1

Father Peter died in April 2020, more than a month into the COVID-19 lockdown, but it was not because of COVID. Not directly. Personally, I believe it was because he became so bored by the isolation we had imposed on him that he decided to just die, because the life he was living was not worth calling life anymore.

This was not the official reason.

On the evening of his final day, he came home from a regular checkup in the hospital. His wheelchair was being pushed into the house, and he looked particularly tired: his head was bowed to his chest, his eyes were closed, and he did not move. You would have thought him dead were it not for the hand which he pressed firmly against the side of his gauze-covered head, the gauze replaced twice daily and serving to protect that gaping, bone-exposed, never-healing wound that had once been his ear. The latter had been removed little by little through a series of operations by doctors who were trying to get at a malignant tumor that had started as a small zit and continued growing and spreading on the side of his face, such that the doctors ended up removing a fourth of his face, leaving his mandible exposed. The wound would never close and the doctors could find no solution. It remained a gaping hole. Through it you could look right into the white bone of his skull—if you were brave enough. It became a frequent mannerism of his to press his hand against the gauze like this, as though with the pressure he could somehow fill the head’s gaping, throbbing void.

He did not look up, did not even budge when the other residents of Aralar approached him and teased him from a safe social distance of a meter. He would usually reply with a clever quip, a comic comeback, even just a simple wave of the fingers to acknowledge the presence of the other. There was none of that now.

“He is snoring so loudly,” said the professional caretaker we had hired. He had put Father Peter to sleep right after the hospital checkup and had come to the refrigerator of our ante-dining room to pour himself a glass of water. “I’ve never seen him snore so much.”

I had just walked into the conversation between the caretaker and Fernando, the director of our residence. Their faces were grim, emotionless as they saw me enter the room. They were silent now.

“Father Peter está malillo, Jejomar,” Fernando told me.

That’s the word he used to describe Father Peter’s state. “Malillo.” Obviously a gross understatement, considering: the old man had survived a cancerous tumor and had already spent a number of years with a fourth of his face missing, in its place a gaping hole which not even the doctors could fix despite attempts to transfer entire patches of flesh taken from his left thigh and upper back; he could no longer stand long enough so as to participate in, let alone celebrate, Mass; he had twice in the past two years been rushed to and confined in the emergency room and been written off as a goner, to the point that his sisters flew to Pamplona from other provinces of Spain to come to Aralar and see him and say their final goodbyes, and his vicar on both occasions sent a personal letter from Rome bidding him farewell and promising him prayers and wishing him strength as he fought his last interior battle before reaching the pearly gates of the heavenly kingdom.

Malillo. A euphemism that served to say that Father Peter was in deep shit, that he was really going to die this time.

At this point, Nacho joined us in the ante-dining room. Nacho was my partner in taking care of Father Peter. Among all the residents of Aralar, only two were allowed to have direct contact with Father Peter, to limit his possible infection with the virus. The chosen ones were Nacho and me.

“Oh, good,” Fernando tried to say brightly, his face nevertheless staying grim, emotionless, the lips not smiling, merely stretching at the corners. “Both of you are here. This will save me time having to tell both of you. Listen. We’re going to have to take better care of Father Peter.”

Nacho nodded solemnly. He was quiet.

“The doctor ran some tests,” Fernando said. “It turns out he’s severely undernourished.”

“He barely touches his food,” Nacho said.

“Yes,” Fernando said. “So you’re going to have to make the extra effort to make sure that Father Peter finishes all his food. All of it. So, right after he wakes up, we have to feed him. We can’t afford to let him to skip any more meals. Está claro?”

Nacho and I agreed it was clear.

When Fernando and the caretaker had left, Nacho took me aside. “Jejomar, pay attention,” he said. “You heard Fernando. We have to make Father Peter eat more. His life depends on it now. During his mealtimes, you’ll need to prod him on. Be stubborn. No more letting him say no. Speak to him like a child if you have to. ‘Come on, Father. Eat. You need to eat. One more bite, Father. Here, let me help you…Open wide.’ See? Like that.”

I wouldn’t look at him. Instead I looked up and then at a nearby corner of the floor, but I wouldn’t look at him.

“Jejomar, did you hear me?” he said.

I still wouldn’t look. I tried my best not to show my annoyance. Or rather: I tried my best to show that I was trying my best not to show my annoyance.

“Jejomar, listen,” he said. “It’s very important that we do this. If you aren’t willing then…then I think it’s better for you not to take care of Father Peter anymore. I…I’ll find someone else to do it. I’m sorry. I can think of no other way.”

This was when I looked at him. I said, much louder than I’d wanted, “Why, that’s a good idea!”

“What?” Nacho said. “Jejomar, what?”

“That’s a good idea!” I said. “A fine idea! That’s the first good idea you’ve had in a while! Why didn’t I just think about that before? Genius! I give up, Nacho. Let’s go find someone else to take my place.”

Nacho held his hands up, palms facing me, as if to back off.

“I mean it,” I said. “I quit.”

“All right. Your call.”

---

2

It was not the first time I had quit, though it would be the second and final time. On both occasions, it had something to do with piss.

“I can’t take it anymore, José,” I told Aralar’s vice-director, second-in-command to Fernando. The COVID lockdown had just started and I was barely one week into my assignment. “I’ve had enough,” I said. “Today I was pouring his urine into the toilet from too high a height and it splashed and I think I felt a droplet hit my lip.”

“Uf,” sympathized José.

“I got so angry I wanted to punch him,” I said.

“Jejomar. Punch the poor old priest? The poor old priest with the huge hole on the side of his head?”

“Yes,” I said. “Punch him.”

José didn’t say anything. He just shrugged.

“I’ll be the first to admit it,” I said. “The man is a saint. A holy man. Nothing less than that. I’ve experienced it firsthand, how he suffers so much pain without complaint. Add that to the fact that he has to suffer me, too. I’ll admit that. I’ll be the first to admit it is I who has the problem. I, Jejomar. Cannot even put up with, let alone love, a sick holy old priest—how much more a normal sinner? All right. Shame on me. But I’ve had it up to here. I’ve got to quit.”

José took a deep breath. He, too, must suffer me!

“To be honest,” he said, “the easiest thing—for both of us—is for me to say, ‘Go ahead, I’ll find someone else who can take the assignment.’ Which I can easily do, by the way.”

“Then do it,” I said.

“I can. And I might. And I respect your freedom. But listen: I really think this assignment will do you a lot of—wait wait wait, don’t make that face, wait for me to finish,” he said. “This assignment will do you a lot of good. I mean it.”

“Get some more piss on my mouth, you mean?” I said. “Some good.”

“You know what good I mean.”

“Ah. Yes. It would be good for my character. It would make me a better, more charitable man.”

“Exactly.”

“It might even do the impossible. Make me a saint.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Amen,” I said. Then I knew I could not quit the job.

---

3

If there was something I looked forward to in taking care of Father Peter, it was that I had an excuse to watch TV series in the afternoon. Since the start of the lockdown, Father Peter had been enclosed in a room in Aralar transformed specifically for his isolation, where no one, save Nacho and I, were allowed to enter. What was an eighty-year-old man supposed to do inside a room by himself the whole day, deprived of social contact with all but two? We helped him make the time go faster by watching his series with him. Father Peter liked anything to do with Great Britain, having been assigned there for pastoral work his first years as an ordained Catholic priest. Hence we watched The Crown, Season 3.

During those afternoons in front of the television I amused myself watching Father Peter as much as watching the actual show. Father Peter was not very emotive; I do not know if the fact that he had been missing a fourth of his face had something to do with this. Perhaps it pained him to move his features, much like it gave him pain to open his mouth too wide to let the entire spoon enter when eating. The most emotion we witnessed from him was the occasional dry quip, said with calm and minimal lip movement. To therefore see the occasional twitch of the lip at a funny scene in the series, or the ever-so-slight raising of his chin at a scene charged with emotion, was for me the equivalent of a birdwatcher spotting in the wild some sort of rare species.

There was one episode of the series he particularly liked, the one about the Apollo 11 landing and Prince Philip’s spiritual crisis. Father Peter was very moved by the end of it; I spotted a good number of chin raises. And so to further milk the cow I asked him, “Very good episode, eh, Father?”

“Yes,” he said, not turning his head, seeing, not watching, the rolling credits. “Very good.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes, I liked it very much,” he said. Still no emotion.

So I said, “Did it make you emotional?”

I watched as he turned his head to me, his head swiveling on his neck so slowly, gently, so as not to aggravate the wound, his face still emotionless.

“Yes, Jejomar,” he said. And nothing more.

Once, for some reason I do not remember, Nacho and I had switched assigned days of taking care of Father Peter, breaking the established rhythm. It meant that I would not be able to watch the series with him that afternoon. I told him this when I brought him his lunch.

“If you want,” I said, “I can give the episode we were supposed to watch to Nacho. He can play it for you this afternoon, so you wouldn’t have to wait an extra day to watch it.”

“It’s no problem,” he said, emotionless, calm, not even looking at me. “I can wait an extra day. I prefer to watch it with you.”

He took a sip of orange juice.

---

4

I disliked my assignment mainly because of having to accompany Father Peter to the bathroom whenever he had to use it. I did not like it at all.

First I had to lift him up out of his special, favorite chair which he sat on all day (his Throne, as I liked to call it). This I had to do with great care, my two hands supporting his elbows and he grasping my forearms, as I lifted him up with the slightest, minutest pressure, for he weighed almost nothing. Despite all the care that I took, he would always let out funny noises such as these: “Ayayayay” or “Ah-ah-ah-ah…aaaaaah.”

Allowing him to use my arm as a support, I would lead him slowly to his four-wheeled walker. He inched to the bathroom with the pace of a human snail; I had time to sit down and browse through my Instagram feed and respond to my DMs as he crossed the hall from his isolation room to the bathroom, a distance of about three meters.

He would then stand in front of the toilet and scrunch up the skirt part of his priestly soutane and clip it with his chin. I would have to stand behind him so that he would not lose his balance, and at the same time I’d hold up the scrunched-up skirt from behind so that it would not fall as he unzipped his pants.

“Bottle,” he’d then say, his chin still clipped to his neck to keep the soutane from falling, his hand raised and outstretched over his shoulder.

I’d pass him the plastic urinal. He peed into it. He never peed directly into the toilet because his doctor told him he needed to measure and track his daily urine production. When he finished, he passed me the bottle; he could not read it himself because his eyes were bad. “How many milliliters?” he’d say. I’d hold it up to look. “Twenty,” I said.

It was always twenty, and he always responded with just: “Ah.” That’s it. I never knew if this meant good or bad, if he had reached the doctor’s urine quota or not.

I guided Father Peter to the sink so he could wash his hands, moving gently so as not to spill the liquid that was in the bottle. When he got there, I went back to pour the contents into the toilet. I liked to see this as a sort of anointing with holy water. When he finished washing his hands, I’d lead him to his walker so that he could walk back to his Throne and I could help him get seated comfortably again. I went back to the bathroom and washed the urinal bottle with soap and water, taking special care not to touch anything that came out of it. It would remain warm. I set the urinal to dry in a corner of the room, ready for its next use.

This tedious and unsavory process was the reason I quit for good. The following happened right before lunchtime, before I finally told Nacho that I had had enough.

In the last few days before his death, Father Peter started to act and talk like a child. Mentally, he had deteriorated: lost a good amount of his marbles. The others concluded that it was a natural and therefore expected consequence of his old age. I had another theory. Father Peter, I thought, was different; up until the lockdown he had continued with his stream of clever quips, sharp comebacks. I thought that he was too sharp in the mind to deteriorate just like that in a matter of weeks, solely due to natural aging; no, I believe the real cause of his intellectual atrophy was the isolation we had imposed on him: deprived of all the social contact to which he was so accustomed, his ability to socialize, to connect, shriveled up like a muscle from such prolonged disuse.

That afternoon, I accompanied Father Peter for his usual pee. It was the same routine, except that when he had finished, instead of passing the plastic urinal back to me, as was the usual routine, he placed it precariously on top of the toilet. Unsurprisingly, when he zipped his pants and brought his skirt down, his hand hit the plastic urinal and it toppled over and spilled, exploded, onto the floor.

Right away I made to pick it up but stopped.

Father Peter looked up at me, cowering, his eyes wide in fright. He looked like a little child caught red-handed in some guilty act, stealing cookies, say, now trying to explain himself, now sniffling, fighting back an eruption of tears. I’d never seen him like this.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said, hands spasmic, clumsily gesturing to the ground. “I-I-It was not my fault. It fell by itself. It was just there and it fell and… It was not my fault.”

I was made to assume the adult role. I hushed him as gently as I could. “Shhh,” I said. “It’s okay, Father. All right, all right. Shhh. It was not your fault. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

I walked him back to his Throne, taking care that neither he nor I stepped on the spreading puddle of urine. I got a mop and a mop bucket and a floor cleaner solution, and I held my breath as I entered the bathroom stall and got to wiping that mess which was not mine.

When I had finished and put the materials back in the cleaning room, I entered Father Peter’s isolation room to get him ready for lunch. He was hunched over on his Throne, watching, as was his favorite pastime, a World War II documentary at full volume on his iPad, airplane bombs hitting the ground at full blast. He did not even look up at me, so absorbed was he in his viewing pleasures, his hand pressed against the missing side of his face. It was as if nothing had happened, as if he had committed no offense.

Nacho and I took him out to the garden that afternoon for lunch. We did this whenever both the Pamplona spring sun and Father Peter felt like coming out; we reckoned that exposure to sunlight would do him good. We set up a foldable table in the middle of the grass and covered it with a sanitized tablecloth and brought out monobloc chairs for Nacho and me and set the food on the table. I wheeled Father to his spot at the table, just under the shade. As we sat down and said grace, I looked at the food and decided that I did not want to eat anymore.

I excused myself. “I’m going to my room,” I said, getting up. “I’m not feeling well.”

Both Father Peter and Nacho looked up at me.

“You’re not going to take lunch?” Father Peter said.

“No, I won’t,” I said. To give some form of explanation, I mumbled, as I walked away, “Headache.”

I went straight to my room and I lay on my bed, not changing my clothes, not even removing my shoes, feet still planted on the floor and hands clasped to my chest. I did not sleep nor did I think of anything. I do not know how long I stayed like this.

I heard a knock on my door. I got up and went to get it. It was José, the vice-director. “Are you okay?” he said, holding out a bottle of orange juice. “I got you this.”

“Thanks,” I said. He’d probably just gone out to buy it. It was very cold.

“Do you need anything else?” José asked.

“No. I’m fine. During lunch I just got a little…exasperated. That’s all.”

“Ah,” he said. “With Father Peter?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah.”

“I think I’ll just stay here in my room for the moment. In any case, it’s Nacho’s turn to take care of him now.”

“He’s headed for a checkup in the clinic,” said José. “He was very anxious about you, you know. He had been asking what happened to you. How you were. He was very worried. Nacho told me that he kept asking this afternoon, ‘How’s Jejomar? How’s Jejomar?’”

I grinned. “Was it really me he was worried about?” I said. “Or was he just worried that maybe I got COVID and infected him?”

“Jejomar…” José said.

“Just a thought,” I said. “Anyway, let me go ahead and rest.”

I closed the door and I lay in my bed and I napped. I napped as Father Peter went to his last visit to the hospital.

---

5

When it was time for the late-night movie in the residence, I did not join the others. Mainly because I knew Nacho was going to be there; perhaps because José was going to be there, too; I did not know if Nacho had finally gone ahead and told José that I had quit the caretaking job. Instead I went to Father Peter’s room.

I knew he was already sleeping. I opened the door, slowly, quietly, enough to let just a thin pencil of light illuminate Father Peter’s frail sleeping figure. There he lay, the man of whom I had become traitor. He snored. The caretaker was right, it was the first time I had ever seen him snore. His head jerked at every gasp of air, snorting loudly at every exhale. It was as though he fought for every breath.

I watched him. He became for me like I’d seen him earlier that day: a child. A fragile, helpless child, whom I could scrutinize without fear of disturbance or judgment or discovery of intent.

I drew near him and I kissed him lightly on the forehead. He did not wake.

---

6

That night, I had just gotten into bed when one of the residents knocked at my door. “Jejomar,” he said. “Father Peter se nos ha ido. He has left us.”

I got up and changed and went towards Father Peter’s room to see what happened.

The other residents were in the living room, seated, silent, faces covered with surgical masks. A woman from the mortuary, dressed and moving heavy and hefty in a full PPE suit, came to claim the body. From the hallway, I caught a glimpse of the resident priest preparing the limp body of Father Peter, placing his hands on his chest and inserting into them a small wooden crucifix. He looked even lighter than I remembered him to be.

I did not stand to watch longer. I went into the chapel and I turned on a light and I knelt, my hands resting on the pew, palms pressed against my eyes. I tried to convince myself that he was already up above, watching me, praying for me. But I did not feel anything.

Alvaro Adizon teaches moral theology to grade 12 students in PAREF Southridge School, Philippines. He is an aspiring writer, and has no previous publications.