‘How many of us will be left?’
By Matt Sedensky
GREENSBURG — The nuns’ daily email update was overtaken by news of infections. Ambulances blared into the driveways of their convents. Prayers for the sick went unanswered, prayers for the dead grew monotonous and, their cloistered world suddenly caving in, some of the sisters’ thoughts were halting.
“How many of us,” Sister Mary Jeanine Morozowich wondered, “will be left?”
These were women who held the hands of the dying and who raised the unwanted, who pushed chalk to slate to teach science and grammar and, through their own example, faith. And when the worst year was over, the toll on the Felician Sisters was almost too much to bear: 21 of their own, in four U.S. convents, who collectively served 1,413 years, all felled by the virus.
The pierce of syringes is bringing the darkest days to an end. Quarantines are being lifted. And as sisters emerge, there is a wrenching grief over their losses and a nagging need to know what it all means.
“There’s got to be a reason,” Morozowich says of her survival. “What is God asking me to do?” reached out for help. in Greensburg.
Sister Mary Christinette Lojewski, the educator with a disarming smile. Sister Mary Seraphine Liskiewicz, whose faith persevered even as her health waned. Sister Mary Michele Mazur, the keen-eyed artist who gave succor to orphans. Sister Christine Marie Nizialek, who’d bounced back from losing an eye and receiving a new kidney but could not come back from this.
No women took final vows with the Felicians in 2020; they ended the year with 455 sisters across the continent. Fifteen sisters died of varied causes, in addition to the 21 who died of COVID-19.
And then Labik, the smiling face who had become the heart of her home.
At first, it seemed like nothing more than a cold. But soon, 78-year-old Labik was on the floor of her room, cradled by Jose. When the paramedics came, she smiled at her sisters and made the sign of the cross as she was led to the ambulance. From the hospital, when they spoke by phone, she was lighthearted and laughing.
They made plans for when she would return before, suddenly, she took a turn for the worse.
“It’s this disease,” the doctor told the sisters, his voice weary with emotion.
When word of Labik’s death reached the convent, her six sisters there went to the chapel, where they prayed and cried. She was later placed in her casket barefoot, in the Franciscan tradition, and buried in her brown habit and black veil, a wood crucifix on string around her neck and the simple silver band she was given when she professed her final vows on her left hand’s ring finger.
“Deus meus et omnia,” was inscribed inside. “My God and my all.”
The sisters boxed up Labik’s few possessions, and the men who carried them away to donate them did it with such rhythm and reverence that they looked like pallbearers at a funeral.
She was the only sister to die in Greensburg, a shadow of the loss elsewhere and yet no less profound.
Jose finds herself thinking of Labik when she passes the front desk and doesn’t see her beaming face and neatly styled hair, or when she enters the chapel and she’s not there to wave.
“Everywhere we go,” Jose says, “we remember her and we miss her.”
Morozowich sometimes slips for a moment, thinking Labik is simply on vacation. The way she feels — dazed, disbelieving, wanting to shoo her emotions away — reminds her of when her mother died.
Outside, purple and white crocuses and yellow daffodils have pushed through the soil in a little courtyard garden that Labik would plant. And inside, in the room that was once hers, a new sister has arrived.