Daria Donnelly, a gift person essay by Robert Ellsberg

History is filled with famous people whose singular, inspirational lives help us gain perspective and navigate through tumultuous, challenging, and perplexing times. Libraries are filled with books written by wise men and women that give us hope and direction in our lives. Museums and concert halls are filled with exceptional art and music that lift our spirits and soothe places where words cannot. But for most of us, the love, kindness and enduring support of our friends and family give us the most nourishment of all. Daria Donnelly’s life - cut short by a fatal illness – is the story of an ordinary woman whose love and compassion inspired, lifted and nourished all whose lives she touched. Do you know a Daria Donnelly for whom you can be grateful?
- Margaret Wakeley

“My getting sick increased my attention to the everyday heroism of refugees, the depressed, the arthritic, the mourning, the lonely, all those who know how good it is simply to get through a day.”

The first sign of something wrong came when she broke a vertebra, just months after giving birth to her daughter. Daria Donnelly was forty-two, the mother of two young children, Leo and Josie, when she received the diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a rare, typically fatal blood cancer that weakens immune system and eats away at the bones. Like anyone under such circumstances, Daria felt the terrible injustice of this news. But she proved to be unusually prepared – by faith and discipline – to face her ordeal. She was determined to make each remaining day a witness to life, and to make this her legacy to those she loved.

Daria grew up in Pittsburgh in a large, loving, and devoutly Catholic family. Photographs from her early childhood capture the paradoxical combination of gravity and levity that forever marked her personality. Even by the standards of her Irish-Catholic roots, she took her faith seriously. After studying religion at Wesleyan College she worked in a Catholic Worker house in Rochester and then traveled to Jerusalem to study Jewish-Christian relations. In this light it was not entirely surprising that she would later marry a Jewish lawyer, Steve Wiessburg. In their home both traditions would hold equal honor.

Daria earned a doctorate in English, writing her dissertation on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. She taught for some years at Boston University and then retired to a more inward life in Cambridge with her baby son, Leo. Eventually she was hired as an editor at Commonweal, the liberal Catholic journal, where she took special delight in writing a semiannual review of children’s literature. She was an insightful and empathetic editor who, as one of her friends put it, respected language “that was adequate to the world as she knew it (and she knew it at its very best and worst.)”

She applied the same care and precision to all aspects of her life, particularly to friendship. As a result, scores of otherwise unconnected people would later describe her as their best friend. In part, this reflected her capacity for focus and generosity. She was a keen listener and gave everything in return.

Daria engaged in many quiet ministries: volunteering in her son’s school, befriending the elderly, and welcoming the company of the odd and friendless. But like her favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, she was a natural contemplative, a discerning observer of life and its dramas. She read the world as if it were a poem, sometimes lovely and sometimes sad, but pointing to some meaning that could not be expressed in any other way.

The news of her illness, so soon after Josie’s birth, hit like a thunderclap. Her friends were devastated. But Daria accommodated herself to her circumstances with a calm, unselfish, and benevolent balance that more than ever became the mark of her personality. Graciously she accepted the support of her friends and neighbors as she adjusted to the narrowing constraints on her existence. Her title at Commonweal was revised to “Editor-at-Large.” “I love the title,” she wrote. “It makes me seem out and about, maybe even hard to find. A flattering fiction, as, in truth, I do a good imitation of Emily Dickinson. Stay put. Travel by other means.”

She endured the devastating rigors of two stem-cell replacements – the sickness, the weakness, the vulnerability to every germ and jolt. She took it all in, both the bitterness and the sweetness of life.

She remained intimately connected to the life of the church, even as it was rocked by scandal. As often as she could she received communion from a Eucharistic minister. Asked later whether she had received the sacrament of the sick, her pastor commented that she had personally used up half the year’s supply of holy oil. Yet there was nothing sentimental or parochial about her faith; it was simply the ground she walked on, the air she breathed. As her pastor noted, “She was to her core a woman of symbol, of story, of sacrament. She reach in the deepest Catholic sense toward the loving, nourishing, reconciling grace of God through the ordinary, commonplace things of God’s created universe.”

She warmly encouraged this present collection of “gal saints” [Robert Ellsberg's Blessed Among All Women] and urged the author to include examples of ordinary women, especially mothers, and those who knew the spiritual challenge of finding God amid the chaos and distractions of family life. Of a previous book on saints, she wrote in her characteristic zany e-mail style: “Your book was full of insight and sharp people but where are the kids? That’s not your fault: does our church ever give the high five to saintly parents??? The noise the joy the distraction: Nouwen, Merton, the modern prophets, they don’t have kids, and as a result they can’t sort all the noise of culture: and their diagnosis is limited….Saints use it all. Anyway it depressed me that there seems to be so little recognition of the saint mother saint father….I’m overtuned to the kids I am sure, but since the sickle man came calling here I am like thy will be done, hell no I won’t go, kids need their mothers.”

Her initial prognosis was a matter of months, yet she lived on for nearly three years, grateful for each extra day to be with Steve, to watch their children grow, to add to their store of memories and their reservoir of love. She continued to read the Bible, the newspaper, and her beloved poets. But meanwhile every part of her body seemed steadily to give out. “Oh man, what next?” she wrote, after another downturn. “I feel like I might wake up without legs or something.”

She was prepared for death, but never resigned. In another email: “I was embarrassed last year to discover how obsessed the Gospels are with healing: it’s the focus: and the healings are literal. I went to hip schools which discounted miracles or explained them away as Jesus’ way of letting us know he was God. Dumb, huh? There is nothing hip about healing, only essential.”

Only weeks before her death, she wrote to a young child about her care for a rescued horse: “The only thing that matters is showing love and compassion in the time that is given us. Your love for Leroy has altered the universe.”

After her long ordeal, the end came suddenly on September 21, 2004. She had taken time to plan her funeral, including long prayers of thanks for all the friends, family, and caregivers who had accompanied her with such faithfulness. The prayers ended with the final words: “May Josie, Leo and Steven be well; may they be free from suffering; may Josie, Leo, and Steven be filled with loving kindness; may they be happy.”

Who can measure the significance of such a life? Daria Donnelly’s brand of “ordinary” holiness, set amid “the noise the joy the distraction” of family life, expressed in daily (hourly, minute-by-minute) acts of faith and compassion, tested by intolerable suffering, bearing witness through all circumstances in the promise of the gospel, leaves no great monument in the world. But, as George Eliot wrote of her heroine in Middlemarch, “The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.”