Love in Action
| Love in Action By Fr Leo Donnelly SSC (pictured right) |
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The woman was about 19 and dying of tuberculosis. Her greatest worry was her baby. To die in peace she needed desperately to find foster parents. She was combing the neighbourhood and was about three blocks from where I was living in April 1962. Knocking door to door she happened on the young mother of three youngsters living in a hovel themselves. There was no way this young mother could accept the responsibility of yet another mouth to feed. However, she knew of a childless couple nearby dearly wanting a child to call their own. Taking this single dying mother to her neighbour solved the problem of the infant’s future. It also had to be a tremendous relief for the infant’s mother.
Then, this young wife and mother brought the dying girl back to her own "house" and settled her in the only space available – on the ground in the chicken coop. Chasing the fowl out into the yard and then spreading rags on the ground she made a sheltered cot for the patient. Her husband arrived home to the fact that there was now a new member of the household. Like myself, when he heard of this he was awestruck, but he was also angry at his wife. It was hard to cope with her incredible generosity or call it foolishness if you will. As he said to me, "Leo, that woman is a danger to the health of our children. My wife should never have taken her in. It’s fine that she found suitable foster parents for her child, but then let her go. We are simply not capable of providing for her." In the poverty they themselves were living in it’s not difficult to understand his concern. They had built one room, with a temporary roof that served as the family’s living/bed room. Outside, and against the wall of this a lean-to shack served as their kitchen – dining room. There was simply no way the whole thing should have happened, but it did.
He had come out of friendship and a shoulder to lean upon in a wretched predicament. There was no way I could deny him any help I could come up with, but what to do. Together we had to come up with some solution. As luck would have it I could arrange help with food, good food and plenty of it. It was obvious that his anger towards his wife was mixed with splendid awe of how he now saw her. They made a great couple. So I asked him to accept what the wife had done, to accept all the food they needed and to keep the youngsters well away from the highly contagious and dying young woman. This idea cooled his anger and frustration and for the next two weeks until the girl died the children ate well and knew not to go near the poor lass. I was invited to go to visit the poor girl. I’ve called it a chicken coop, but it was more like a rabbit hatch. You could crawl in at one end under a bits and pieces of roof, and, apart from the one wall that marked the boundary of their property, the rest was just open wire netting. It was pretty grim and no place for a very ill person. Two weeks later she died and our next problem was her burial. There was no way the young couple could afford an undertaker and to go to the police would only involve them in endless paper-work and time consuming frustration.
Up the road, in the other direction, was an undertaker well known in the area. A bit of a bandit perhaps, but also the undertaker we needed. Together we approached him, explained the situation and struck up a bargain for what had to be the cheapest funeral in town short of a pauper’s grave. More important to us, he was prepared to do all the necessary paper-work involved, and even managed his way around the obligatory autopsy, there being no death certificate.
The next call for counsel came almost immediately. What to do about the "adopted" child? The couple had no details of the dead mother, not even her name, she had been so ill, and bordering on coma till her death. We had even less information about who the father might be.The "adopting couple" needed some proof of their right to the child. To get it’s birth registered as their child they needed some other formal document to present to the municipality. We solved this problem by having the child baptised in the local church as the child of the "adopting couple". Thus armed with a Baptismal Certificate, and paying a small fine for not having registered the birth within the time prescribed by law, the adopting parents became the legal parents of the child now bearing their name.
In a sense there my story ends. I’ve had no further contact with either couple since moving out of that area, still less with the child concerned who now has to be around 40 years of age. Nor can I recall whether it was a boy or a girl. I have sworn a number of times to try and trace all concerned, but have never gotten around to it. I am left with an abiding yearning to know what became of all five. Just writing this story that I have told so many times, pushes me to go back and find the sequel.
[Far East Magazine]