Daria Donnelly, R.I.P.
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Margaret O'Brien Steinfels DARIA DONNELLY, R.I.P. 1959-2004 aria Donnelly, Commonweal's associate editor (at large), died September 21 at the age of fortyfive. She was the mother of Leo and...
...What dries last...
...She got a PhD from Brandeis, where she studied nineteenth-century American poetry and theodicy...
...The course of life since her diagnosis was recounted on a Web site that Steve faithfully maintained...
...No news is good news...
...Water...
...An ardent museum-goer—the Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection in Houston were among her favorites—she planned one day to write about the experience of sacred art in such secular settings...
...Leo and Josephine were often her first sources in identifying the books she wrote about...
...Her friend Mary spent all oflast night with her until 6 a.m...
...Initially there was good news, then good news and bad news...
...Allen Grossman Commonweal 8 October 8, 2004...
...The farmer's overalls heavy with desire...
...He posted not only treatment details (usually an array of numbers by which doctors and nurses gauged the to and fro of battle), but the course of life with Leo and Josie...
...Steve's Web diary continued for two and a half years...
...She later served as a consulting editor...
...On one visit, she handed me a yellow pad with her funeral service written out...
...In her illness and in her dying, she manifested the same lively intelligence, curiosity, wit, and hospitality that were among her signal qualities in health and in life...
...Myeloma is a rare and almost always fatal cancer, but a few people survive...
...Family, neighbors, friends were welcomed ever more deeply into their lives...
...at Brigham and Women's Hospital, three years after her first symptoms of multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow....Her summer was difficult, and the last few weeks seemed impossible, but Daria carried herself forward with dignity and strength and love...
...I demurred...
...Leo and I and two of her siblings were with her this morning, and until she died...
...Outside, on wash day, are two galvanized steel tubs for rinsing in the lovely air...
...Steve's final post came Tuesday, September 21: "It is with utter sadness that I tell you all that our dear Daria, mother of Leo and Josie, my wife of fifteen years, died today at 1:30 p.m...
...May Josie, Leo, and Steven be filled with loving kindness...
...You need a heart...
...After majoring in religion at Wesleyan University, she taught in an inner-city high school, cooked for a Catholic Worker house in Rochester, New York, and spent a year living in Jerusalem...
...Well-water is real cold...
...Not store-bought...
...Fumes...
...Sickness can be isolating, but not for Steve and Daria...
...Her reviews and essays appeared in scholarly journals, critical anthologies, the New York Times, and Commonweal...
...Daria included in her funeral liturgy this prayer: May Josie, Leo, and Steven be well...
...During this past summer, Daria intermittently returned to the hospital...
...And may Daria Donnelly rest in peace as well...
...She was never so sick or so weak that she did not welcome a phone call, a visitor, or, in sometimes loopy fashion, reply to a lamenting e-mail...
...Her twicea-year Children's Books column resumed a feature started by Claire Huchet Bishop in the 1940s...
...Hard to start in the kitchen, but too heavy to lug outside...
...Rinse Tub Two: the bluing, too cold to be true...
...Daria read children's books with the eyes and ears of a child and wrote about them for adults with the critical tools of a scholar...
...But, she could not...
...An essential fact about Daria is that she devoted an inordinate amount of time, energy, and attention to whatever was of interest to her: pre-sent article, school project, reading to Leo, preparing for death, etc., to the extent that she just let other things fall away (such as cleaning her room, paying bills, etc...
...The weather's right, bright and windy...
...Thus, everyone loved her, because she gave them her all...
...Listening to her one afternoon, I realized what a good prospect she was...
...The immediate cause of death was pneumonia, but much else was failing or had failed...
...First, soap...
...More frequent postings and new numbers came along...
...Handkerchiefs and lady's underwear...
...After the pigs have done their damnedest, the cobs burn hot...
...For long periods after her first transplant, there were no postings...
...Her circle included the nuns who sent medals and relics, which she pinned to the sling protecting her broken right arm over the last several months, to author Gregory Maguire whom she interviewed on the complexities of parenting as a gay man and a Catholic (Commonweal, October 24, 2003...
...The blue-enameled kitchen stove burns corncobs gnawed clean by pigs...
...1, 2. (Check it out...
...A large correspondence attests to her seldom losing track of any-one she befriended...
...With Steve, her companion in battle as in life, she began the arduous struggle to treat her disease, to live a normal life, to love her children, to continue writing, and to cheerfully confront the anxious faces of her friends...
...Just in case," she said...
...No problem," she said...
...Chapt...
...Steve wrote recently, "Daria was very proud of her New York Times book review article this last year about Galileo and Darwin...
...But a second transplant be-came necessary...
...In 1999, I was looking for an associate editor...
...That was Daria's plan...
...She was the mother of Leo and Josephine, two beautiful dark-eyed children, and married to the singularly devoted Steven Weissburg...
...Even last week we thought that she might be able to turn the corner...
...A quick-dry day...
...I reluctantly agreed, but in an unprecedented fit of superstiD Commonweal 7 October 8, 2004 tion, I reversed the beginning and the end of the liturgy so no evil fairy could espy its content and take her from us (Daria, the children's book lover, understood completely...
...Her friendships were lasting and wide-ranging...
...But alas, she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...In fact, a basket of summer fruit...
...6, vss...
...But stone-hard pigfat and lye mixed with oatmeal in a pail...
...She commuted each week for two days, sometimes accompanied by then five-year-old Leo, who bombarded the office with squadrons of paper airplanes and left-behind pictographs of train travel, space travel, and a running commentary on his New York adventure...
...On the bib, where the heart beats, his everlasting snuff tin has inscribed an unwashable perfect circle forever...
...To our dinner table conversations that all too often were focused on politics—ecclesiastical and civil—she brought another perspective: recent poetry, necessary novelists (she had me reading Hillary Mantel), new music, and art, ancient and modern...
...Also here comes the prophet Amos, with something in hand...
...She wanted me to type it up...
...There's a word for you...
...May they be happy...
...A visit to 51 Frost Street was to encounter an outpouring of affection and food (a feast of perfectly roasted chicken prepared by Daria's friend Jana Kiely graced the table during one of my visits...
...May they be free from suffering...
...Her first article, "Into the City of Faithfulness" (June 18, 1993), explored the spiritual riches of an interfaith marriage, her own to Steve...
...Rinse Tub One: rain-water, sheer joy...
...Time to do a wash...
...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, editor of Commonweal from 1988 to 2002, is now co-directing a project on faith and culture at Ford-ham University...
...No stove, pigs or not, is hot enough to bring well-water to blood heat...
...Daria was educated by Mercy nuns in her home town of Pittsburgh...
...Daria had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow...
...Daria regularly stayed with the Steinfelses...
...In the root cellar beneath the kitchen potatoes sprout dead white because there's no light...
...Two stem-cell transplants, dozens of daily pills, treatments and transfusions, gloves and masks never closed her off from friends, conversations, e-mails, or even—last spring—from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to which she came to see the Byzantium exhibit and to stand in front of a miracle-working icon of Mary and pray to be healed...
...She loved poetry, her teaching at Boston University gave her insights into a younger generation, and her command of literature filled a gap in our collective knowledge...
...Then hacked with a knife into Lux-like flakes...
...What dries first...
...Then the washer, gas powered...
...Wash Day July, 1947...
...At the turn of 2002, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma when fractures in her vertebrae were found...
...Then, everything dries on the line in the winds of July...
...Daria appeared on Commonweal's radar screen in 1993...
...For three years she contested its claims on her bones, her stem cells, her energy, and her life...
...Josephine's birth in July 2001 halted Daria's commuting life, but technology, faxes, FedEx, phones, and the Internet, kept her engaged in the work of the magazine...
...At noon, the naked truth descends offering her stunning breasts...
...Gibbon, Minnesota (for Daria Donnelly) Soiled thoughts heap up like rags in a basket...
Vol. 131 • October 2004 • No. 17
