Page 198 - Always Virginia

186 Virginia Day Fritscher

up and lived with me until she died. And she always told me she
didn’t want to be buried there. I said, “Well, no. I know that, ’cause
you’ve got your lot in St. Louis.” That’s like me, wherever I live
when I die, I’ll be buried in Springfield because that’s where Daddy
and John are, and that’s where my lot is. That’s where I bought it.

Jack: Could you describe that morning when Uncle John died
[suddenly at age 54]?

Mary Pearl: Well, I was down in my room [in the St. Cabrini
Rectory]. Millie [Imelda Honerkamp, Uncle John’s longtime
housekeeper] had got up. I was just about dressed when she come
down and she said, “Nan, come quick! Something happened to our
father.” Our father? It never dawned on me that she meant John.
She said, “Father John!” I said, “Well, what happened to him?” She
said, “I don’t know, Nan,” she said, “but come quick.” She took
ahold me by the arm and we ran up the hall and he was...uh...
laying on the bathroom floor. And I got down on my hands and
knees, and put his head in my lap, and he just looked at me and
smiled, and he was gone. But anyway he knew: I was there. Millie
said he was, uh, and when her and Father [Corbett, the assistant
pastor] found him—that he was just reaching for the shower to
turn it on, and I guess that’s what gave him the heart attack. And
they laid him on the floor. Then they called me. I’ll never forget
that day. I can remember now, though, Father Corbett told me, he
said, “You got ahold of me and you just beat me in the chest with
your hands as hard as you could hit me,” and I don’t remember it.
He said I was just excited and he was holding me tight, you see,
’cause I was screaming and everything and I was just a-beating on
him. Wasn’t that awful to do that?

Jack: No, people do that all the time.

Mary Pearl: He was nice. He came to see me one time I was
at Norine’s [in St. Louis], and he and Father Haggerty came and
Noreen saw them [the two priests] and just because she had on her