A life of service and caring for others
Sister Patricia Hanlon lost her life to COVID-19
Sister Patricia (Vianney) Hanlon was a living saint. Now, she is a virtual martyr.
After an astonishing life of grace and service to the sick and the dying, she has lost her life to the raging disease that has brought the world to its knees.
A prayer service for Sister Patricia was streamed from the P.X. Dermody Funeral Home in Hamilton on April 28 following her sudden death from the COVID-19 virus on April 24 at University Hospital in London, Ont.
She should have died hereafter. And in a different hospital.
Her friend and fellow Sister of St. Joseph, Kathleen O’Neill, conducted the service and delivered a loving eulogy which captured Sister Patricia’s goodness perfectly. Among her reminiscences was the astonishing story of the phone message Patricia left for her two days before she died, offering her comfort and remembrance on the anniversary of Kathleen’s father’s death. It was a call Patricia had faithfully made without fail every year since he died — in 1976!
As were many others, my family was blessed by Sister Patricia’s kindness. She was at the bedside with us in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton when our father died in 1998 — and again when our mother died in 2007. Ever since, without fail, she has called us on the anniversaries of their deaths. Her calls were never cursory; she reminisced, she asked about each of our children by name and she was interested in everything.
And any time one of us was hospitalized or undergoing surgery at St. Joe’s, she invariably appeared at our bedsides with words of comfort and hope — often quietly pressing one of her home-made “smilestones” into our hands as talismans of hope.
Ours was just one family of thousands whose lives she touched profoundly and faithfully — in and out of the hospital.
When I think of the number of anniversaries she honoured with her calls, I can’t imagine how she ever found the time. I thought it was remarkable that she had been doing it for 22 years since our father died — until Sister Kathleen related her own story about the calls she had received since 1976.
Sister Patricia began her life of service in health care in 1955. She had many gifts; serving as a pediatric teacher, the director of a school of nursing, the supervisor of an emergency department and the director of novices for her congregation. But by far her greatest gift was her pastoral care service from 1981 until her retirement in 2017 at St. Joseph’s — a gift she continued to share after her retirement, in hospitals, nursing homes and funeral homes — and through what she herself called her “telephone ministry,” which never let up to the end.
It is heartbreaking that, after calling St. Joseph’s her home and comforting its patients for over 70 years, she died in a hospital in London, the city to which she and a small contingent of her fellow sisters had been compelled to move after their magnificent motherhouse in Hamilton was sold just a few months earlier.
When Sister Patricia called us on Feb. 6 to remember my father, she was her cheerful self, but it was pretty clear that the adjustment to her new surroundings was difficult. Although she was grateful for the kindness of the people there, she obviously missed her life and friends in Hamilton. Nevertheless, she accepted the change with her irrepressible grace, as “God’s will.”
She was God’s gift.