“Why are they doing that?” Mickie whispered.
“It’s in the Bible, Michaela,” my mother said. “In heaven, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. This is heaven, Mickie. You’re in the presence of God.”
I could not refute my mother’s assertion. In a world in which people would trample you to get a seat on a bus, it was miraculous to watch them spontaneously give way to the sick and suffering.
After attending Mass in the basilica, Father Cavanaugh’s group had arranged for a significant number of priests to hear confessions. Since the sun had broken through the cloud layer and the temperature had warmed, the priests set up chairs outside.
“A forgive-your-sins assembly line. They should just have a drive-through window,” I said, which generated a frown from my mother but a grin from my dad.
We wheeled my parents to the next available priest, and Mickie and I looked for a place to catch a short nap. My mother, never one to miss an opportunity to save my soul, grabbed my arm. “Go for me,” she said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Don’t be insolent. You know what I mean. Go to confession.”
“You’re pushing it, lady,” I told her, but ever the dutiful son, I agreed.
In a mild protest, I avoided an American priest and found a Spanish-speaking priest from Mexico. Just my luck, he spoke better English than I did. I probably could have talked to him for several hours, but I gave him the abbreviated version and, my sins absolved, I returned to find Mickie waiting with both my parents.
“Had a long list?” she asked.
“Couldn’t remember the bloody Act of Contrition,” I said.
Mickie and I wheeled my parents into the grotto of Massabielle, a place of incredible beauty. Atop a hundred-foot escarpment, where once stood a fortified castle, was the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, a white-and-gold Gothic cathedral with multiple spires and elaborate carvings. At its base, on the banks of the river Gave’s flowing bluish-green waters, dozens of candles flickered beside a natural cave perhaps fifty feet in length, ten feet high at its tallest, and five feet in depth. Just above and to the right of the spot where the spring emerged was a cleft in the stone. In it was a statue of the Blessed Mother to mark the location where Bernadette saw her apparition. It struck me that I had seen this statue before, though I could not place where.
We pushed the wheelchairs closer to the escarpment. The ground on which Bernadette had knelt had been paved with asphalt and the hole she had dug covered by a thick sheet of Plexiglas. The water flowing beneath that glass was illuminated by light. As we passed, my mother made a sign of the cross with her rosary. Water also trickled down the stone escarpment, and my mother asked that I stop just below the statue of the Blessed Mother.
“Give me your arm,” she said, and she used it to stand and touch the rock, wiping the water over her face, then over my father’s face. As she leaned forward and kissed the stone, Mickie gave me a look, but I had no answer for how my mother was accomplishing these feats. I knew it wasn’t a drug that had relieved her considerable pain and allowed her to do this, because she had refused to take any. “One does not see the Blessed Mother on drugs,” she’d said.
“I’ll bet some people have,” I’d joked.
“Don’t be sacrilegious, Samuel,” my mother had replied.
She set her hand on the wet stone and rubbed the water over my face.
“You’d at least think the Blessed Mother could have used warm water,” I said.
“The warmth comes later,” my mother said. I had no idea what she meant.
The baths were our last stop, and despite the collapse of my own faith, I could not deny that a part of me had brought my mother to Lourdes hoping for exactly what Mickie had warned against—a miracle. The lines were long, but again the faithful willingly stepped aside to allow the sick to proceed first. Mickie took my mother to the side of the grotto with small underground pools reserved for women. I took my father to the pools reserved for men. We entered a small, dimly lit, cave-like room, where an elderly Italian volunteer assisted me with the task of removing my father’s clothing. Then I removed mine. We both wrapped cold, damp towels around our waists, and then the Italian volunteer and I helped my father stand from his wheelchair and step down into a sunken stone bath, which was perhaps seven feet long, three feet wide, and a couple of feet deep. We held my father while he prayed to a tiny statue of the Blessed Mother at the foot of the bath. When he had finished, the volunteers instructed him to sit. My father complied. Having never lost his sense of humor, he looked at me and spoke the clearest words I had heard him speak since his stroke.