the wounds in his hands, the crown of thorns digging into his skull, the gash on his side. The sculptor had added realistic blood dripping from his head, hands, and ribs. Small and growing, I mused on his pain, the stinging and throbbing. It was hard to avert my eyes during Mass to something less compelling—candles, the chalice, the flowering trees outside the window. The suffering Jesus trumped all. 

In my early 20s, after a period of intense interest in religion, I had fallen away from the church. Fallen is the right verb, as it was a breathless feeling, to go over the brink and into the air without anything to hold onto. Falling was different from flying, which I often did in my dreams. I had been falling for years and doubted I might ever land.  

It had been hard to tear myself away from the fabric of the fabulous stories of mysteries and transcendence. To become a modern young woman, I had burst forth from my natal world, creating irreparable ruptures. I was alone and naked, unstoried and unprotected, free of their strictures. But I missed the martyrs. 

My mother’s name was Benita, from the Latin benedictus, meaning the blessed one. She had been in ill health for many years. She had five pregnancies in six years (one a miscarriage). She experienced the uniquely American mid-century modern birth experience of labor pain that built until she arrived at the hospital, where she was completely sedated. She awoke, bleary, to an infant miraculously emerged from her body, her tender places bruised from forceps. 

Soon after she started having children, she developed migraines. Still in her thirties, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. The cabinet above the stove was stocked with pain relievers of all sorts—aspirin, ibuprofen, codeine—usually washed down with a glass of wine. When I was seven, she fell prey to pain in her right shoulder and was diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome, in which a nerve is compressed between the clavicle and rib, causing numbness and pain. A friendly orthopedic surgeon, on whom she had a crush, proceeded with a series of surgeries to remove three of her ribs. But the pain persisted. Percodan (a combination of the opioid oxycodone and aspirin) was added to the cabinet and became her favorite. 

My mother was never constant, always moving on a continuum between pain and sedation. She had no moments of resting in between the two states and little tolerance for the pain part of the equation, so the days became a hopscotch between ever-increasing doses of Percodan. My father was the keeper and mediator of her medication, the one who parceled out the dose when the time arrived. It was difficult to hear her begging him for it beforehand. My father also negotiated with doctors to have the prescriptions refilled.

My mother had been a nurse in her youth and had honed the art of flirting with doctors. They loved her Irish charm and were wary of her immense appetite for narcotics. Several times, like a serial adulterer, she began a relationship with a new doctor in which he (always a man) was enthralled with the mystery of her symptoms, settled into prescribing opioids, and then, growing weary of her increasing tolerance and needy phone calls, would cut her off. 

Her breakups with doctors were tragic. She went through withdrawal, engulfed in a feeling of doom. She cried and raged at my father; eventually, she stopped speaking and stared at the ceiling, moored in her recliner, hands shaking, a pink kidney-shaped vomit basin by her side. 

My father, desperate for calm, would take a day off and begin to work the rotary phone, pacing the kitchen and trying to find a new doctor to take her on. By the time she had a new appointment, she was in such terrible shape that, of course, a new prescription would be written. Coquettishly, she would perk up with the prospect of a new flirtation with a doctor, charming them into access to their prescription pads and the deeply delightful oblivion of Percodan, which only they could supply. 

By the time she was lodged in the nursing home in 1997, the dance had ended. Her doctor, a woman (finally), a depressed geriatrician with dirty hair, felt no qualms about medicating the hell out of her. My mother had developed chronic pneumonia and severe osteoporosis, perhaps from the steroids she took for her bad breathing, which likely resulted from her cigarette smoking and lack of exercise. She had the bird bones of a 95-year-old. She coughed and broke a rib. She turned over in bed and broke another. 

Everything in the nursing home was easier when the residents were drugged, and the doctor gave her the highest doses possible. My mother floated in a delightful bliss, dozing through soap operas, cushioned from cares and worries by the amniotic opioid. This might have been the happiest time of my mother’s short life, her time in this high bed in a room lit by fluorescent light, surrounded by the undemanding company of the kind, heavy nurses. It was certainly the happiest I had ever seen her. She no longer had to fight for relief. 

My mother had married late for her cohort, at 27. In her twenties, she worked at a hospital in Syracuse and lived with her parents, caring for her father, whose heart failed when my mother was 23. Her mother died the following year. 

Alone but for a brother in the suburbs who was busy with his new wife and babies, she met my father not at a coffee hour after Mass but at the hospital where she worked. Newly discharged from the Navy, he was an orderly. The hospital was not Catholic and employed people of all faiths. My father, nominally a Protestant, did not attend church. 

My mother and father met with a priest many times before their marriage for pastoral counseling. The priest’s requirement for sanctioning their wedding was that my father agree to raise the children of the marriage as Catholics. While canon law puts the responsibility to give a Catholic education to children of a mixed marriage on the Catholic partner, the priest, rightly recognizing the power structure of a working-class American marriage in the 1960s, had my father sign an agreement to ensure his cooperation.

The week before my mother and father married, there was a blizzard. It was no surprise to have snow in a Syracuse February, but the Blizzard of ’66 was special, dumping 42 inches of snow on the city over three days. My father had been in my mother’s basement apartment, hooking up his stereo, and they said he did not notice how heavy the snow had become until it was too late to leave. 

“Your uncle must have called every 15 minutes to check on me,” my mother laughed. 

But perhaps not frequently enough, as my elder brother was born eight months and three weeks after the blizzard. 

A miscarriage was next. She gave birth to me two and a half years after that. My two younger brothers arrived at breakneck speed after that, almost but not quite Irish twins. Bottle-fed babies got siblings right away. 

In 1972, after she had been pregnant five times in six years, her doctor suggested that she might wish to use a method of birth control other than the rhythm method so that she could rest and focus on the children she had. Catholic, she could not. She went to the priest for advice, and he suggested that she sleep in a spare bed. 

There was no spare bed to be had in that crowded house. My mother moved onto the couch in the family room. In pain, she tossed fitfully and shuffled around the house at night in her synthetic blue robe, hood raised against the cold, a nun mortifying herself. My father slept alone. I don’t think they necessarily decided to live this way, but rather, reached an impasse from which neither would budge and about which they could not speak.  

My mother named me Bridget in honor of my maternal Great-Grandmother, Bridget Feeley. She was called Bessie and was born in 1871 in Cashel, a tiny town in County Sligo. She emigrated to the United States as a young woman and married John McQueeney (a Leitrim man) in Auburn, New York, in 1896. My paternal grandparents were from Mayo and Monaghan. 

I don’t know much about my Great-Grandmother Bridget, but I do know quite a bit more about my other namesake, St. Brigid of Kildare. Called Muire na nGael (Mary of the Irish), she is a saint of poetry, learning, healing, and cows, and most likely is a person whose human reputation merged with stories of the pagan mother goddess Brig, a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a supernatural tribe of gods and goddesses in Ireland. 

St. Brigid amuses me in many ways. She was born a slave—her mother was a pagan who converted to Catholicism, and her father was a pagan chieftain. As a young woman, Brigid was known for her great generosity with other people’s possessions—she gave away her mother’s butter and bacon and her father’s jeweled sword. A rich woman gave her apples, and she passed them to the lepers. She could turn water into beer.

The patron saint of midwives, she could help a woman get pregnant and make a fetus disappear from the womb without harming the woman. She was learned and founded religious communities and a school of art in which books were illuminated. She was a friend of Saint Patrick. Once, a man harassed her for her chaste vow, and she made his eyes explode. 

Both Brigids—adventurers who exist in liminal spaces between countries or spirit worlds—seem like good guides to me. Bridget is also a fine name for a servant, which my mother intuited was to be my nature and thus trained me.  

My father, in good 1950s fashion, was named Richard but called Dick. After I was born, he went through a crisis. He never told me the story; what I gathered emerged from my mother in a nonlinear manner at moments when she was furious or labile from opiates. He hit her more than once. He swallowed a bottle full of aspirin and locked himself in the bathroom. She called her brother, crying. She would not leave her husband. My father was hospitalized. Once he was released, he attended group therapy for several months, where the participants told him to grow up and be a father to his children. 

Throughout the rest of her difficult life, my mother, angry at my father for a minor transgression, would return to the story of his “nervous breakdown,” castigating him for his poor behavior during this time. Her pain at his treatment of her during his struggle did not ebb. My father, a man who, in my memory, never raised a hand against us, would sit, head bowed, and implore her to forgive him and forget the past. 

At the time of his nervous breakdown, they lived in an apartment on a hill above Erie Boulevard, which overlooked a drive-in movie theater. While he was away—hospitalized or at group therapy—she would put us to bed, sit in the window of the living room, chain smoke away her pregnancy nausea, and watch the movies on the drive-in screen. It was the age of Love Story and MASH. There was no sound, but she liked watching the films anyway, looking at the women’s dresses. The summer I turned one, she watched Ryan’s Daughter, her favorite, every night for a month. She divined the story even though she never heard the actors’ voices. 

My mom and I sat in the dim family room one Saturday night after dinner, folding the clean laundry. It was our daily devotion: dirty clothes into the washer, the wet tangle into the dryer, and the smoothing, folding, and sorting, all while we sat together with warm clothes on our laps and chatted. The boys were already in bed; my father was lying on the living room floor, doing a puzzle.  

“Guess what happened today?” she asked. “When you guys went to the airport with Dad.”

My mother had been in a mood, crashing dishes together in the kitchen and complaining that she just needed a bit of peace. My father piled us into the station wagon and took us to stand by the chain-link fence to watch the planes take off and land. 

“I went downstairs to the basement to put the wash in the dryer,” she began. 

I was terrified of the basement. Covered in dirty black-and-white checked linoleum, it contained my father’s workbench, piles of lumber, the furnace and water heater, the washer and dryer, and a gaping black pit with a sump pump. 

“When I was down there,” my mother said, “The front door opened and a person, a small person, walked across the floor above my head, from the door to the kitchen sink. The water went on.”

“Was it John-John? Debbie? Jamie?” I asked, listing the neighborhood kids. We were in and out of each other’s houses all the time, and it was not unusual to get a drink of water or use the restroom in whichever house was closest rather than one’s own. 

“Nope. I went upstairs quietly and poked my head around the corner. I saw a girl, with curly red hair, wearing a white dress, all covered in shining light. She had a cat’s tail and ears. She giggled and was drinking from your cup. She put it down, ran back outside into the sunshine, and disappeared. But a streak of light stayed in the air behind her for a few seconds.” 

My mother stopped, holding the clean white sheet she was folding against her, eyes far away. 

“Who was she?” 

“Maybe a ghost.  Maybe your older sister, the baby I lost. Or my sister, the one who died as a baby. Or maybe,” she said, “one of those spirits whose name you can’t say in the house.”

 “Why not?” I asked.  

“Because they’ll come and take one of you.”

“Tell me the name,” I said.  

My mother motioned me over to the window. She raised the screen, put her head outside, and pulled me beside her. I put my head outside too. The night air was cool; the bare skin of her upper arm was hot against mine.  

“The sidhe,” she whispered into my ear.  “Back inside, quick. ”

I jumped back inside, and she slammed the window shut.  

“Well,” she said, “the important thing is that I did not follow her.  Although I wanted to.  Help me fold this sheet.”

We paced apart, stretching the long white cotton between us like the shroud the women wrapped around the dead Jesus, and moved toward one another once again, bound together by duty.  The door to the basement was behind me, lurking. If the sidhe came for me, might I want to go with them?

Camille Paglia, an Italian-American cultural critic born and raised in Syracuse, NY, says that what fascinated her about her childhood Catholicism was its “pagan residue.” Immigrant Catholic women, purposefully undereducated, are never far from the pagan practices the church has grown up around.  

My mother did not hear an American ghost. Those footsteps belonged to a pooka, an Irish spirit. 

Growing up in Eastwood, on the east side of Syracuse, my father was baptized a Baptist in his early teens but ceased practicing when he ran away from home at 16. For the first years of their marriage, my mother went to church on Sundays alone while my father stayed home and listened to Mozart on his turntable.

Soon after we moved into the house in Fairmount, we joined the parish up the street, Holy Family. It was a large Irish-and-Italian congregation. A notice appeared in their bulletin: the church was going to be renovated, and they needed volunteers. My mother signed my father up to work, as he liked to use his hands. His gruff carpenter father had taught him how to refinish furniture. She guessed, correctly, that he might not mind a few hours working in the church each weekend, away from our noise and mess. 

One day, we went to church to get Daddy. He was on the top of a long ladder, his glasses and clothes spattered with creamy yellow paint. The paint was even in his short military-cut hair, making it spiky. He grinned down at us.

Daddy had a funny sense of humor. Sometimes he said things that weren’t funny and laughed anyway. Once in a while, on his fifth or sixth beer of the night, he would flip a dime in my direction and say, “Here’s a dime—go call all your friends.” I was terribly plagued by a nervous stomach, and if I mentioned a stomach ache, he would always respond, “Stomach hurts? Come here. I’ll break your leg, and that will distract you.” Some nights, if I dragged my feet at bedtime, he would bark at me to go sleep in the yard. This was a sign that I needed to hustle away from him quickly. He was deep in his cups. 

While working, a parish priest befriended my dad. Father was a short, stout, dark-haired fellow with an awkward laugh. One evening, my father came home and announced he had invited the priest to supper, which made my mother nervous.

“I haven’t the money to entertain him,” my mother said. “There’s no meat tonight. And the house is a mess.”

“He needs to know how hard it is,” my father said, “how we can’t buy milk if we have to buy shoes. How can he stand up there and tell you to be a good Catholic if he doesn’t know that? Priests don’t know anything about the way we live. The nuns cook and clean for them.”

“He knows what God thinks he needs to know,” my mother argued. But she set another place anyway.

Priests are strange beings, crazy man angels who hear God speak to them directly. Sometimes, people speak of them affectionately, but that is merely to soften the terror of contemplating their true otherworldliness. They are not like the rest of us. They answer not to the laws of the state within which they live but to the secretive rules of the extraordinarily wealthy transnational church. They are of particular interest to Satan, who wishes to seduce them. 

During ordination, a seminarian lies prostrate on the floor before the altar. When he arises, each priest in attendance touches his head. The seminarian undergoes what St. Thomas Aquinas called the “ontological change”—the very nature of his spiritual being changes. He is no longer a man but a Christ—not just a symbol or embodiment, but an actual Christ. While he looks the same, his essence has changed. He is in persona Christi. When he says, in mass, “My body, my blood,” he is being serious. The priest offers his very self as a sacrifice in each Mass. He has already sacrificed his self to his celibacy. 

A priest is a priest forever. Even if he misbehaves in the most sinful way and is laicized (stripped of his collar and title and “reduced to the lay state”) or excommunicated, he still remains a priest and can consecrate the Eucharist. The supernatural magic to create the sacraments is forever his. The ontological change cannot be undone. 

It’s hard to imagine how an individual human perceives this change in himself to another being in spirit. But from the outside, it is clear that priests are weird dudes. Perfumed by booze and incense, smiling in a funny way, a priest off the altar and out of his robes is disconcerting. They are walking among us, those awkward and lonely Christs. 

Father was no exception. He didn’t mind that dinner at our oak table was spaghetti with tomato sauce. His arrival necessitated the addition of a seventh chair, which threw all our usual places at the table awry. And what a fetching guest he was, a man who talked directly to children, a man full of stories! 

“Do you want to see my dolls?” he asked, beckoning me over. 

From his wallet, he pulled a Polaroid print of Raggedy Anne and Raggedy Andy dolls, nestling arm in arm. 

“My sister made them for me,” he said. “They live in the rectory with me.”

My family did not own a camera. I loved Polaroids, the transformation of a blank space into an image in front of your eyes. I longed to have one.    

“Raggedy Andy likes to steal my cigars! Once, he set a fire to the rectory by accident, but Raggedy Anne put it out! Someday, you can come to the rectory to see my dolls,” he said, winking. 

“Can I see your camera?”

“Of course you can! You can take a picture of me with it!”

My parents had a good time that night, laughing and joking. After dinner was done, instead of washing the dishes, my mother made coffee. Father Raggedy Andy lit a pungent cigar, my father lit his pipe, and my mother, her cigarette. They sat at the table in a cloud of fragrant smoke for a long time, talking while we watched snakes fighting on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom in the family room.

Soon, on other nights after dinner, my father began to walk up the dark bowling alley parking lot to visit Father Raggedy Andy at the rectory on his own. He brought home lots of thick books to read. He listened to classical music on the radio at night, staring off into space.

While conversions have always existed in the Catholic Church (often forced, such as the Islamic and Jewish conversos in Spain during the Inquisition), the contemporary American Roman Catholic Church is not overtly evangelical. Proselytizing is not a priority, as it is for evangelical Christians or Mormons. Only 2 percent of US adults are converts to Catholicism. In fact, conversions are often discouraged or given the “Roman delay.” Conversions happen mainly as they did for my father, through exposure in the home and family. 

One bright Saturday afternoon in April, the day before Easter, my mother combed out the pink sponge curlers she had set in my hair the night before.My father dressed specially in his brown suit with an avocado green polyester button-down shirt and the wide, flowered tie my mother had sewn for him. Finally, we all climbed into the station wagon and went to church.

Father Raggedy Andy raised the host and lowered it. He called my father onto the altar and said some words. Father put the host into Daddy’s mouth, and my youngest brother started to wail, crying that he wanted a piece of gum, too. My mother struggled through the people in the pew and lugged the baby outside. She was wearing a dark blue sleeveless linen dress, and the gauzy light blue scarf she had wrapped around her neck unwound and was trailing behind her. I balanced on tiptoe on the red vinyl kneeler. My father walked down the aisle of the church.

Afterward, people came back to the house. My mother made a big tray of scrambled eggs, plates of toast, home fries, and baking sheets of bacon. Guests brought coffee cakes, rich with thick veins of cinnamon and brown sugar. People kept hugging my father and smiling. Later on, his beloved reel-to-reel recorder, on which he was playing a tape, began spitting sparks and smoke. Father Raggedy Andy grabbed the smoking machine and threw it out the front door into the yard. I thought my father would get quiet and leave the house to smoke, like he usually did when things broke down. But he stayed.