The Faithfulness That Waited

When my mother, Violet, was dying in the fall of 2020, my sisters and I found ourselves watching the calendar and counting the days. On what would have been her seventieth wedding anniversary, she asked for tea, then stopped herself: “I’ll never drink tea again.”

Mummy had always said that the day she couldn’t have her tea, she would die.

I wondered and wrote in my journal that morning: Is today that day? Somewhere beyond the tumor’s tentacles, does she know she will see Daddy today?

It wasn’t. A few days later, it was the Feast of the Archangels. We told her it was alright to go. She didn’t. Then the Feast of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus—we prayed, we sang, half-hoping the Little Flower herself might come carry her home. She didn’t. The next day, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, I wrote: Is this going to be the day? Lord, only you know. She held on two more days, and died on October 4th—the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, a day none of us had been watching for at all.

We searched for why. Mummy wasn’t especially devoted to animals, and St. Francis is often pictured surrounded by them. We guessed it was simply the beauty of his prayer that fit her as she left this world. Then we let the question go.

Six years later, writing the afterword to a memoir about those twenty-six days, my sister Natalia sent me a text that stopped me cold. She was reading a 1691 book on devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which mentioned that Pope Clement X had granted great indulgences for that devotion, dated October 4, 1674.

October 4th. My mother’s exact date of death—three hundred forty-six years later, to the day.

My mother spent her whole life treating Jesus as her closest friend—kissing the crucifix, greeting Him each morning at her altar, deflecting every compliment with the same quiet line: “It’s not me, it’s the Lord in me.” That she was called home on the very date, centuries earlier, when the Church granted indulgences to the faithful who practice devotion to His Most Sacred Heart, it felt like an answer we hadn’t known to ask for.

Then, during my daily reading time, a line in today’s Mass reading from Jeremiah called to me: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”— Jeremiah 31:3

That is the sentence I would say about both of my parents’ deaths now. My father died on the Feast of the Ascension, shortly after receiving Holy Communion. Sixteen years later, my mother died on the anniversary of an indulgence granted for the devotion she carried her entire life. Not just one answer, but two—each on an already sacred day, each marked by a sacrament.

We asked why, six years ago, and got no answer. We got it in God’s time, not ours—which, I am slowly learning, is the whole lesson of holy surrender. The question doesn’t disappear when you let it go unanswered. Sometimes it just waits, faithfully, for you to be ready to hear it.

The Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

Where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master,

Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

AMEN

(Prayer commonly attributed to St. Francis of Assisi)

© 2026 Paula Veloso Babadi

Image credit: Family photo of Sacred Heart image from the Veloso home

Edited by Gabriella Batel