”It feels wrong, doesn't it? To interrogate a miracle? Second guess a gift from God?”
I don’t remember much about the days leading up to when I nearly died. I started feeling poorly in November, and once I clarified that it wasn’t COVID, I minimized it, if not ignored it outright. I was at the right age to begin perimenopause, which has a whole bunch of bizarre symptoms, and so attributed it to that. Or maybe, given how I seemed to be covered in bruises from the neck down, it was anemia1, so I began taking iron supplements. I had health insurance, and so have no idea why I put off getting medical attention for so long. Fear, I guess, mostly. Not wanting to add something else to my ever-growing list of Shit I Have to Worry About. More than anything else, I simply hoped I would wake up one morning and magically feel better.
By mid-December there were things I simply couldn’t ignore anymore. I lost my appetite, and when I did eat, I almost immediately threw it back up, with violent, painful retching. Walking up a single flight of stairs left me breathless and feeling like someone was sitting on my chest. Focusing primarily on the vomiting, I tried to convince myself that it was “some kind of stomach bug,” even though stomach bugs didn’t last for weeks and weeks.
I became so weak that taking a shower left me exhausted. I couldn’t even hold down Jell-O, even though that’s the thing they tell you to eat when you can’t hold anything down. I don’t remember anything about Christmas Day, except that we watched Wonder Woman 1984, a movie so bad that not even the presence of Pedro Pascal could save it2. Still, astonishingly, I put off seeing a doctor. I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking at that point, because, again, I don’t remember much. What finally tore it was three straight days of not being able to sleep, and shaking so hard my entire body ached. Upon the third day, late in the evening, there was a voice in the back of my head: Go to the hospital. Right. Now.
So I did, worrying the whole way there that I would throw up in the back of the Lyft3. I realized things were serious when the ER doctor came back with my bloodwork (ran twice because the first results “couldn’t be right” — they were) and told me that it wasn’t compatible with someone who was still alive. I passed out at that point, and went in and out of consciousness for the next few days. When I was awake enough to see my doctor, I could do little else but repeat everything he was telling me: “Kidney failure?” “Dialysis?” “Transplant?” My blood pressure spiked so high one night that I had a seizure, and was too zonked out on Ativan to see the new year come in. I had been stuck with needles so many times that I would later joke that I looked like Sid Vicious.
And then, just a day or two after the new year, I was suddenly awake. I was conscious, alert, eager to try to get out of bed, and most importantly, ravenously hungry. I felt better than I had in over a month, seemingly out of the blue. It felt like a miracle.
Now, logically, the “miracle” here was two dialysis treatments to flush out all the toxins that had flooded my body, and which would have invaded my brain and likely killed me if I hadn’t gone to the hospital, possibly within the next day or two. That’s all it took, just two, to make me feel practically normal again. The miracle is science. But let’s go back a few days and focus on that voice in my head telling me to go to the hospital. I don’t remember anymore what it sounded like, exactly, just that it was insistent: go now go now go now go now. I’ve spent a lot of time since then wondering if it was old-fashioned gut instinct, or something else. Maybe that was the miracle, that right at the cusp of being too late, “something” pulled me back.
I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure. I guess I’ll have to settle for that.
A question about miracles nags at Riley in episode three of Midnight Mass. He’s seen with his own eyes the paralyzed Leeza Scarborough (Annarah Cymone) rise and walk again. He saw Father Paul (Hamish Linklater) call her forth. But as he explains at their next two-person A.A. meeting, what he has trouble grasping is how Father Paul knew Leeza would walk, how he was so certain of it that he was willing to put his entire reputation on the line. Father Paul explains that he wasn’t sure, exactly, he just felt it, a deep, inexplicable connection to Leeza, a feeling that it was worth the risk.
The risk obviously paid off: though she needs to build her strength back, Leeza can walk again. Though Dr. Sarah (Annabeth Gish) suggests that they take her to the mainland for more testing, Leeza’s parents politely decline, both because they don’t have the money4, and because they don’t think they should question such a gift.
Small miracles abound in the days following Leeza’s inexplicable recovery. After quickly gaining her strength back, Leeza is able to enjoy the life of a normal teenager, which includes a sweet romance with Riley’s younger brother Warren (Igby Rigney). Riley’s father, Ed (Henry Thomas), discovers that the bad back he’s had for years is gone, and he no longer walks like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, while his mother, Annie (Kristen Lehman), finds that her vision is clearing up. Dr. Sarah’s mother, Mildred (Alex Essoe), nearly lost to dementia, is suddenly herself again, able to remember both who, and where she is.
Attendance at St. Patrick’s doubles, then triples. Even Ali (Rahul Abbari), Sheriff Hassan’s (Rahul Kohli) teenage son, wants to check it out, much to Hassan’s dismay. Most of the residents of Crockett Island are feeing something they haven’t experienced in a long time: hope. The possibility of a second chance, when it feels like one more storm or oil spill will be all it takes to wipe the whole island off the map. Even the gray sky looks a little lighter.
”So if God can forgive you, and He says He can, all over the place, He says it, then I can forgive you. And if I can forgive you, Joe Collie, then anyone can.”
Speaking of second chances, Leeza pays the gift she’s been given forward to a most unexpected (and unexpecting) recipient: Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet), the man responsible for her injury. She’s still furious with him, but now that fury is tempered with pity: Joe has spent the years since the accident consumed with guilt. Alone and with no prospects, it’s all he has. So Leeza forgives him. In setting him free, she sets herself free, and now it’s up to Joe to try to salvage something of his miserable life, to honor her forgiveness and make it mean something.
Joe is so moved by this that he’s compelled to attend the next A.A. meeting with Father Paul and Riley. As is it is with Riley, the sticking point for Joe in his recovery is forgiving himself. Shame is a hard thing to shake, as is the knowledge that (a) we’ve let people who care about us down, and (b) they won’t be terribly surprised if we do it again. Joe has been so consumed with self-hatred that he stays in a dying town, surrounded by people who treat him with disgust. He drifted apart from his sister, and never got a chance to see her before she died. But now, even he feels a tiny glimmer of hope and possibility for the first time in years, and is grasping it. He and Riley are pragmatic about their recovery, and understand that even at the end of the road there may still be pain and loneliness, but they’ll still be in a better place. “Here’s to be being better people,” Joe says, before they go their separate, uncertain ways.
Though the whole community seems to be rejuvenating, Father Paul isn’t looking too good. He’s having dizzy spells, he’s tired, and he’s vomiting blood. Being the instigator of all these little miracles is taking a toll on him, though he’s keeping his complaints to himself. As it turns out, Father Paul is keeping a lot of things to himself.
“Bless me, Father, for I am going to sin.”
It’s a risk revealing the biggest twist in Midnight Mass so early in the proceedings. Watching it again, of course, you can see some hints, but you can also see how easily they could be explained as something else. Yes, “Father Paul” seems to fit right into the community like he’s been there his whole life, but it’s his job to be a comforting presence, and to be someone that people immediately feel they can trust. Yes, Mildred Gunning thinks he’s Monsignor Pruitt, but until her own miraculous recovery her mind was so gone she didn’t even recognize her own daughter anymore.
I don’t think I had any idea going into it the first time that it was secretly a vampire tale, and that it balances perfectly with a story of faith, redemption, and rebirth is a miracle in itself. It also subverts expectations by not revealing Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt as the villain5. He really does seem to care about the people of Crockett Island. His interest in helping Riley through his recovery is sincere. His intentions are good, but we know what they say about those.
If anything, it’s poignant to learn how Monsignor Pruitt was in far worse shape than anyone realized when he was sent off on a trip to the Holy Land. Like Mildred, his mind is going too, though tragically he seems far more aware of it than she is, and even buried under several inches of “old man” makeup, Hamish Linklater evokes heartbreaking terror and sorrow. When people wonder how Pruitt could have mistaken an obvious demon who looks like a combination of Voldemort and Nosferatu for an angel, it’s not just that he took the Biblical description of an angel literally, but also that he barely knew where or even who he was.
When Pruitt awakens after this terrifying encounter, he’s young again6, and his mind isn’t clotted with mud anymore. His life is ahead of him, instead of far behind. No monster would bestow such a gift, and only ask for a little blood in return.
So “Father Paul,” he knows more about miracles than he lets on to Riley. The proof is in his unlined face, though nobody knows that yet. But they will, because Monsignor Pruitt wants to share that miracle with his beloved parishioners. He’s brought it home to them.
Turns out I was actually right about this — on top of everything else, I was so anemic that I needed two units of blood. I have no idea whose blood is running through my veins currently.
My daughter insists that the reason I didn’t die was that it would be a tragedy if that was the last movie I ever watched.
I didn’t, but I did realize later that I never tipped the driver. So, if you’re reading this, and you were my Lyft driver after midnight on December 29th, 2020, I’m sorry. Turned out, I was dying.
Evidently being Mayor of Crockett Island isn’t a lucrative career.
We’ll get to who the actual villain is in the next chapter.
Not to mention extraordinarily handsome