Goodbye and Thank You, in the Name of the Father
It was equal parts love and anger that brought Father Edward Barrett--then the Catholic chaplain at the Veterans Administration hospital in Westwood--into the life of my distinctly Protestant family back in the late 1970s.
Love, because when “Father Ed” saw my mother in heartbreaking distress, he found a way to comfort her with courageous words. “Now, Ruth, remember, this too shall pass,” was something only this striking silver-haired priest could say convincingly to a distraught woman whose 77-year-old husband had suffered a stroke during heart bypass surgery, leaving him a total-care patient with devastating brain damage.
Anger, because Father Ed and Ruth Harris were able to share their rage when ignorance or injustice affected patient care--something they both felt happened all too often.
By the time dad died in February 1980, with both of them calmly at his bedside, mother had been a daily presence at the hospital for more than two years. The relationship between Father Ed and the Harris family was only beginning, though. It gained strength with my 1982 marriage to Andrea McKenna, who got from him a refreshing perspective on her own Catholic church. And it intensified as Father Ed performed such un-priest-like functions as helping pull my sister, Judy Wolman, through a divorce.
Lacking a church of his own, he chose the places he loved most for much of this family ministry: elegant Westside eateries such as JiRaffe and Melisse. And that approach served us well, too. “The French restaurant was the church for me,” recalls Judy, who rarely leaves her home by the beach on Sunday mornings. “He could always get me there.”
Like most families today, mine spreads with a multigenerational reach across the country, from Manhattan Beach to Del Mar to Jacksonville, Fla., to Boston. But when Father Ed died at 70 in Santa Monica on Oct. 1, three generations of Harrises lost our spiritual guide--a priest who had been there for us for more than 23 years, from ceremony to ceremony, and through heart-rending crises in between.
In this age of church sampling and regional relocation, to say nothing of the continued separation between Catholics and Protestants, enduring relationships between one clergyman and a family are unusual. But mere cultural obstacles never dissuaded Father Ed--a transplanted New Yorker who had been ordained there in 1957--from staying connected to the people he loved.
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For our family, rooted in Presbyterianism, this peculiar ecumenical relationship began when our mother first turned to Father Ed for advice in the dark days at the VA Hospital. This was a shock to her children. While growing up in the St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves, Judy and I, along with our sister Ann O’Keefe Brewer and our brother David, hadn’t met many Catholics. Our parents saw Catholicism as authoritarian and elitist. (A lifelong Democrat, mother still “just couldn’t” vote for John Kennedy for president.)
But we had seen mother--she hated the word “mom”--adjust to a whole new world in those VA years, as she sat by dad in an environment she saw as largely hostile. My father, Roy J. Harris, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and former World War II Army colonel. In retirement, after his 43-year-career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, mother took charge of the move to Southern California and the planning of their travels around the globe. Dad’s heart operation in 1977 had been designed to eliminate his debilitating angina and allow more such travels. But his stroke had left him defenseless and needing constant attention, albeit with the ticker of a man 25 years younger. At the VA, mother could attend him daily, though that forever put her at odds with one or another nurse or doctor charged with his care.
“Thick as thieves” was one of mother’s pet expressions, and it describes how she and Father Ed worked together. Somehow, she discovered that he, too, seethed over the hospital’s failings. Behind the closed door of his small VA office, his support allowed her to shed the tears and utter the curses she kept from the rest of the staff. Curses didn’t phase Father Ed. Together, they conspired to circumvent the bureaucracy on dad’s behalf: an appeal for a more sensitive nurse here, a move from the wrong ward there. “They just don’t understand Roy’s illness,” Father Ed would say, preaching to the proverbial choir.
With his help, and her children’s, mother reached a state of acceptance in time for the February morning dad died. I received a call at my Santa Monica apartment, and arrived at the hospital moments too late. Father Ed and mother were praying, and I can still hear the Lord’s Prayer he led us in, with his unfamiliar “trespasses,” instead of “debts.” On many levels, I was accepting, too; Father Ed knew well that I had already said my goodbyes and told dad I loved him. We had talked about how the next job for the Harrises would be helping mother adjust to being home again--with Father Ed in the less demanding position of family friend.
But it was not to be. Just four months later, my older brother David was murdered in his Atlanta apartment building, once again thrusting the priest into the role of explaining the unexplainable, and preparing mother, who was 67 that year, for an even more difficult acceptance. As my sisters and I drew close for yet more grieving, Father Ed was on the phone with us, sharing our shock--and, as always, sparing us the platitudes. Like the Kennedy family, we were being tried beyond reason, but he assured us our strength would see us through. Somehow, he helped us believe it.
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Andrea and I were engaged in 1981, and though I planned to remain a Protestant, we decided to have a Catholic ceremony. Father Ed would conduct the “pre-Cana” counseling that serves as a Marriage 101 course before a Catholic wedding. In a way, we were doing him a favor, he said with a laugh, because VA chaplains so rarely had such happy duty. Still, our sessions with him must have been unusual, by church standards. From the pamphlet we read together, the meaning of a Catholic marriage seemed clear: Have lots of children. But Father Ed’s thoughts were different and happened to agree with ours. Family planning was no problem for him--”Oh, please!” he’d say. “Marriage is about you.” (In fact, to stir up Father Ed, one had only to mention the church’s role in Third World overpopulation.)
He was ecstatic, in 1986, to preside over the baptism of our first son, David--christenings were even rarer for a VA chaplain--and he was resplendent in white and gold vestments as he addressed our little congregation at St. Augustine’s in Culver City. It was a scholarly occasion, with Father Ed preaching on water’s place in the Hebrew tradition, a subject he chose, he said, so that Jewish members of our extended family would feel included.
Andrea’s devoutly Catholic parents, here from Cape Cod, were delighted with the priest’s elaborate preparation for this one service. At the reception, though, he happened to mention that he was planning to fly to San Francisco for the pope’s visit--to protest against the church’s position on gays. They were horrified but balanced this with his obvious caring for their daughter, figuring, well, he is from California. And, sure enough, they were back to attend the no-less-splendid St. Augustine baptism of our second son, R.J., in 1987.
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As other ceremonial needs arose, Father Ed was there for the family. And when mother died in 1993, his eulogy--delivered from the pulpit of her own Santa Monica Presbyterian church--captured her life of devotion to husband and children as only someone with his intimate family knowledge could.
Father Ed retired from the VA, taking shorter-term jobs such as serving as chaplain on cruises and tours, and traveling back East to stay in touch with family and friends from his early days in the priesthood. His neat but crowded Santa Monica apartment became a colorful museum of his travels, adorned with statuary and knickknacks that created a complex stalking ground for his cat.
His lunchtime ministry with Judy, Andrea and me kept growing. And what an eclectic ministry it was. A practiced chef himself, Father Ed would praise or pillory every sauce, then jump from world events to the L.A. traffic to his irritation du jour. Yet the discussion would soon turn to the personal crises of his dining companions, and uncannily he’d find a new perspective that made things easier. The focus was rarely on his own life history, which remained something of an enigma, although it was clear he’d been out of the Catholic mainstream for a long time--and enjoyed it there.
Andrea and I saw him as an unofficial marriage counselor and even something of a parenting trainer. Although he loved children, it was the “couple” in us he really nurtured. His counsel helped us pamper ourselves with dinners out alone together and occasional weekend trips, to recharge our batteries for our demanding roles as mother and father.
These and other lessons we carried with us when it came time to say goodbye.
We moved back to New England in 1996, when I was caught up in a layoff by my employer of 23 years, the Wall Street Journal. He applauded our decision to move our little family closer to Andrea’s New England clan, and he promised to visit us when he came back East.
There wasn’t much chance. Andrea was diagnosed with brain cancer in August 1997--a little more than a year after our move. Maybe three more months, the doctors said. I assumed there would be a miracle, though, and in one of our late-night phone sessions Father Ed assured me I was right, though he warned me not to predict what the miracle might be. She fought for more than seven months before she died, at home, in April. Her valiant battle had been the miracle.
“Andrea McKenna Harris needs no eulogy from me,” he began his remarks at her memorial service. Still, it wouldn’t have been complete without Father Ed, who traveled 3,000 miles to be there. Hardly a typical Catholic eulogy, his cited Leo Tolstoy and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and delivered a tough message: that our suffering and grief--and even our anger over losing her so young--had made us stronger somehow.
Less frequent now were the L.A.-Boston phone calls. He still traveled. But Father Ed was having hardships, too. During a trip to China, he’d picked up a parasite that had somehow invaded his heart, weakening him terribly and increasing the time spent with his least-favorite people: doctors. When we did talk, I saved the best for him, making him the first person I entrusted with the thought that I might remarry--and getting his fervent support. (In a way, my wedding last November only felt truly complete when I finally introduced my new wife, Eileen McIntyre, to him during a trip West this summer.)
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Memories about his eulogy for Andrea came flooding back this October, as separate Santa Monica and New York services were planned for Father Ed. There, his family and friends spoke freely about how this unusual priest had touched their lives, and about what a mystery--and in some ways a contradiction--his life seemed to be.
“He was a very private man,” said Mary Anne Given, an oncology nurse and longtime Los Angeles friend. “But when he was your friend, he gave you his thoughts completely.” Other families evidently had benefited from knowing this individualistic priest, although mine was the only Protestant one, as far as I could tell. Bill Hildebrand, one of Father Ed’s oldest friends in Los Angeles, recalled how his unusual take on the church and on humanity had helped repair marriages and bring others back to Catholicism. Bill called him a poet, “with grace and charm and elegance, and the turn of phrase that could reconcile disparate situations, events and people.”
There was talk of how his “epiphany parties” each January opened the window just a bit on Father Ed’s life, bringing scores of friends to a feast at his apartment. For days in advance, he joyously labored alone in the kitchen over a five-course roast lamb dinner--each course introduced by his striking a gong.
He never seemed embittered by his own freak heart ailment, and Father Ed remained feisty until the end. And while he’d been too ill on Sept. 11 to know what had happened in his own dear New York City, his friends speculated that the barbarity of the terrorist attacks would have enraged him--and that he’d have led the charge to punish the attackers. I agreed; he and I had often discussed how Jesus got angry, at injustice, hypocrisy and lack of faith. And Ecclesiastes was certainly clear, we agreed, about there being “a time for war and a time for peace.”
Asked to talk at the service, I simply adapted the words he’d prepared for Andrea those years before. This grief, too, would make us all stronger. “Father Ed Barrett,” I said, “needs no eulogy from us.”
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Roy Harris is a senior editor at CFO magazine, a Boston-based publication of the Economist Group.