Remembering Father Murphy

I can still hear the silverware clinking, the hollow, metallic bang of pots in the kitchen, the occasional sound of decompression as hot air from a stove or oven picked itself up and moved across a room. I can also hear voices, but not like those to which I am accustomed; boisterous men with facial hair that could put them on The Sopranos converse loudly, women with dark hair scold their olive-skinned children, who babble on in the lilting, bouncy tongue of the country in which I had found myself for the past several days. This perfectly Italian trattoria off the main square in Assisi remains with me not only in its sounds, but also in its sights. I can see the appropriately Umbrian, rural decorations creeping across the walls and the bottle of effervescent water (we had asked for “no gas” but had been disappointed upon our waiter’s return) in the center of the table. I can see the cozily crowded restaurant and its entrance, a door that seemed too small for a normal person from either end and required the customer to stoop down as he or she descended the stairs into the family-run eatery, or ascended them out.

Most of all, I can see my father’s face. Thinking back, I remember that this summer he had grown a goatee; my father has been clean-shaven all my life, so this was a novelty, and we had to buy him a small pair of scissors in Assisi with which to trim his facial hair because he wouldn’t stop picking at it. This time I don’t remember the goatee. I do, however, remember his eyes. They are a murky, hazel shade, discolored from their original dark brown by a case of Hepatitis C he had as a young man, and this time, they are shining in an odd way, partly with happiness and partly with tears.

Earlier that day, in one of our rare forays into a nearby internet café, my father had learned that Roland Murphy, his Ph.D. adviser, had passed away. Father Murphy was more than a professor to my dad; he was a mentor and a friend. I can’t remember in any sort of detail many of the stories that my dad told me that night in the trattoria in Assisi. But I do know that he regaled me for several hours with anecdotes about Father Murphy. I was sad to hear that such a good man had died, sad that my father was abroad when it happened and would be unable to attend the funeral, sad that he had no one but his 16-year-old daughter to whom he could reminisce. I felt curious to hear my dad talk about his own life, curious about this moral and scholastic giant to whom my father seemed to owe so much gratitude and affection. I felt confused by my father’s tears, though my dad has never been the image of the stoic, unfeeling patriarch and is in fact a bit of a crybaby. I listened politely, even interestedly, asked a few questions, and let the leftovers of my spaghetti carbonara (my new favorite Italian dish) grow cold as his storytelling stretched on into the night.

That night in Assisi seems so poignant to me now and may in fact have been the most spiritual moment of that trip, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Here I was, essentially on pilgrimage to the place where Saint Francis lived and worked; I had familiarized myself with the streets of the town, this town perched on a hill that seems to float in some ephemeral way. I had attended Mass in the basilica (this was years before I became borderline neurotic about the Eucharist). I had listened to and memorized much of my father’s treasure trove of stories about Saint Francis. I had visited the church of Santa Chiara and had seen the miraculously preserved body of this 13^th-century saint and friend of Francis. Later in the trip, when we had moved on to Lithuania, I would have a wonderful moment in a small Franciscan monastery overlooking the Hill of Crosses, which had stained-glass reproductions of the famous frescoes depicting Francis’ life in its sanctuary. But for all the obvious inbreakings of God on that trip, perhaps the most meaningful one was also the most subtle—the experience of talking to my father over pasta, wine, and carbonated water, witnessing how the sad news of the death of a dear friend can elicit the most beautiful, joyful memories of a person’s life.