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    Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell
    Unavailable
    Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell
    Unavailable
    Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell

    By Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Winner of a 2015 Catholic Press Award: Family Life Category (First Place)

    In this lyrical adieu to her mother, renowned Catholic essayist, poet, and professor Angela O'Donnell explores how the mundane tasks of caregiving during her mother's final days--bathing, feeding, taking her for a walk in her wheelchair--became rituals or ordinary sacraments that revealed traces of the divine.

    With Joan Didion's grasp of grief, the spiritual playfulness of Mary Karr, and the poetic agility of Kathleen Norris, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell narrates the events that followed her mother's fall and the broken hip that led to surgery. As O'Donnell and her sisters cared for their mother's failing body during the last days of her life, they unconsciously observed rituals that began to take on a deeper importance.

    Bathing her each morning was a kind of baptism, the nightly feeding of pie took on a Eucharistic significance, trimming and polishing nails became a kind of anointing. Beyond the seven there are the myriad sacraments they made up: the sacrament of community via cell phone, the sacrament of wheelchair pilgrimage around the nursing home, and the sacrament of humor and laughter. This deeply human portrait of loss is balanced by the surprising grace found in letting go; it will resonate with any spiritual reader but especially caregivers and those currently in grief.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAve Maria Press
    Release dateSep 8, 2014
    ISBN9781594714092
    Unavailable
    Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell
    Author

    Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

    Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., is a writer, poet, and professor. She teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. She is also co-editor of the Curran Center’s new book series, “Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series,” published by Fordham University Press.

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