Kathy, We Hardly Knew Ya

Halloween 2001 was not an ordinary day. Or maybe it was I don't remember much of the seven weeks before that, shuttling back and forth from my apartment in Harlem to my job on the Upper East Side. I remember my grandmothers crying on the phone. I remember a long-lost friend convincing me that I really was the person inhabiting my body, and not someone new every day like I thought. But those are other stories. The one I'm telling you now isn't really mine.
     Unlike that September morning, October 31st was a day of whispers. The hospital I work in had admitted a woman with anthrax over the weekend. In the early hours of Halloween, when some say the veil between the worlds of the dead and the living is the thinnest, she died.
     Kathy, the patient, was a 61-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who'd escaped her war-torn homeland for a more peaceful life in the Bronx. A devout Catholic, she apparently went to Mass every day—either at St. John Chrysostom in the Bronx, or at St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington, where I sometimes went. Her doctor and I had the same music teacher—those were the only links we had.
     If you listened to the news reports of the still-unsolved mystery of her illness and death, the litany you would have heard was "No family, no family, no family." That's what the papers kept saying, anyway. But they were wrong.

     As head of publications, I was asked to design her funeral program. Word had gotten around that I was good at them. A dubious distinction.
     I was asked to attend a meeting to gather input for the ceremony. I thought it would be just the three of us: myself and two colleagues, one of whom, seven weeks earlier, had lost a brother in the attacks downtown.
     At 8:00 at night, I walked into a room full of people. The two I'd expected were there, but I wasn't ready for the representatives from the New York Vietnamese community, or the FBI agent ... or Kathy's family. You see, she'd lived in the same modest apartment complex in the Bronx since she'd come to the United States. She'd made many close friends, some of whom I'd talked to on the phone in the quietly frantic days surrounding her death. Women I felt like I'd known for years. "Oh, you're the one I talked to," they said. "It's wonderful to meet you. Thank you so much." A dubious pleasure.
     It struck me that none of Kathy's closest friends shared her nationality. One didn't even share a common language: a Chinese woman who'd brought her teenage son to translate for her. When we were introducing ourselves around the table, she was asked what Kathy called her. Her son translated the question, and the woman started crying as she said, in English, "Baby."

     The meeting went well. We agreed on a photo, a psalm, a poem. The Vietnamese priest helped me typeset a short eulogy in his language for the back cover, faxing it back and forth with me for half a Saturday. All of which is how I came to know Kathy, and how I came to be standing in the back of a Bronx bodega in a thin black dress and blazer, drinking coffee between the breakfast cereal and the soda pop at 7:00 on a 35-degree morning, with my brotherless colleague, who'd come into town early to help me fold and carry up the thousand programs.

     The priest at St. John Chrysostom, Kathy's home church, was late. We finally got into the church a little after 8, for the 9:00 service. There was no one to sing the psalm—"Father, I put my life in your hands"—so I did it. The cold, the governor's wife, and the gold brocade that covered Kathy's coffin all conspired against my quavering voice in the drafty church that morning. A dubious honor, but I was glad I'd done it. For her. Even though she'd never split her lunch with me, or brought me homemade cookies or soup, like I'd heard she'd done almost every day for other people.
     Altogether, Kathy had three funeral services: the one we gave her, a Vietnamese-language wake at a funeral home in the Bronx, and a bilingual memorial at a church in Chinatown. Her friends and I were regulars. I was invited to, and went to, them all. I'm still learning why. Mostly I wanted to know her better. One doesn't like to speak ill of the dead, of course, but I wondered why people seemed to love and revere her as much as they did. And I wondered about the future—it felt like she had the makings of some sort of saint.
     I wonder what miracles will be ascribed to her. Will someone find a family in the midst of people they'd never known? Will someone get half a sandwich, or cookies or soup, just when they needed it most? Or will she just remain a quiet presence in dim workaday hallways, reassuring us that the work will get done, and that uncertainty and intractable secrets aren't the worst things in the world?

     I picture her full-moon face, that I never saw in flesh, singing, her hands holding out a tray.

Originally written for Fray Day 6