My second brother died within days of his birth. I was quite young, but it affected me greatly. When my third brother came along two years later, I insisted upon seeing him immediately. Of course, in those days, children were not allowed on the ward with newborns. Try explaining that to a determined six-year-old. My father arranged for my mother to be at a ground-floor window with a flyscreen at the back of the annex. I could not see my brother, but I could hear him crying and my mother soothing him.

I never forgot the brother who died and often prayed for him. My youngest aunt gave me a brass plaque with a prayer on it: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." I really wasn't worried about dying at that time. I had a child's faith in God and a real sense of my Guardian Angel. However, I did feel that the family had unfinished business with my brother.

Years later, after I left the Navy, my wife and I travelled down the Eastern seaboard of the United States to visit my brother in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was stationed there in the Air Force. From Biloxi we decided to drive across Texas to El Paso on the way to visiting with my grandparents in Phoenix. As my father was an officer at the time of my brother's death, he was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Bliss near El Paso.

We arrived an hour before the cemetery closed and there was no one to help us look up the burial record. For that hour, I walked around praying and looking for the headstone. Sadly, I was unable to find my brother's plot. Years later, I found a picture of the headstone online. It was good to be able to see it virtually. Someday, I'll see it face-to-face.

The bonds between persons are strong. When something like death intervenes, we need ways of negotiating the transitions. Within the Catholic Tradition, we have the Litany and Prayers for the Dying to aid us. Sadly, these are largely forgotten by most. Our culture works against their use. We have trivialised death with hidden corridors to whisk away the newly deceased who die in casinos and other public venues. We sensationalise death by accident or misadventure. We sanitise death in the hospital or nursing home. We restrict opportunities to die among our friends and family by limiting funds for home hospice care.

The Litany and Prayers for the Dying are yet another context to explore before engaging The Dream of Gerontius. Without being familiar with them, we are at risk of misunderstanding Newman's work. In fact, scholars who misattribute segments of The Dream as liturgy relating to the Mass miss the salience of the Litany said by friends and family who surround the dying. [1] While the priest may be present and take some leadership, these prayers are not part of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. Apart from the Kyrie, they are also not found in the Mass of Newman's day nor, indeed, our own. Additionally, the Kyrie is found in many prayers of the faithful.

Again, I would encourage folks to first prayerfully read through the Litany and Prayers for the Dying before heading to The Dream. They can be found at Saint Annes Helper dot com. Just follow this link.

[1]

Rebecca Rainof (2013) makes this mistake and other misapprehensions in her "Victorians in purgatory: Newman's poetics of conciliation and the afterlife of the Oxford Movement" in Victorian Poetry, 51(2):227-247. While I would hold that her major thesis is weakened considerably by her failure to properly identify the textual source material of much of Newman's poem, she makes interesting points and provides useful background information in her paper. Here is but one of her more egregious errors: "Newman invokes ritual in ways more explicit and potentially off-putting than other popular devotional poets of the time, notably Anglo-Catholic devotional poets like Christina Rossetti, for Newman quotes directly and at length from rites performed in the Roman Catholic mass." This snippet can be found on page 229.