Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

152 Divine Mercy: The Heart Of The Gospel of increasing the pain of loved ones. On the other hand, family members and friends, as well as members of the healthcare team, may be reluctant to engage the dying person in the normal forms of human interaction. If you look again at the Diary, I would suggest paragraph entry no. 783: “I must be on my guard, especially today, because I am becoming oversen­ sitive to everything. Things I wouldn’t pay any attention to when I’m healthy, bother me today.” That is a manifestation o f social pain. And the pressure to finish, to complete what is left to us is also very real: “I live from one hour to the next and I am not able to get along in any other way. I want to make the best possible use of the present moment, to faithfully accomplish everything that it gives me. In all things I am dependent on God with unwavering trust.” (1400). Here again, you see Faustina’s mys­ tical ascent, you see her continuing “Yes” , “Adsum”, “I am present to the Will o f God.” But you also see how she is struggling with the human responses to pain and death. These are human responses that we encounter ourselves. We can often find in families an unwillingness or an inability of others to keep company with the dying by visiting them, by listening to their feelings and experiences, and by discussing the impli­ cations o f what’s happening to them, and this aggravates the feeling of isolation. You may remember that Sister Faustina had an interaction with one of the other Sisters that bespeaks this isolation: One day I began to doubt as to how it was possible to feel this continuing decay of the body and at the same time to be able to walk and work. One of the Sisters came to converse with me. After a minute or two she made a terribly wry face and said, “Sister, I smell a corpse here, as though it were decaying. O, how dreadful it is!” I said to her, “Do not be frightened, Sister. That smell of a corpse comes from me.” She was very surprised and said she couldn’t stand it any longer. After she had gone, I understood that God had allowed her to sense this so that I would have no doubt but that He was no less than miraculously keeping the knowledge of this suffering from the whole community” {Diary, 1428, 1430). You can imagine the social isolation that Sister Faustina was feeling in this. This is part o f her purification. It is also a record o f the human failure of those around her. Oftentimes this kind o f social isolation takes place with the best intentions, because people are afraid that if they talk about the serious things that need to be talked about they will break down and cry and make matters worse. This becomes extremely com­