On the way to Rome, my cousin and I told Tom, “We have no agenda as to what we want to see. We only want to go where you want to go. Show us the places you love.” And he did. With this mandate, he led us all over Rome in a grueling marathon tour, as if to squeeze all memories of his time there as a student during Vatican II in the 60s and all his subsequent visits over the years into one weekend. One of my most enduring memories of Tom will forever be the white soles of his sneakers slapping the pavement in an unrelenting march around the city, Yolanda and I following behind like exhausted ducklings.
One of the places he loved was the Basilica of San Bartolomeo all’Isola, located on an island in the middle of the Tiber River. The basilica is the home to the Sanctuary of the New Martyrs of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, a memorial to people like Saint Maximillian Kolbe, executed by the Nazis; the Monks of the Tibhirine, executed by extremists in Algeria in the 1990s; and Blessed Father Stanley Francis Rother, killed in Guatemala in 1981 due to his defense of the local indigenous communities. And of course, among the relics are those of Saint Oscar Romero, patron of El Salvador and Tom’s hero and model.
After a grueling walk through the Trastevere, we arrived at the church, which seemed deserted. The sanctuary was barely lit with only a few candles, but Tom led us straight to the altar dedicated to the Martyrs of the Americas where the crosier, vestments and missal used by Romero during his last mass when he was assassinated were displayed. Tom immediately bowed his head and began to pray.
Yolanda and I wandered a bit, but came back to Tom, who was still at the Romero altar. At some point, my cousin quietly snapped this photograph of him standing in front of the altar, deep in prayer. It wasn’t until days later when we sifted through the hundreds of photos we took that we realized the profound beauty of the moment.
I love this photograph, deeply infused with faith and humility, capturing a hero for so many paying respects to his own hero. But it also gives me chills. In Rome, Yolanda and I were completely unaware of the implications of this scene and the context of Tom’s life and work woven through it. For the children of his parish he was only the warm, loving pastor we saw every Sunday, and were only vaguely aware that during the week he traveled to places like Iraq, Chiapas, El Salvador, Honduras, Vietnam. The list of countries had impressed us, but we did not know the scale of the work he was doing in those places, in circumstances where he could easily have been killed while working on behalf of the communities who had begged him to come.
We were totally unaware. And as I read his biography now, I have to set it down at times, overwhelmed and a little frightened to know that the person I had hung out with at the beach, yelled at Tigers games, came over for dinner, ate all my dark chocolate supplies and watched movies with was someone whose own vestments and crosier could have easily ended up at the Basilica of San Bartolomeo.
It’s been a month after his passing, but my heart still aches as I cycle through the various stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger. Anger at myself for not having been around more near the end, angry at Tom for not telling me how he was really doing. “Oh, I’m doing great,” he said on the phone shortly before he passed. “Feeling good, all clear!” But he knew what was happening to him. That he was preparing for another journey.
And that was his MO. A lifetime of keeping his travel schedule close to the vest, not telling people he was headed off to a war zone or a village deep in Central America where priests were being targeted by death squads. Not telling friends he was circling in planes over Iraq in severely angled flight paths to avoid anti-aircraft missiles, hiking through mountains during lightning storms or slipping completely off rough plank bridges into open sewers in Mexico. After scaring his poor, sainted mother while traveling to Iran to visit the hostages in 1979, he knew that to do his work he had to go it alone, hidden from view, often to the hurt frustration and consternation of friends who had to resign themselves to loving a person who was also a Maximillian Kolbe, a Father Rother, an Oscar Romero.
To love Tom, you had to be at peace and be prepared to let him go so he could fully be himself. It’s a lesson of loving and deep friendship that I am only now learning.
I miss him a lot. It’s hard to let Tom go.
