Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [173]
On July 28, Flannery penned her last letter, a card, in a shaky, nearly illegible hand, addressed to “Dear Raybat.” Adopting a big-sister tone, she worried about an anonymous crank call that Maryat told her of receiving. “Cowards can be just as vicious as those who declare themselves — more so,” Flannery warned. “Dont take any romantic attitude toward that call. Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions. And call the police. That might be a lead for them.” She then apologized, “Don’t know when I’ll send those stories. I’ve felt too bad to type them.” Her sign-off: “Cheers, Tarfunk.” When her mother discovered the card a few weeks later, left at the bedside, she sent it on to Maryat, with a note, “Mary Flannery enjoyed your visit to her and I’m so glad you came. The enclosed was on her table.”
Mary Jo Thompson and Fannie White, of Sanford House, stopped by Andalusia on the evening of Saturday, July 25, on their way to dinner in Macon. They had brought with them some food from the restaurant to drop off with Regina. Over the past decade, the pair had continued to spend nights at the farm once a week; closer to Regina than to Flannery, they remained important members in the O’Connors’ support network, made up mostly of single women. “We had not dreamed we would see Flannery,” recalls Mary Jo Thompson. “But she told her mother to tell us not to leave. And she dressed, even though I know she didn’t have the strength. She came out onto the porch and sat in the rocking chair and visited with us. And that was good-bye, because we never saw her again.”
The following Wednesday, Flannery was once again extremely ill. Her cousin Catherine called an ambulance early in the morning, and she was rushed to the hospital. On Sunday, August 2, many of her close, local friends received calls, alerting them. “A friend, Mary Jo Thompson, has called to tell that Flannery is critically ill,” remembered Louise Abbot. “The end could come at any moment. My impulse is to drive over there, but I’m told she would not know me.” Flannery received the Eucharist, and at some point during a very hot, very still Sunday, as her kidneys began to fail, was administered last rites by Abbot Augustine More of Conyers. Shortly before midnight, she slipped into a coma, and was pronounced dead, at the age of thirty-nine, on August 3, at 12:40 a.m.
A LOW REQUIEM funeral mass was held for Flannery O’Connor the following day, August 4, at 11:00 a.m., at Sacred Heart Church. It was a sunny Tuesday, with temperatures in the low nineties. A sizable number of cars were parked that morning on Hancock and Jefferson streets, bordering the little redbrick church that stood on land given by Flannery’s great-grandmother. The building’s brown shutters were closed against the August heat. “There was a lot of people there,” recalls Alfred Maty-siak, the son of the Polish farm worker. “It was a good crowd. I remember that.” Louise Abbot, informed of the details by Uncle Louis, had driven to Milledgeville with a group of friends from Louisville, and remembered the sanctuary as “full but not crowded.”
Music was playing on the small church organ as mourners filed in, including those nuns and priests who were scattered throughout the congregation. Among them was Monsignor Patrick O’Connor, a cousin from Savannah. Seated to the left of the altar, inside the rail, were Abbot Augustine, Father Paul Bourne, and Brother Pius, all from the Trappist monastery. Flannery’s family members were seated to the left of the altar, at the front of the congregation. Her casket rested in the center aisle. The walls had recently been painted a color that Flannery ruefully described as “nursery pink,” a decision of her rector, Father John Ware, which was rivaled in her disapproval only by his removal