WHEN WILL OUR TERRORS CEASE?
James P. Stobaugh
April 1, 1987
We have seen the young man mutilated,
The torn girl trembling by the millstream.
And meanwhile we have gone on living …
We have all had our private terror …
-T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
I didn't know it, but I was too late.
Frank had died twenty minutes earlier, but when I arrived, all I saw were the hospital sheets, like wrinkled drapes in a house in which no one lives, lying on a disheveled and very empty bed.
I picked up the sheets anyway, as if to make sure Frank wasn't hiding beneath PROPERTY OF WEST PENN HOSPITAL. He wasn't, but lying next to the garbage can was a crumpled piece of paper. I investigated this new evidence. People don't simply disappear from hospital rooms.
"Turn the corpse over and fold the arms behind its back," the note read. Frank is dead! I realized. What a way to find my old friend. An hour ago Frank was watching "The Today Show" and sipping cold coffee. Now he is "the corpse."
Two weeks earlier I had gone to his house to give him Communion.
"This is my body that is broken for you." How many times, my old friend, have you heard these words? I thought. I wonder if you know how uncomfortable I am.
"Take, eat . . ." What right do I have to serve you Communion? I silently asked. Because I went to seminary? What do I know about life? About death?
Frank reached out and draped one pallid hand on top of mine. His cool touch steadied my shaking. But something in the coolness of it let me know he would soon die.
"This do in remembrance of me."
I gave him Ritz crackers and grape juice. He gave me fresh peanut butter cookies. "Bet you could never guess they were made from margarine," he chuckled.
They were holy cookies. I nervously munched on them all the way home.
But now, an empty hospital room. ...
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