Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (8 page)

Shannon’s impending hysterectomy last fall revived family discussion of her history. “Why do you think it was always such an ordeal for Shannon?” I asked my older sister Maggie, whose own twelve-year-old daughter had just sailed through her first period, excited by this grown-up development. “She fought it,” Maggie said simply. “She always fought it.”

Shannon had a different answer. “It was that house. I internalized the tensions in the house,” she told me. And added, as if in evidence, “They got better once I left for college.” She also admitted to having been relentlessly naÏve in adolescence. Though connected only by phone line, it was as if she and I were back in the yellow bathroom, her hand in mine. She repeated the same thoughts that had spun through her mind thirty years earlier: “It’s supposed to be so natural, but you think,
Why is blood coming out of me every month? Something inside must be injured or wounded.
I mean, two tampons and a pad? Isn’t it dangerous to lose all that blood?”

Another theory surfaced after her successful surgery. The surgeon informed Shannon that her uterus had been tilted at an unusual angle, and this pressure on her spinal nerves, added to a growing body and menstrual swelling, could explain what had exacerbated her monthly pain. “Now they tell me!” she exclaimed, laughing. “What timing! God, if only I’d known thirty years ago . . .”

I later wondered, would it have made a difference? Rather than consolation, the news might have simply added to her feelings of defectiveness, that yet another part of her was out of whack. But I’m glad not to have to recast the past for, buried beneath her childhood insecurities and extra weight, something truly remarkable was blooming: faith. Shannon, who had long been in open conflict with her physical body, began quietly and confidently embracing her spirituality. She was the only one of my sisters who attended Mass as frequently as Dad and me.

I had become an altar boy in third grade and served for five years. Every other month I was assigned to serve for a week at St. Augustine’s 6
A.M.
daily Mass, in addition to regular Sundays. Dad would drive Shannon and me to church, for he usually served as the lector. None of us ever got up early enough to eat breakfast and then fast the requisite hour before receiving Holy Communion, so we’d make the trip in a hungry, numbed silence. Morning after morning, we’d roll through the dark, empty neighborhoods and down the hill to church, as if in a recurring dream, one that I can still easily conjure.

I am twelve years old and walk three steps behind Dad as we enter St. Augustine’s dim sacristy, dipping our fingers into the font of holy water. I hang up my coat and pull the blousy black-and-white cassock on over my clothes. Dad scans the Bible readings and speaks with Father Austen, who responds to his polite, whispered chitchat in a gravelly roar. I light the altar candles and pour water and wine into glass cruets, which I’ll later have to carry—
don’t spill, don’t clink, don’t trip, don’t drop
—in the processional, a three-man parade (Father, Dad, and Boy) from the sacristy, into the foyer, down the side aisle to the front of the church, then up the main aisle to the altar. It is all quite showy considering that there are no more than two dozen of the devoted looking on—a huddle of nuns, a sprinkling of old people, and there, in the third pew, Shannon.

I am here for one reason: because Dad says so. Though not yet a disbeliever, I am skeptical. I’ve glimpsed too many of the goings-on behind the velvet curtain. Shannon, by contrast, attends Mass out of fascination. This difference in perspective is never clearer than during the hushed moment at the heart of the Mass when bread and wine become Christ’s flesh and blood, the miracle of transubstantiation. From my vantage point, kneeling at Father Austen’s feet on the right side of the altar, I can easily see Shannon’s face. Her look is always the same, an expression of awe. When Father Austen holds aloft the Communion wafer in the consecration of the host, she is wholly enrapt in this retelling of the Last Supper, as if hearing it for the first time. I, on the other hand, can’t help thinking of the cellophane bag in which a hundred hosts came packed, like potato chips. On autopilot, I ring the altar bell three times. Next, when Father Austen raises the chalice of amber wine, I see only the gallon jug from which it had been poured, stored under the sacristy sink, and can already smell the sourness that will later be on his breath. Again, the altar bell. In the quiet that follows, I watch Shannon, whose head is dipped, fingers pressed in prayer. She looks like she’s captured a firefly in her hands and peeks to see its light.

The wine will not be offered to parishioners to drink, in part for simplicity’s sake, I suppose, but also because Christ’s blood already exists in the Eucharist, just as blood is present in human flesh. After taking a host himself, Father Austen places one on my tongue, where it is left to melt—never to be chewed—and I follow him to the altar rail. It’s my job to hold both the basket of hosts and the long-handled golden paten under each recipient’s chin, lest a host should fall.
But don’t even think it!
A host must never touch the ground. Wafer catching involves keeping your eye on parishioners’ tongues—gray-red, stubbled pelts, mostly, shooting out on waves of bad morning breath—a nauseating task on an empty stomach. To me, the sacrament of Communion means that Mass is almost over. To Shannon, second in line behind Pete the usher, it signifies far more. Her tongue slides under the chain-link fencing of her metal braces, and I momentarily meet her gaze.

“This is the body of Christ,” pronounces Father Austen.

“Amen,” she returns. In Shannon’s flushed, avid face, I see gladness, as she is united with the Son of God.

I couldn’t help but smile at her joy, though at the time I didn’t fully understand it. She drew from a depth of feeling that I’d yet to form about anything. In this respect, she was far beyond me. The girl born backward had pulled ahead, and I couldn’t have been happier for her.

In addition to attending daily and Sunday services, Shannon played her guitar and sang at Saturday’s folk Mass. On a bookshelf in her room she kept a collection of nun dolls, each half a foot tall and dressed for a different religious order and historical period. I always found them creepy, with their Kewpie-doll faces and smothering garb, but to Shannon each represented a saint. For example, the doll in the white habit and black mantle, a Dominican nun, was Catherine of Siena. And the female Friar Tuck, dressed in the brown robes of a Carmelite sister, was Thérèse of Lisieux. Shannon also read
The Lives of the Saints
and developed a profound admiration for Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystic. She took Saint Teresa’s name when she was confirmed in eighth grade and also sought out copies of her books, which was unusual in itself. Unlike Ellen or me, Shannon wasn’t much of a reader. In Teresa’s life story, though, Shannon perhaps saw glimpses of herself. “I had one brother almost of my own age. It was he whom I most loved,” Teresa wrote in her autobiography. She continued:

We used to read the lives of the saints together; and, when I read of the martyrdoms suffered by saintly women for God’s sake, I had a keen desire to die as they had done. . . . I used to discuss with this brother of mine how we could become martyrs. We agreed to go off to the country of the Moors, so that they might behead us there. Even at so tender an age, I believe that our Lord had given us sufficient courage for this, but our greatest hindrance seemed to be that we had a father and a mother. . . .

When I saw that it was impossible for me to go to any place where they would put me to death for God’s sake, we decided to become hermits, and we used to build hermitages, as well as we could, in an orchard which we had at home. . . .

By rights, Shannon should’ve replaced me as the family acolyte, but the Catholic Church forbade girls from service. This ban was not reversed until 1983, and even then it was left to individual bishops to decide whether to integrate. The church provided no role for a girl like Shannon, except to sing in the choir. And that was a new privilege in terms of church canon, only first allowed in the early 1900s. In the preceding seven centuries, with rare exceptions, no woman could wear a choir robe. She could sing from the pews but, because the choir sang sacred liturgical texts, only men were permitted. A legacy of Leviticus 15, this and many other anti-woman prohibitions officially entered church law under the
Corpus Iuris Canonici
(1234 to 1916).

Pope after pope would reiterate that, because women bled and were hence unclean and impure, they threatened the holiness of the church. It goes without saying that, if they couldn’t sing in an official capacity, women couldn’t become ordained, distribute Communion, or serve as lectors. Nor could they touch the chalice, the sacred vestments, or the altar linen upon which the Eucharist was placed, even, I would suppose, to clean them. As for whether a girl or woman in her period could receive Communion, interpretation varied. In its strictest form, she would have to forfeit taking the sacrament, her abstention effectively announcing her menses to the entire congregation.

It was within this hostile environment that women such as Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) and Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) fought to create a role for themselves in the church. I can see now why Shannon was attracted to them. Beyond their saintly virtues, these were smart, articulate, confident women, who suffered greatly yet drew upon superhuman strength. In 1970, when Shannon was twelve, they became the first two women to be named Doctors of the Church, so honored for their extraordinary writings. In the same way that a teenage boy might live vicariously through comic-book characters, Shannon drew inspiration from these female saints.

Saint Catherine was bold. She spoke her mind. She led a life filled with adventure. Her impassioned voice can still be heard in her published letters and the celebrated mystical work
The Dialogue of Saint Catherine,
a transcript of a five-day rapture. What intrigues me most about this writing, and what I imagine comforted my sister, was Catherine’s unflinching embrace of blood. It suffused her work. She saw blood as glorious, God’s great gift to humanity through the sacrifice of His only son. But more so, she saw the souls of the faithful as blessedly drenched in it—bathing in it, even drowning in blood: “A man can possess the whole world and not be satisfied . . . until blood satisfies him.” Her imagery could be sensuous and unabashed. In a vision Catherine later recounted to her confessor and biographer, Christ offered her the reward of drinking straight from the crucifixion wound at his side: She placed her lips “over the most holy wound, and long and eagerly and abundantly drank that indescribable and unfathomable liquid. Finally, at a sign from the Lord, she detached herself from the fountain, sated and yet at the same time still longing for more.”

DESPITE THE CATHOLICISM IN OUR HOME, MY PARENTS GAVE EACH of us the option of attending public or private high school. As had older sister Ellen, Shannon chose Marycliff Academy, a small, all-girls Catholic school. When it closed in 1975 for lack of students, she transferred as a junior to Gonzaga Prep, the big coed Catholic school I was just entering. Though housed in the same building, the freshman and junior classes seemed to exist in separate counties. I was excited to finally be in high school, eager for weekend keggers, dances, football games. Most Friday nights Shannon could be found at home in her room, playing the guitar or doing needlework. I remember seeing her drift through Gonzaga’s packed hallways. Her deep spirituality gave her an otherworldliness that made her seem woefully disconnected, like a girl suspended between heaven and earth.

A simple fact of human biology is that blood travels to the body’s farthest extremes but always returns to the heart. So, too, with kin. Shannon’s life and my life converged at the same spot in 1983, a pivotal year for both of us. I’d just moved to Seattle, having meandered through four years at Santa Clara University in California; she’d been living there since graduating from a small private college in Montana, where she had studied the one subject at which she’d always excelled, religion. We lived directly across the street from each other on Queen Anne Hill. Shannon and I saw each other often, sharing meals, going to movies, yet we could not possibly have been headed in more opposite directions. Unbeknownst to her or any other family member, I was coming out, dating men for the first time. At the same time, Shannon was following Saint Teresa’s example, taking the first steps in becoming a novitiate of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, the cloistered order Teresa had founded in the mid-1500s. (
Discalced
means “barefoot,” a defining aspect of their asceticism.) At age twenty-five Shannon was preparing to leave society, while, at twenty-three, I was finally emerging into it.

Our apartments reflected this divergence. Her studio was as Spartan as a monk’s cell, merely a bed and a table with a single place setting. As is the prerogative of little brothers, I poked fun: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, have you already taken your vow of poverty?” My place, by contrast, was an overgrown hothouse, with grass-green shag carpeting, potted flowers, and walls covered with sister Maggie’s enormous, bright-colored paintings. It was packed with thrift-store furniture, the air thick with Halston cologne. Madonna never left the turntable. I always made sure to hide the latest issue of
Christopher Street
when Shannon came over, visits that grew less frequent. Coming out was a nighttime vocation, I was learning, as I ventured to bars and clubs and occasionally ended up going home with someone. Shannon’s spiritual life started at the crack of dawn, with sunrise service. What little else I knew about her training with the Carmelites didn’t thrill me.
This is her choice,
I had to keep telling myself,
this is making her happy.
Still, one requirement seemed especially harsh: Once Shannon began living at the monastery, she’d have to sever all ties with family and friends for five years.

Although Shannon had known about other orders that ministered to the poor or worked in hospitals and schools, she could imagine no higher calling than devoting her life exclusively to praying for the betterment of the world, she has since explained to me. The only contact the sisters had with people outside the convent was through handwritten prayer petitions slipped into a narrow slot in the monastery wall.