Chapter 183: The Best of Us

My students have graduated and dispersed and I am kicking myself for sending them off without telling them about one of the most profound experiences that awaits them: that if they do their work right and remain open, they may well meet – loved ones aside – the best, most honorable, most generous person they will ever encounter.

I know this sounds awfully mushy, the stuff of greeting cards and uplifting aphorisms sent in delete-me-now group emails. It feels especially so for journalists, who are trained to keep their cynical guard up, lest they fall prey to the siren calls of happy talk and, I almost hate to write it, inspiration.

And perhaps because we are hard wired to be dubious of those who present themselves in the most flattering, if sometimes disingenuous ways, it can be hard to allow ourselves to appreciate the best in people.

I have met worthy people, wise people, people who are kind, thoughtful, magnanimous, selfless. I have also met more than my share of people who, on the Human Decency Continuum, resided in the gray middle as well as those whose behavior pushed them into Unfavorability. I don't know many journalists who enter the profession hoping to be uplifted. Over time, we come to accept people for their limits, flaws and shortcomings. Especially if they are interesting. Or maybe just famous or powerful.

But then along comes someone who possesses qualities that, taken together, set them apart and leave us thinking, surely I must be missing something but no one is that good. Except they are.

I have been doing this work for close to 50 years and, if pressed to consider all the many people I've gotten to know, there is only one person whose name comes first to mind. That would be Sister Geraldine.

I met Sister Geraldine some 30 years ago. I was working on a book about the child welfare system, how the state, even with the best of intentions, nonetheless failed children and families time and again. I wondered whether anyone was doing the work right, be it a local government or a private agency. Again and again I was told to head to Brooklyn where, in what had once been a nondescript home for seminarians, I would find the Center for Family Life. There I would meet its directors, Sister Mary Paul and Sister Geraldine. The center's and its founders' reputations extended well beyond New York. Child welfare scholars and practitioners from across the country and around the world came to see how the sisters and their team of social workers went about their work and whether their approach might be replicable.

I will confess that early on I was dubious: how was it possible to achieve what this small agency had done with two nuns who both held graduate degrees?

I recall being a bit intimidated by Sister Geraldine. Where Sister Mary Paul was tiny, and spoke in a voice too high and delicate to convey her underlying steeliness, Sister Geraldine was, for lack of a better word, formidable. She was of medium height, broad shouldered and carried herself with a sense of power and authority.

My memory of the reporting was hazy and so, hoping to make sense of why I found myself so drawn to Sister Geraldine, I went back to the book I wrote long ago. I was reminded, most importantly, of the way the sisters thought about their work – how it began with an understanding and acceptance of what, in the child welfare field, was regarded by many as heretical: the inevitability in the lives of children of even the most delinquent, cruel, neglectful and absent parents. That meant that while it may have felt satisfying to separate a child from a demonstrably failing parent, it was imperative to keep that parent connected to the child, even in the most attenuated way.

The sisters were not pushovers. They could be demanding of the parents with whom they worked and, when all else failed, would sometimes conclude they had no choice but to recommend the most severe legal step of terminating parental rights. But even then, that parent lived on for that child, and no good came from denying that bond.

But reading what I had written brought me no closer to making sense of the bond I had felt toward Sister Geraldine. I liked her, and liked talking with her. She did noble and important work, work that was core to her life. But so too did many other people I'd met in my work. Why her? Why Sister Geraldine?

Perhaps, as so often happens when we find ourselves connected to another person in ways that cannot be defined, timing had a lot to do with it. My book appeared in early 1997. That June my youngest child was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. And as the long, arduous, harrowing and terrifying months of treatment began, I called Sister Geraldine.

I do not know why I did, only that among the many friends whom I knew longer and better and who, to my eternal gratitude, rallied behind my family, I also felt a need to let Sister Geraldine know.

Maybe, like those parents who for decades had come to her at a time of seemingly bottomless despair – their children had been taken from them and they did not know when or if they'd ever get them back – I hoped that she might offer me what she had given them: strength, hope. Prayers.

I recall no particular conversations, nor any words of advice or assurance. I recall only the need and with it the vague memory that she understood why I had called and what she might provide without being asked.

We must have stayed in touch over those months, because by the Fall, as the date for my child's surgery was approaching, I called to update her. And she, in turn, must have asked me to call after the operation when we'd spoken with the surgeons.

It was a long and excruciating day. Friends and relatives arrived early and stayed with us, waiting until the surgeons appeared. And when they did it was to report that the operation had gone as well as we all could have hoped.

I hugged everyone. Then I went to the bank of pay phones in the waiting area – I don't recall having a cell phone yet. I dropped in my quarter and dialed the center and asked for Sister Geraldine. She came on the line and listened to the news. And then she said words that, even now as I recall and write them, are as vivid and moving as they were the moment she spoke them.

"Michael," she said, "we're going to storm heaven for him."

I ask myself whether had my child not been so sick, had I not felt overwhelmingly vulnerable and frightened, I would have felt, and still feel, the same about Sister Geraldine. I believe I would. By then I had, without being aware of it, allowed myself to feel a connection to her.

Reporters develop all sorts of connections with subjects – I have had long friendships with a few people I'd once written about, though I was very much aware that those friendships were to be delayed until the story was done.

Sister Geraldine was not my friend. She was not my spiritual counselor, nor my advisor, nor go-to shoulder to lean on. She was simply a singularly good and wise person whom I was fortunate to get to know in the course of doing my work, and who I felt, whom I knew I could and should turn to when I needed such a presence in my life.

Sister Geraldine died of cancer in 2000 – in the same hospital that I had called her from three years earlier. She was 59. Her funeral mass was celebrated at the vast church around the corner from the Center of Family Life. She was survived by her mother, her cousins, and Sister Mary Paul.

I think of her from time to time and when I did the other day I Googled her, hoping to find a picture. There weren't many. But there is this one, with Sister Mary Paul. Geraldine is on the right. She is as I remember her. It pleases me no end that I do.

With the academic year at a close, we'll be starting our annual summer leave. Hope your writing goes well. We'll be back and ready to help after Labor Day.

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