My dad died nine years ago this week. Talking about waging nonviolence and little insurrections.
In life, as in dying, my dad was a peaceful warrior.
In the fall of 2002, after months of feeling lousy and only very slowly healing from hip surgery, Phil Berrigan, priest, peace activist, father of the plowshares movement and three kids, went to the doctor. The verdict came back harsh: advanced (stage 4) and aggressive liver cancer that had metastasized to his kidneys. The doctors said they could treat it with chemotherapy, but the chances of a full recovery were slight. Dad was up for trying chemo and wanted to let the doctors—oncologists at the top of their game at Johns Hopkins—a chance, but after one round of chemo, he said “no more.”
Friends from far and wide offered alternative cures, advice, great stories of teas and herbs that (against all odds) allowed them to live cancer-free. But, our dad sat us down and told us that he was seeking healing, not a cure; putting his faith in God and in us—praying for healing and for the faith to be strong in the months to come and asking us to start preparing for a life without him. He was not afraid, he told us. He loved us and he was sad, but he would be ready.
And then, with clear eyes and a lot of compassion, he got down to the hard work of dying with dignity.
The hallmark of the next few months was gratitude. I would sit and read with him. “Thanks, Freeds,” he’d say. My sister would bring him a drink. “Thanks, love,” he’d say. My brother would spend time with him. “Thanks for giving an old man a lift,” he’d say. My mom, the Jonah House community, the continuous stream of friends and relatives who came to say hello, spend some time, and say goodbye all experienced the same thing—thanksgiving. Dad allowed no gesture, however small, to go unappreciated.
When some of the day-to-day care became too much for us, we brought in hospice care. They were amazing. They respected what we were doing—loving our dad on his journey to death. Letting him die the way he lived; surrounded by people, surrounded by love, resisting the medical-industrial-complex. There must have been 25 people staying at our house during those last two week of Dad’s life and we all had a role to play. Our sister in law Molly and I cut up Dad’s clothes and made a banner that said “They Shall Beat Their Swords into Plowshares. Nations Shall Learn War No More.” He has so few clothes that we had to use a pair of drawers for “nations.”
He stopped eating; he did not want to drink. His breath grew labored. Magnified by the baby monitor in his room, his breathing became the off-kilter metronome of our days, as we planned the funeral, shared stories and memories, prayed, cried and laughed.
On December 6, sometime after dinner, he died. We stood around him and prayed and cried and said goodbye. The pine box that my brother and friends made was ready, beautifully painted by iconographer Bill McNichols. We prepared the body and laid him in the coffin in dry ice.
The wake and funeral were both at Saint Peter Claver, where he had served as a priest decades earlier. The night after the wake, we gathered around him one last night and then nailed the coffin closed. I remember my Uncle Jim- my dad’s oldest living brother at the time- driving nails deep with just two whacks at the hammer, in contrast to my own clumsy, off centered pings with the hammer.
The next morning was cold and clear, so beautiful. Dad was loaded on to the back of a pickup truck and my sister Kate, Molly and I rode in the truck with him while most people processed carrying signs and banners to the church for the funeral mass.
I don’t remember that much of the service, but it was a strangely happy occasion. Dad was gone, but in a room full of people who loved him, he was still so present. That presence was the theme of Kate and I’s eulogies (it is online—at the bottom of the page—here). We took turns reading paragraphs, it is nice for me to go back and hear her voice in some of the lines:
He is still very present to us, and the work we do (all of us), today and tomorrow and for the rest of our lives, will keep our dad close to us.
He is here with us every time a hammer strikes on killing metal, transforming it from a tool of death to a productive, life-giving, life-affirming implement.
He is here with us every time a member of the church communicates the central message of the gospel (thou shalt not kill) and acts to oppose killing, rather than providing the church seal of approval on war.
He is here whenever joy and irreverent laughter and kindness and hard work are present.
He is here every time we reach across color and class lines and embrace each other as brother and sister…
I have spent a lot of time thinking back on my dad’s life this week, and it makes my heart open wide and smile to know how present he is in the struggle and cacophony, the hard-born miracle that is Occupy…Everywhere.
Kate and I ended by saying:
Thanks, Dad, for lessons in freedom, inside and outside of prison. And thanks to all of you for struggling toward freedom and working to build a just and peaceful world. Our dad lives on in you.
Thanks to everyone out there doing the hard, life-giving work right now.
Thanks, Frida. Presente!
Frida, your father lives on in the life and work of so many of us. His communicative action resounds daily in the little and big steps for love and justice taken by the people whose lives he touched. I am eternally grateful for him, for your mother, for Jonah House and for the new (and ancient) way of being that you all have marked out. Thank you.
To Philip
Compassionate, casual as a good face
(a good heart goes without saying)
someone seen in the street; or
Infinitely rare, once, twice in a lifetime
that conjunction we call brother or friend.
Biology, mythology cast up clues.
We grew together, stars made men
by cold design; instructed
sternly (no variance, not by a hairs-
breadth) in course and recourse. In the heavens
in our mother’s body, by moon and month
were whole men made.
We obeyed then, and we’re born.
DB
And he lives on in my son, whom I named Berrigan so he would have two saints looking over his shoulder, and two people to aspire to be like. And of course in all of us, all over the world, working for peace and justice.
Dear Frida
I have saved your Dad’s letters to me while he was in prison. I treasure them. He taught me much as did Dan and Liz who picked me up where I was performing and brought me to spend the day at Jonah House when Dad was home.
My husband, Joe, taught me how to die. I hope I don’t forget. I am in the midst of lung cancer (my 4th cancer) I am not receiving treatment. I pray that I will have loving people around me like your Dad did when it is my time to go.
I send you and yours peace and much love, Sarah
Hi Frida,
I don’t know if you ever saw this — the poem I wrote about your dad the day he died — so let me post it here …..
POEM FOR PHIL BERRIGAN
As family gathers around Phil Berrigan in Baltimore who refuses to go quietly into that Good Night
But still speaks, even in dying, his spiritual voice unsheathed on behalf of those who resist all war,
And as students at the New School for Social Research gather this morning
To challenge Bob Kerrey, Vietnam war criminal, liar and President of the college,
And as I sit here in Bensonhurst, my ancient beloved Brooklyn, looking out from my little corner of the world
Towards the Narrows, the blue and freezing waters of East River and Hudson merging and sluicing down beneath the Verazzano,
Listening to Amy Goodman’s homage to Phil Berrigan, to all those antiwarriors who have fallen but always live in our actions,
Thinking of another Phil — Phil Ochs — whose birthday on December 19
Is almost upon us again, another laborious twirl of this devastated planet
Around the sun which this morning beats down so unstintingly with broken wing;
And as the soldiers are moved into place like pawns by unseen hands
Preparing to commit the coming slaughter,
I sit and look out
Nibbling the edges of sanity,
Of towering sadness
Of apparently inexhaustible rage
And of surprising kettle-fulls of love and humor
This morning of overbearing and self-referential adjectives threatening to overrun their nouns
Appreciating Phil Berrigan, appreciating all who resist the circumstances
That compell us down the road of annihilation and who instead open up in front of us new possibilities, new roads to peace,
I pull on my winter jacket and head out the door
To the New School, to the antiwar demo,
To the only places where we, the Tilters at Windmills,
We, the fighters for Peace,
We, the army of lovers,
We, the self-contradictory multitudes
Are compelled by a different drummer to be,
Throwing yet again our bodies against the gears of injustice and war,
The machinery of Holocausts
Welcoming, forever welcoming,
The opportunities offered by each and every moment no matter how gray the dawn.
– Mitchel Cohen
I grew up in Baltimore. During the 60’s the Berrigan Brothers worked very hard to raise awareness about the unjust war in Vietnam. All my uncles and father had served in World War II, so as a 19-year old, I believed I had a duty to serve my country. It wasn’t until I returned from Vietnam and studied the history of Vietnam that I realized how unjust the war in Vietnam had been. The Berriagn Brothers were right, my government and the mainstream churches were wrong. If I could do it all over again, I would have joined the Berrigan Brothers, not the US Army. Live and learn.
Thank you Frida. You said it all so beautifully. You also reminded us how our parents teach us how to live but also they can keep teaching us in their dying .
Dear Frida,
Thanks so much for sharing the memories of your dad’s living and dying. His example is such a sign of hope tyo me. I am a Catholic priest working at a big Marian Shrine in Massachusetts dedicated to Our Lady of Lasalette. Her message simply is the heart of the Gospel…. Reconciliation. Your Dad gives me hope in our Church when sometimes I have little hope. Muchas Gracias and may you and your family have a true Christ filled Christmas, John Sullivan
Thanks for this, Frida. He continues to change the way we live.
Thanks for this rememberance of your dad. I also feel Jackies’s presence everyday and at the same time miss her presence everyday. Your dad, Jackie and the cloud of wittnesses that have gone before them are with us always, urging us to, as Jackie always says, “take one step out of your confort zone” to make the world a peaceful, nonviolent planet.