On the Other Side of Fear by Hallie Lord

Author:Hallie Lord
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Onward

Love is a festival. Love is joy.

Love is to keep moving forward.

~ Pope Francis

I used what little energy I had left to put together a handful of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as I rushed to get dinner on the table before the St. Junipero Serra canonization coverage began.

As far as dinners go, it wasn’t going to win me any Parent of the Year awards, but given that I (a) had bronchitis, (b) was on solo parent duty that night, and (c) had included fresh fruit in the dinner lineup, I considered it a victory.

I’d been sick for over three months when Pope Francis came to visit the United States in the fall of 2015. None of my illnesses was life threatening — little more than a series of miserable colds accompanied by a seemingly endless and severe case of bronchitis and one brief but very painful double ear infection that left my hearing impaired for over a month (not the worst symptom a mother of seven has ever experienced, I have to admit) — but the relentlessness of these maladies was exhausting. Just when I’d see the light at the end of one viral tunnel, another would suck me in.

The good news was that my rock bottom coincided nicely with Papa’s touchdown on American soil. Due to my inability to do much more than the bare minimum required for survival, I had more freedom than usual to sit and watch him while I nursed my milky sweet newborn.

I’d spent the last twenty-four hours glued to my computer screen as Francis moved from one event to the next, weaving in and out of one crowd after another. I watched with just the slightest touch of jealousy as mothers with newborns as tiny as mine begged Pope Francis’s security detail to squire their babies over the barricades, through the air, and into his embrace. Over and over again, I replayed videos of him demanding that his driver stop the car so that he could kiss modern-day lepers.

There were moments when he looked tired. There were even a few times when he seemed mildly annoyed. It was noted by the press that these moments seemed to coincide quite perfectly with the ones in which he was spending time with politicians rather than in the company of his flock. (To such speculation, the Vatican had no comment.) He never once looked overwhelmed, impatient, or stressed, though. Not to me, anyway.

This was remarkable to me. Here was this seventy-eight-year-old man with diminished lung capacity (decades earlier he lost part of one lung to surgery following an infection), sciatica, and an entire world demanding that he go here, do this, don’t do that as well as expecting him to bring a little relief to our souls and peace to our world — and he had not yet had a mental breakdown.

I would have had a mental breakdown.

I was experiencing some of what I imagined he was experiencing, but on a vastly smaller scale, and I was a mess.

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