The Thanatos Syndrome

to celebrate the reopening of the hospice turned out to be a fiasco.
    Father Smith, who I had understood from Max to have come down from the fire tower in his right mind ready to take over St. Margaret’s, behaved so strangely that even I, who knew him best, could not make head or tail of what he was saying. To the others he appeared a complete loony, or, as Leroy Ledbetter put it, crazy as a betsy bug. To make matters worse, he also managed to offend everyone, even those most disposed to help him and the hospice.
    It was doubtful at first that the hospice was going to succeed, after all.
    Local notables gathered to welcome the staff, a civic and ecumenical occasion, not only other priests, ministers, and a rabbi, but many of my fellow physicians both federal and local—good fellows who were ready to donate their time and services—the mayor, a representative from United Way and the Lions Club. Even our Republican congressman showed up and promised his support of legislation to divert at least some of the federal funding of the Qualitarian program to the hospice movement.
    Chandra had even arranged for a NewsTeam-7 remote unit to tape the highlights for the “People and Places” segment of the six o’clock newscast. It was one of those occasions, Chandra assured me, which has “viewer appeal,” like helping old folks, flying in kidneys and hearts for dying babies. Americans are very generous, especially when they can see the need in their living rooms. And NewsTeam-7 had 65 percent of the market in the viewing area.
    It, the hospice, couldn’t miss.
    There was to be a Mass in the little chapel at St. Margaret’s, a few words from Father Smith, followed by a televised tour of the facility, with perhaps short interviews with a malformed but attractive child, a spunky addled oldster, and a cheerful dying person.
    It couldn’t miss.
    But one look at Father Smith as he comes up the aisle of the crowded chapel and I know we’re in trouble.
    He’s carrying the chalice, but he’s forgotten to put on his vestments! He’s still wearing the rumpled chinos and sneakers he wore in the fire tower for months, plus a new sweatshirt. It is a cold January day.
    People turn to watch, as a congregation watches a bride enter church for her wedding. I am sitting in the front row with Max. There is a stir and a murmuring at Father Smith’s appearance. But it is not his clothes I notice. Something else: a certain gleam in his eye, both knowing and rapt, which I’ve seen before, in him and on closed wards.
    The chalice is held in one hand, properly, the other hand pressed on the square pall covering, but there is something at once solemn and unserious about him, theatrical, like my daughter, Meg, playing priest.
    Oh my.
    Well, at least he is going to say Mass, where it’s hard to get in trouble. Perhaps the friendly crowd will take his old clothes as a mark of humility, albeit eccentric—but you know what a character he is!—or maybe they’ll see him as a worker-priest or a guerrilla priest.
    But instead of mounting the single step to the platform of the altar, he turns around in the aisle, not two feet from me, exactly between me and Max, and faces the little crowd, which is still well disposed if somewhat puzzled.
    â€œJesus Christ is Lord!” he says in a new, knowledgeable, even chipper voice. Then: “Praise be to God! Blessed be his Holy Name!” A pause and then, as he looks down at the upturned faces: “I wonder if you know what you are doing here!”
    Well then, I’m thinking, what he’s doing is what Catholics call pious ejaculations, which are something like the Pentecostal’s exclamations—Glory! and suchlike—that plus a bit of obscure priestly humor.
    But no. They are uttered not as pious ejaculations but more like a fitful commentary, like a talkative person watching a movie.
    All is not yet lost. Sometimes priests say a few words before Mass, especially on a special occasion like this, by way of welcome.
    No one is as yet seriously discomfited.
    Father Smith begins to make short utterances separated by pauses but otherwise not apparently connected, all the while holding chalice and covering pall in front of him. They, the utterances, remind me of the harangues delivered by solitary persons standing in a New York subway or in the ward where I was committed by Max and later served as attending