Aloise B. Heath, R.I.P

“Ror her,’ an august and worldly professor of the social sciences called in when the word leaked out that she was in coma, “I have to confess I have said a prayer, for the first time in many years even though I never met her.” His prayer, and others, were unavailing. Aloise Buckley Heath died on Monday, January 16, ten days after an unsuccessful operation which was performed a few hours after she had complained of a bad headache, and was driven, by her husband, to the hospital in Hartford. Unconsciousness and partial paralysis gradually set in, and when the doctor did operate it was only because, as he put it, he would have done so on his own wife under similar circumstances – he gave her only one or two chances out of one hundred. And then a few minutes later when he actually observed the damage done by the cerebral hemorrhage, he simply stitched her back together and waited, as the family did – her husband, her ten children, her mother, her eight brothers and sisters – for the inevitable end. It came later than the young doctors had predicted. “They don’t realize,” said one doctor, “that at the heart is strong. It goes right on beating, for a while, a good while. What happened to her brain is the kind of thing that usually happens to people in their late sixties or seventies. That’s why she isn’t dead – yet. But there won’t be any pain, any consciousness.” She was buried at St. Bernard’s Cemetery, in Sharon, Connecticut, on Wednesday, January 18, alongside two of her sisters, who had died at age three days, and years. At the service, said as she would have wanted, in Latin, a memorial card was distributed, a small photograph, the dates of birth and death on one side, and on the other a passage from Francois Mauriac’s Ce Que Je Crois that she had seen and expressed admiration for – as a young girl she had been schooled in France, and she knew the language as a native – only a month before. Mauriac wrote: “Faites, Mon Dieu, que je me recueille dans la paix de votre présence, afin que quand mon heure sera venue, je passe par une transition presque insensible, de vous ad vous, de vous, pain vivant, pain des hommes, ad vous amour vivant déjà possédé par ceux de mes biens-aimés qui se sont endormis avant moi dans votre amour.’ – “Grant, O Lord, that I might commune in the peace of your presence, so that when my hour is come, I shall pass through a transition all but insensible, from You to You; from You, the Living Bread, the Bread of Man, to you, the Living Love, already possessed by those of my beloved ones who, in that love, have gone before me to sleep.” “Though I never met her,” one reader wrote, “I felt along with thousands of National Reviewreaders, I’m sure, the force of her personality; her vibrant, joyous spirit sang out of her seasonal articles for National Review.” “Of all the writers on your magazine, over the past eleven years,” an attorney wrote, “she must surely have been the most lovable.” And from a minister: “My wife, my children, and I feel something of a personal loss in the death… As she has on several occasions in the past, she added to the joy of our Christmas celebration with her most recent article, [giving us] that sense of thankful and lighthearted appreciation of the mercies of God which we are trying to nurture in those whom He has given us to love.”

Aloise Heath wrote for the very first issue of National Review, and had an article in the issue that was on the stands when she took sick. She did not, however, write frequently. There was of course the handicap of her motherhood of ten children, and the very special care she took of them. Besides that she was notoriously disorganized, so much so that generations of editors clamored, unsuccessfully, for her articles, and when she died, she had on her desk, as usual unanswered, a letter from the editor of a prominent monthly, begging for her copy. She had excited, at Smith College, the admiring attention of the academicians, as sharply distinguished from the administrators who at one point got so fed up with her dilatory habits as to suspend her for a year (she graduated with the class of 1941, instead of 1940) – a lever against her which unfortunately no editor inherited. But the professors gave her all the ritual honors of a very bright young writer. She was married in and got around to writing an article about her first child five years later. It was published in the Ladies Home Journal, and with her check for $500 she bought expensive presents for all her brothers and sisters, resolved to write regularly, and didn’t; not even when the agent for Somerset Maugham who thus announced himself – offered to handle her material. She was always acquiescent; she would agree to write anything in the world any editor asked her to write; and simply did not do so – she was too busy with her growing family. She did produce a piece for NR at Christmastime, the ordeal of whose parturition was an annual agony – bits and pieces would come in by notepaper, telegram, telephone. But they were the most applauded pieces we ever published, even though they seldom touched on politics (one reader suggested we get Aloise Heath to write all of every issue). Seldom, but not never…

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“Ror her,’ an august and worldly professor of the social sciences called in when the word leaked out that she was in coma, “I have to confess I have said a prayer, for the first time in many years even though I never met her.” His prayer, and others, were unavailing. Aloise Buckley Heath died on Monday, January 16, ten days after an unsuccessful operation which was performed a few hours after she had complained of a bad headache, and was driven, by her husband, to the hospital in Hartford. Unconsciousness and partial paralysis gradually set in, and when the doctor did operate it was only because, as he put it, he would have done so on his own wife under similar circumstances – he gave her only one or two chances out of one hundred. And then a few minutes later when he actually observed the damage done by the cerebral hemorrhage, he simply stitched her back together and waited, as the family did – her husband, her ten children, her mother, her eight brothers and sisters – for the inevitable end. It came later than the young doctors had predicted. “They don’t realize,” said one doctor, “that at the heart is strong. It goes right on beating, for a while, a good while. What happened to her brain is the kind of thing that usually happens to people in their late sixties or seventies. That’s why she isn’t dead – yet. But there won’t be any pain, any consciousness.” She was buried at St. Bernard’s Cemetery, in Sharon, Connecticut, on Wednesday, January 18, alongside two of her sisters, who had died at age three days, and years. At the service, said as she would have wanted, in Latin, a memorial card was distributed, a small photograph, the dates of birth and death on one side, and on the other a passage from Francois Mauriac’s Ce Que Je Crois that she had seen and expressed admiration for – as a young girl she had been schooled in France, and she knew the language as a native – only a month before. Mauriac wrote: “Faites, Mon Dieu, que je me recueille dans la paix de votre présence, afin que quand mon heure sera venue, je passe par une transition presque insensible, de vous ad vous, de vous, pain vivant, pain des hommes, ad vous amour vivant déjà possédé par ceux de mes biens-aimés qui se sont endormis avant moi dans votre amour.’ – “Grant, O Lord, that I might commune in the peace of your presence, so that when my hour is come, I shall pass through a transition all but insensible, from You to You; from You, the Living Bread, the Bread of Man, to you, the Living Love, already possessed by those of my beloved ones who, in that love, have gone before me to sleep.” “Though I never met her,” one reader wrote, “I felt along with thousands of National Reviewreaders, I’m sure, the force of her personality; her vibrant, joyous spirit sang out of her seasonal articles for National Review.” “Of all the writers on your magazine, over the past eleven years,” an attorney wrote, “she must surely have been the most lovable.” And from a minister: “My wife, my children, and I feel something of a personal loss in the death… As she has on several occasions in the past, she added to the joy of our Christmas celebration with her most recent article, [giving us] that sense of thankful and lighthearted appreciation of the mercies of God which we are trying to nurture in those whom He has given us to love.”

Aloise Heath wrote for the very first issue of National Review, and had an article in the issue that was on the stands when she took sick. She did not, however, write frequently. There was of course the handicap of her motherhood of ten children, and the very special care she took of them. Besides that she was notoriously disorganized, so much so that generations of editors clamored, unsuccessfully, for her articles, and when she died, she had on her desk, as usual unanswered, a letter from the editor of a prominent monthly, begging for her copy. She had excited, at Smith College, the admiring attention of the academicians, as sharply distinguished from the administrators who at one point got so fed up with her dilatory habits as to suspend her for a year (she graduated with the class of 1941, instead of 1940) – a lever against her which unfortunately no editor inherited. But the professors gave her all the ritual honors of a very bright young writer. She was married in and got around to writing an article about her first child five years later. It was published in the Ladies Home Journal, and with her check for $500 she bought expensive presents for all her brothers and sisters, resolved to write regularly, and didn’t; not even when the agent for Somerset Maugham who thus announced himself – offered to handle her material. She was always acquiescent; she would agree to write anything in the world any editor asked her to write; and simply did not do so – she was too busy with her growing family. She did produce a piece for NR at Christmastime, the ordeal of whose parturition was an annual agony – bits and pieces would come in by notepaper, telegram, telephone. But they were the most applauded pieces we ever published, even though they seldom touched on politics (one reader suggested we get Aloise Heath to write all of every issue). Seldom, but not never…