Page 60 of Dead to Rites

Damn it.

“I’m sorry I’ve sent you back to square one,” Jude said, and he sounded genuinely sympathetic.

I shrugged. Better to have to start over than accuse the wrong person of murder. A change of subject sounded good to me, so I said, “Okay, are you going to tell me now?”

To my relief, he didn’t look too surprised by that question. “Tell you what?”

“Tell me why you left the church,” I replied. “You said it wasn’t a first-conversation subject, and I went along with that. But this is our fourth or fifth conversation, so I just thought you might be ready to talk about it now.”

He picked up his cup of tea and sipped from it. I didn’t see any hesitation in his expression, more something that seemed almost measured, as if he was thinking about the best way to launch into the subject.

I waited.

“If you have an hour, I can give you the long version,” he said.

“I have all morning,” I replied. “Or rather, I have until twelve-thirty, so that’s basically the rest of the morning and a little bit of the afternoon.”

He didn’t smile, although I’d kind of hoped he would.

“Want some more tea?” he asked.

Delaying tactic, or just trying to be polite?

“I’m good,” I told him.

He shifted in his chair. It wasn’t a nervous movement, but rather him settling down to tell me the thing that had been weighing on his mind for years and had caused him to leave the clergy.

“It was about five years ago,” he told me. “I was the parochial vicar at Sacred Heart, and part of my duties was administering last rites.” He paused. “You know what those are, right?”

“Sure,” I replied. “I’ve seen them in plenty of movies.”

To his credit, he didn’t wince but only continued. “I went to see a woman in my parish, Maria Ortega. She’d been suffering from congestive heart failure for years, and because of other health issues, she wasn’t a candidate for a transplant. I got word from her family that she was dying, and I went to her house to sit with her and give her the last rites.”

I wondered what that would be like, to know you were leaving this world but to have someone who would sit with you and perform a ceremony that was supposed to guarantee your entrance into Heaven.

Or was it into Purgatory? I had to admit I was a little foggy on how all that worked. I’d read Dante’s Inferno when I was in college, but it ended just as the narrator was heading for Purgatory, and I had no idea what happened after that.

“It was a peaceful death,” Jude said. “Maria had been suffering for years, and she was ready to let go. I could feel the end when it came — she’d been holding my hand, and her fingers went limp and dropped onto the bed. But then….”

The words trailed off, and I could tell he was having a hard time continuing, even though he’d told me he would give me the whole story.

He pressed his lips together, and appeared to pull in a breath. “I closed my Bible and got up from the chair where I’d been sitting. Her family was waiting in the next room, and I knew I needed to go in there and let them know that she’d passed peacefully. But as I got up, I saw her standing there.”

I didn’t need to ask him to elaborate. I knew all too well what it was like to see the spirit of a dead person standing near their body.

“She looked at me,” he said. “Then she looked down at her body in the bed, then back at me. She was very calm. Radiant, actually, looking ten or fifteen years younger, relaxed and happy.”

I’d seen this as well. Hazel always appeared about thirty years younger than she’d been when she passed, healthy and, if not in the complete prime of life, still vigorous and with decades ahead of her.

Jude went quiet again. I could tell he was waiting for me to interject, but I didn’t want to stop him in the middle of the story. I just waited, and after a beat or two, he continued.

“She smiled at me and said thank you, and then she was gone. I thought I must have been hallucinating, except everything about that moment felt sharp and clear, almost too real. Maria hadn’t been wearing her nightgown, but a pretty red dress and red lipstick. And at her funeral a few days later, that was the outfit she was wearing in the picture her family had displayed next to the casket. I asked her daughter about it, and she said the photo was from her mother’s fiftieth birthday party. I’d never seen it before. In that moment, I knew I hadn’t hallucinated. I’d seen Maria Ortega’s spirit in the hour of her death.”

Another silence. This time, he reached for his cup of tea and drank most of it in one swallow, as if his throat was dry after talking for so long.

Then he said, “For the next year, I obsessed over the vision I’d seen. I read as many texts as I could find about ghosts and spirits and the afterlife, trying to reconcile what I’d seen with what my faith had taught me. I went to Father Frank for advice. He took it all seriously — and I was grateful to him for that — but he also counseled me to let it go, that my new obsession was interfering with my ability to be a good pastor to our community.” A sigh, one I wasn’t sure Jude even knew he’d released. Then he went on, “And I eventually realized that I couldn’t continue as a priest with this weight on me. Father Frank helped me leave the priesthood, and he never judged. He was just there for me as a friend.”

“He was a good man,” I said quietly. How many members of the priesthood would have done what Father Frank had done despite knowing that their numbers were dwindling and the Church needed to keep as many in the faith as possible?