Winifred was faded: a ghost of a woman you vaguely hoped, rather than knew, had once existed in full color. She shuffled into church every Sunday about half an hour late, careful to inform bystanders of the reason, sure that they had been anxious for her. Her pale blue eyes were vacant, almost devoid of all color now, faded like the wisps of grey hair under the knit cap she perpetually wore.
Winifred had one story, and she told it over and over with slight variations, assuming strangers knew her well enough to care. It usually involved a niece taking her somewhere or not being able to take her somewhere; an illness; occasionally a birth, but often death. Either way, there was worry: worry like a vague, haunting fragrance, musty and withered like the life she had led.
Winifred had surgery and asked that it be announced in the parish bulletin, with a child-like confidence in the importance that this would bear to the community. Winifred had other prayer requests, which she handed to Sister Gertrude (the Pastoral Associate), to be read out immediately at Mass, written on tiny scraps of paper in an illegible copperplate script. And when what was left of Winifred’s family finally decided to move her to a nursing home one hundred miles away, Winifred had a goodbye party in the vestibule.
It was my senior year of college, and when people asked me what I did in my parish internship I answered with a grin, “I do what I’m told.” I was told to teach RCIA, to lector in my very poor Spanish, to fold worship aids, to act the part of Mary in the Christmas pageant. I was told to move chairs and make coffee, lots of coffee, for parish suppers. Sometimes I was never formally “told” like when I walked in on the tail end of Winifred’s send-off and saw the good lady who had to drive her home looking in despair at the remains of the reception. With the church about to lock up and no one in charge of clean-up, I knew my job when I saw it.
There was no telling from the trays of cookies and the leftover fruit juice how many…or how few… had assembled to see her off. But as Winifred walked off into the dull winter afternoon, her light brown coat hanging to her spare ankles, she paid tribute as if it had been a twenty-one gun salute. My appearance on the scene was only what she would have expected. People have been so kind, she said. Everyone here is so helpful.
“There is no place like this.”
She cast her eyes one last time around the old Irish church built by her parents—its unfortunate 1960’s remodel crumbling—and I saw her suddenly as if from a long way off. “There is no place like this.” To others, the neighborhood was dangerous. Its once prosperous Irish and German inhabitants replaced by the city’s poor minorities; its once stately homes subdivided by landlords. To others, it was a poor church, a church whose slender resources were tapped to the breaking point, a church it would be a small loss to close.
To Winifred, it was much more than that. Not least, it was all she had. And I glimpsed the despair she must take with her to an alien community, the long, one-story sprawls where the elderly go to die; a building (not a home) she would seldom, if ever, leave. She would likely never return to St. Rita’s and I think, through the fog that had become her norm, she knew it. As I packed away vanilla wafers and emptied the three gallons of coffee some ambitious person had prepared, I glimpsed the loneliness of those who matter to no one: the elderly, the poor, the colorless, inconvenient people it is so easy to forget.
In my senior year, so close to my own departure into an unknown future, Winifred’s words resonated with me deeply. Then, and in the years since, my own heart has echoed her claim: “there is no place like this.” For many years in my early twenties I was dogged by a sense of homelessness as old as Eden, a sense of trying to get back to a place I had known long ago. In the world in which I found myself, I did not feel known, understood, safe or beloved. The things I saw and the things I valued seemed to carry little weight with those around me. Friends and family felt like islands: places one could rest before returning to a dark and perilous sea. Particularly as my life unfurled on less traditional paths… getting a job abroad after college, delaying grad school, not getting married… it felt like home was a porch I would always be standing on in the twilight, a lighted window I would always be looking in from the outside.
G.K. Chesterton once remarked that there are two ways of getting home. One is by traveling the world around until you find it. The other is by staying there. As an epigram that is delightful, but as a philosophy I find it unrealistic. Sometimes we have neither option. Home may be your childhood birthplace…but its magic is replaced by dysfunction if you pretend that childhood never ends. Home may be college…but you came here to graduate. Home may be a person…but a person can leave you. If given the choice, we would all love to “stay home.” But home does not always choose to stay with us. Home is constantly eroded by time, distance and human nature: by changing roles and relationships, failed communication and even the death of those we love. And before we step out of it into a colder, emptier reality, we are stung by the realization that “there is no place like this.” Other good things may await us, and other people may come into our lives. We are losing something irreplaceable, for all that. And it is important and necessary to honor that loss: to acknowledge it, to sit with it and to feel its full weight.
As I reflected that year, as winter turned to spring and graduation loomed, I realized that, far from being a pitiable or despairing character, Winifred is the wisest of us. In her stubborn adoption of “home” at St. Rita’s and more broadly in the Body of Christ which is the Church, she staked her claim to a place that transcended time, leaped over distance and participated in a reality beyond the limitations and failures of this earth. She entered that reality every time she attended a liturgy and received a sacrament. She was reunited in that place with all the people and places she had loved and lost. Her confidence in the care of the community, in their interest in her, in the importance of her story to them was not, as I thought, an elderly delusion: it was a witness to her understanding of the fullness of a Church which I had only begun to know and where she was fully known.
Looking back now on Winifred’s life, I have come to believe that it was not despair or regret that she took with her to the nursing home, but rather a simple resignation to the cycle of loss, change and grief. I believe that leaving St. Rita’s, although painful, was for her another stop on a journey, not farther away from home, but closer and closer to it. Winifred’s example invited me to find my own home most fundamentally in the Body of Christ, in the prayers and liturgy of the Church, and in the communion of saints, past, present… and future… that surrounds me there. I find that it is a lot more difficult to feel homeless in that place: a place where not a sparrow goes unnoticed; where a reception feast is always at hand; a place where Winifred and you and I… infinitely… matter.
There is no other place quite like this.