Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
DOROTHY DAY'S PASSAGE FROM THIS world was in the spirit of the Catholic Worker itself: intense, chaotic, spare, sad, passionate, celebratory, anti-institutional, and personalist to the last. Her body was washed Saturday night by Sister Marie Kimball, a recent volunteer whose warmth and humor Dorothy had enjoyed. Sister Kimball had experience ministering to older nuns, and Tamar agreed that her mother was being left in the right gentle, capable, loving hands. It took several hours-until almost midnight-before the death certificate was signed and the undertaker's men came to the house, allowing time for the people closest to Dorothy to take turns keeping a vigil, comforting Tamar, praying the rosary. The house continued to be eerily silent.
The next day, the body was viewed at the funeral parlor on Second Avenue by Frank Donovan, Dan Mauk, and Peggy Scherer, and Dorothy was then brought back to the house in her beloved blue-and-white-checked housedress and bandanna, to rest in a simple open pine coffin on the narrow wooden altar-carved by some artistic friends from the trunk of a hefty cedar tree-in the small second-floor chapel at Maryhouse. The funeral was scheduled for Tuesday morning, December 2, at the Church of the Nativity, only a block away on Second Avenue. That was the church-a squat modernist monstrosity of black brick and unpainted concrete but the only one nearby-where Dorothy had worshipped when she was still able to leave the house. Two of her grandsons and four of her granddaughters came to the city to serve as pallbearers.