In Mysterious Ways: 
The Death and Life 
of a Parish Priest

"In Mysterious Ways is a deeply moving book; it could and should, become a spiritual classic."

Random House, 1990

ISBN 0-394-57584-9

Excerpt 

It was Sue Tegan who voiced what Father Greer's doctors and to other nursing staff on Proger 6 North had seen so clearly yet hat been reluctant to articulate during the first week post transplant. She stripped off her surgical mask outside room 664, rested her heal for an instant on the doorjamb, then looked over at Danny M' Clellan, another nurse, who was about to enter 665, the other isolation room. Her voice was laced with the kind of pity staff. high-risk floors like Proger 6 North seldom allow themselves.

"Shouldn't somebody be in there with him?" she pleaded.

Since his admittance more than two weeks before, Father G. had had no visitors other than hospital personnel. When Father' Canniff had called to check on his friend's status, Tegan had him—though not in graphic detail—of the difficulties Father G' had begun to experience and had suggested that someone visit It although the priest from Natick had forbidden this. "He's a private guy, " Father Canniff had replied. "When he's ready to see us, 1' let us know." ''

The answer had not sat well with Tegan. It is not uncommon for a primary nurse to grow close to her patient, to alert fan members to needs, and to anticipate mood swings at various so of the transplant procedure. But for Sue Tegan Father Greer~ more than just another man struggling for his life. He was a priest--

Tegan was, as noted, a devout Catholic—and one whom she had immediately liked for his easy good humor and the way he always asked about her as she saw to his needs.

And now, during the worst days a transplant patient endures, he seemed so pitiably alone.

Sue Tegan had an old-fashioned, deep-seated respect for priests stemming from her adolescent years. A young priest in her parish had been especially important to her and had helped her over those teenage years when, among other matters, the survival or demise of religious convictions depends so much on adult role models. She had been nervous when she had learned she would be Father Greer's primary nurse. When she had first touched him to help him dress or to wash him, she was far more tentative than her ten years of experience might have suggested

Father Greer had sensed this and quickly put her at ease with his ready chatter, his way of saying "Thank you, sweetheart," that conveyed nothing offhanded or familiar but was simply the genuine appreciation of a man who had served so many himself.

But in the last week she had seen that insouciant priest, with a marvelous sense of detachment about himself and his illness, turn bitter and angry. She had witnessed a man of seemingly unshakable faith rage at his doctors, a man of reason become unhinged. She had, with a shaking hand, recorded on his chart Father Greer's words the first she could understand after days of babbling: "Why did this happen to me? What did I do?"

Sue Tegan, who had both nursed people back to life and prepared them for death, was terrified.

He was not a patient who confided in her deeply, as many do so all she could fudge by were the externals and her imagination. The externals were grim enough. His creatinine level was slowly dropping, and although the guarded opinion on the floor was that had passed through that danger, his bilirubin count was still high, indicating liver trouble. With a dysfunctional immune system, was a constant risk of developing hepatitis. And then there what are considered the "normal" side effects of a transplant, a magnitude only a patient can ever know.

In his mouth and down through the long and winding tube that the human gastrointestinal tract, pieces of dead tissue had peeled off, leaving behind raw sores. His mouth was bubbly with a herpes infection, his throat swollen. Saliva, properly generated but now with no place to go, streamed out of the corners of his mouth. His joints ached. His stomach churned and lapsed into painful spasms. And his mind, that most precious and, according to Catholic teaching from Augustine to Aquinas, ultimately controllable organ, which his rigorous schooling and priestly life had trained to hold sway over whatever the problem or temptation, had gone awry.

Father Greer could not read, could not concentrate long enough to recite the 23rd Psalm, which he had last said, over and over when he could think of nothing else, as he sat crammed inside the tiny plywood box, his body bombarded with photons.

"The Lord is my shepherd.... The Lord is.... The Lord . . ." And then blankness, a horrifying blankness. The needle of his consciousness would not lift from the groove in which he was stuck. A man who had never suffered from headaches and who thought the pain he had experienced in Scotland was unbearable now felt the jaws of a vice tightening at his temples. The physical pain throughout his body was far more acute than he had anticipated, many times more intense than he had ever felt before, but the true agony—for a man who had always prided himself on his rationality—was the loss of his reason. The morphine and Ativan had induced a dreamlike state, the antihistamines and antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and steroids, the antiviral agents, all swirling about in a pharmacological witch's brew, had assaulted his central nervous system. The synapses of the electrical impulses that normally convey thought patterns and sensations were short-circuiting

He had read articles about bone marrow transplants and talked to others who had undergone the treatment, but now, in his semilucid moments, he knew that the reports from this battlefront had been so much revisionist fiction.

Further, Father Greer was hallucinating: There was a recurring and gruesome accident. Sometimes he was the victim, sometimes not—equally a punishment to have to watch and not be able to help. The twisted wreckage, the body bloody and limp. Over and over, the impact, the sound, the carnage. The hallucination dragged on. He waited for help to come. No one did.

And then there were the dogs. The cats.

The accident victim turned into a huge, vicious dog. Father Greer could smell it, feel its hot breath, see the snarling jaws, the huge teeth. The dog was suddenly there in the room, prowling about, ominous, bigger, more vicious, still more huge—but always silent, and the silence of the beast added to its savagery. Father Greer felt the floor shudder with the weight of this enormous creature. He saw the paw prints on his sheets.

A fastidious man who disliked clutter in his rectory kitchen or on the altar, Father Greer had always had an enormous distaste for dogs. He had found even more reason to hate them while working as a postman during his college years. Now dogs with muscular shoulders, huge heads, and glaring eyes were defying him to so much as move. And cats; he would do anything to avoid touching them. Now they were coming to haunt and taunt him. Cats of monstrous size stalked in front of his bed, arrogant in their slow, deliberate pace.

Each time they came to haunt him, he sat up in bed with a start, drenched with perspiration, his sore-encrusted mouth screaming for water.

Coming out of the hallucination, his momentarily semilucid mind scrambled to grasp its moorings. It was the Agony in the Garden, the night before the Crucifixion, and like the disciples he could not stay awake long enough to pray or be present for the man who was going to be sacrificed. Prayer? He needed desperately to pray, his beclouded mind commanded him to, but he could not. His body was crying out so loud no voice could be raised above it. God was far away.

It was not a matter of transcendence as he had foretold; he could think only of preservation.

In his delirium, Father Greer knew he needed his Saviour more than anything, that He was the only safeguard against these demons and against the unforgivable sin: despair. The Holy Eucharist, his Saviour, the One who had stood against the forces of the netherworld and triumphed. There was no thought of saying Mass—his Mass kit, the bottle of wine, unopened since his arrival, mocked him from the closet. But the Eucharist, at least that.

His throat was swollen shut from the herpes. Nothing would pass.

"Though I walk through the valley . . . the valley . . . the valley . . ."

It was not all hallucination. Indeed, he had been in an accident. He had experienced a collision; his body was in shock. He had lost his life-sustaining blood, just as that battered victim in his mind had done. But his collision was, for the time being, at the forefront of science, as carefully controlled a procedure as medical knowledge could provide, yet a gross example of overkill, a late-twentieth-century equivalent of boring holes in the head to relieve pain, of bleeding a patient to cleanse the blood.

At times he grabbed at his neck because of the searing pain. He would vomit three, four, as many as seven or eight times a shift, gagging, almost suffocating as he forced air down his swollen windpipe. He had constant diarrhea. His temperature soared to over fog. When he rolled over—painfully—clumps of his fine hair were left behind in the indentation of the pillow.

Sue Tegan held a straw in a cup of cool water, but he could not swallow a sip. Father Greer gazed at her forlornly. "Just to think," he rasped, "I took it all for granted. I can't even do this."

On his windowsill were two huge piles of newly arrived cards and letters. He had neither the strength to open nor the will to read them.