Four men knelt at the bedside of the dying woman and sang the “Salve Regina,” a medieval hymn to the Virgin Mary. She sang along but faded in and out of consciousness, exhausted by the cancer that was killing her and the long struggle to remain alive. Just that day she’d rallied to greet each person in the long parade of visitors to her Hyattsville home. It was the Wednesday of Holy Week, her first day back from the hospital. She’d come home to die in her home, with her community. The men concluded their a capalla chant with the words “. . . Virgo Maria.” She smiled and opened her eyes, which met each of theirs in turn, and thanked them. It was the end of a long day, the end of a long illness. As Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote, Deirdre McQuade met both with tireless faith and courage.
Deirdre McQuade was a woman of many gifts, not the least of which was a felicity for communication. Despite pain, fatigue, and sedation, she imparted to those of us at her bedside “the urgency to love.” This is what consumed her mind as death approached: love. She had, more than a gift for communication, a gift for community, which began with her friends, whom she wished to become friends of each other, and began in her home — a kind of proto-monastic community of a kind desperately needed today.
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