Mysterious ways: Sister Mary Angela’s heartbreak
Why does the miracle of birth prompt the toughest mental journey of a woman’s life?
The woman at the window is 94 years old and Irish and as warm as the lemon light bouncing through the convent. “Former convent,” she says. “No longer a convent once we vacate it.” The woman at the window once believed it was her mind that spoke first to her heart – and then her body, a gift from God and County Clare, moved accordingly. The woman at the window knows now that her heart talks first and talks loud and then her mind and body simply do as they’re told. “But this is too much about me,” she says. “The story should not be all about me.”
The story should focus on why we’re here. An act of grace. A coming together of hearts and minds and bodies. The one about the doctor and the psychologist and the nun who walked into a convent and changed the lives of Queensland mothers living with perinatal depression.
“I’ll just tell you this,” she says, her soft white fingers touching the glass window at the end of a corridor on the second floor of the former Mater Convent. The brown brick sanctuary on the grounds of Brisbane’s Mater Hospital was a home for more than 300 Sisters of Mercy from 1927 to late 2014, when summer hailstones the size of young pineapples tore through the sides of an already breaking convent. Beyond the glass is a view of Brisbane’s central business district, all steel and concrete and blue sky. Reflected in that glass is a wrangler. A warrior. A spirit inside a heart inside a habit. The girl born as Kathleen Doyle and the woman named Sister Angela Mary.
“I stood right here,” she says. She looks at the carpet beneath her walking shoes. Nods her head. “Right here. It was January, 1948. None of those city buildings were there then.” She stares out the window, stares into the past. “I remember looking to the city of Brisbane from this very spot and I thought, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary and so very frightening that not one person in the whole of Brisbane knows I even exist.’ I wasn’t crying about that. It was just a fact.” She smiles. “But don’t make this story all about me.”
And it’s not all about her. It’s about her heart. That raw and rebuilt and raging thing inside her that’s so intrinsically tied to why we’re here. That heart that felt the call of God at the age of 15 in a field on Six Crosses, the Doyle family farm in Ireland, and saw her sail for five weeks to Australia in 1947 to join the Mater Hospital’s tireless Sisters of Mercy, who rotated through nursing shifts from 5.15 in the morning to 11 at night with half a day off every six weeks. That heart that saw her rise to the role of administrator of Brisbane’s Mater hospitals from 1966 to 1987. That heart that saw her publicly fight for the rights of Queenslanders dying from HIV/AIDS at a time when premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen viewed the disease as God’s punishment to homosexuals. “Punishment from God?” she says. “He knew a different God to the one I know.”
This woman at the window railed against the very government that was keeping her beloved hospital financially afloat because she knew it was the right thing to do, knew it in her heart. That great big heart that secretly failed four years ago following the death of her beloved sister Nuala, because it only ever needed two constants in order to beat – her faith and her Nuala – and when she lost one, she almost lost the other. Life waited 90 years to break that heart. What if the greatest emotional challenge to your heart and your mind arrives when your body is at its weakest? What happens when our darkest hour strikes at twilight?
“I was lost,” she says. “I was nowhere. I didn’t know where Nuala was. I didn’t know where God was. They talk about a pit and a hole, a black hole. That’s true. Every bit of it is true because there was nothing there for me.”
And then there was this. It’s here inside this former convent where that heart’s been mending. It’s being restored by an idea; by an informal action group of Mater Hospital neonatal and mental health specialists addressing the alarming dearth of satisfactory perinatal (the period before and after birth) mental health services for mothers and babies in Queensland. Suicide is the leading cause of maternal death during pregnancy and the first year after birth. In Queensland, mothers requiring inpatient treatment for perinatal mental illness are, more often than not, placed in acute mental health facilities without their babies.
Almost one year ago, this action group ran an idea past Sister Angela Mary of County Clare. “We’re thinking of turning the Sisters of Mercy convent into a support centre for mothers and babies affected by perinatal mental health problems.” Those words made Sister Angela Mary weep. An idea so providentially tied to her own heart, to her own recent unexpected internal struggles. “Throughout my long life, I have been in a position to observe amazing medical advances,” she says. “From personal experience, I know the human condition needs more than these. To be able to truly heal, we need love and trust.”
And here she is, leading a group of believers – doctors, builders and mental health specialists – through a former convent that will be transformed into a $14 million sanctuary for mothers, babies and families. An idea built on love and trust, and lasting proof to every citizen of Brisbane that Sister Angela Mary Doyle most assuredly exists.
They shuffle here from the maternity wards. This is where people come to quietly say thank you and forgive me and please help me and amen, and to ask how and when and, dear God, why. On a balcony above the former Sisters of Mercy convent’s adjoining chapel, Greg McGahan talks about a day job that is as complex and elusive and deep down inside the heart as having faith in a God. Light bends through the chapel’s ornate leadlight windows and greens and reds light his business shirt. He runs the Mater Hospital’s mental health programs. He can’t put his finger on any exact cause of perinatal depression, on why the miracle of birth might precede or prompt or prolong possibly the toughest mental journey of a woman’s life. The latest report of the Queensland Maternal and Perinatal Quality Council 2017 says there were 10 maternal deaths to suicide in Queensland between 2014 and 2015 alone.
“It’s a very tragic reality of what we’re trying to respond to,” he says. “Anxiety and depression would be the most common reasons a woman might be admitted to this facility we’re creating. But you also have people with pre-existing mental health concerns. And then a small group of women have what we call a post-partum psychosis. They become floridly psychotic really quickly and it usually resolves fairly quickly as well but they need some intensive support. The reality of anyone who is suicidal is that it is a moment in time. This is a place to recover and work through it. They just need a safe place.”
Sister Angela Mary recalls what neonatologist Dr Michael Beckmann, director of Mater’s Mothers, Babies and Women’s Health Services, said to her when he first asked her how she thought the Sisters of Mercy would react to the notion of transforming their beloved convent into a sanctuary for new mums. “We look after babies as well as anybody does, maybe better, but what about Mum?” he said. “What are we doing to look after Mum?”
“That stilled the room,” Sister Angela Mary says.
“Let’s call it what it is, an epidemic of unrecognised sadness, pain and morbidity throughout our community,” Beckmann says. “And we don’t see it. The hospital has provided care to someone who’s having a baby and after four or five days it’s ‘goodbye’. Women may go to their GP and say they’re having problems or maybe they’ll speak to a child health nurse or maybe they’ll say nothing. We don’t see it.”
This project is about seeing it. About three years from now these dark and uninhabitable convent halls will open up to entire floors dedicated to assisting mothers with sleeping, feeding, settling and other parentcraft. Consulting rooms for acute mental health work. Some six dedicated shared care beds for mother and babies. Another six dedicated beds for mothers, babies and families.
“In some ways it’s quaint,” Sister Angela Mary says, shuffling through corridors of small rooms where her fellow sisters have slept over the decades. The paint on the walls is peeling now. Some sections of the convent are roped off for public safety. “All these nuns who lived here forever, all linked to Catherine McAuley, who started the Sisters of Mercy back in Dublin in 1831 to look after women who were in trouble, mothers who were in trouble. That was her mission.”
This convent has accommodated hundreds of sisters who live lives of prayer and service not only as nurses but also pharmacists, laboratory technologists, photographers, teachers, pastoral care workers, cooks and office workers. Over there by a staircase is where Sister Mary Michael accidentally knocked a statue of St Joseph off a railing late one night and watched it spin violently through three floors of stairwell and shatter on the concrete floor below. “The noise was appalling. Everyone was up immediately, except for Sister Mary Michael. She went to bed with her shoes on!” That line should be heard with the gentlest breeze of an Irish accent. Joy in it. Comedy. She elbows your ribs, whispers: “Poor St Joseph was like Humpty Dumpty. Never put back together again!”
Over there is the path splitting three rock walls where the sisters would march to work. “Those rock walls are all heritage-listed so they’ll be staying,” says the development’s project manager, Mike O’Donnell. “Where?” asks Angela. “There,” says O’Donnell, pointing at the same three basic rock walls Angela is staring at, a site with all the heritage appeal of a sewage pipe.
“Those three walls?”
“Yep,” says O’Donnell.
“Goodness gracious,” she whispers.
Over there is where she would rest her bare feet in a pot of water after endless hours of nursing in the public wards. “People used to bring us food,” she recalls. “Vegetables and meat, especially from people out in the country. They’d kill animals and bring us the meat. That was the only way we lived. I’ve never filled out a tax return in my life. We had no money. No pension. Nothing. We lived on kindness.”
The same thing will see the mother and baby family unit project survive. “It’s all been funded so far by private donations,” says Nigel Harris, who runs the hospital’s fundraising arm, Mater Foundation. It’s in the essential element of fundraising that Sister Angela Mary’s powers of wrangling and arm-twisting are proving so effective. She’s gently patted the arm of every powerhouse politician and big business billionaire in Queensland. She emails. She gently nudges. These colleagues, these fellow missionaries, speak of her generosity, her spirit, her kindness, her tenacity, her humour, her heart. They’re too polite to mention the real wonder.
“She’s 94 years old,” I say out loud to the group of six. “Great, thanks,” Sister Angela Mary says. “They didn’t know how old I was. They thought I was in my 70s.” She throws a sharp look of faux dismay. “I thought we were friends.”
We are friends, in the same miraculous way a kind-hearted swan might stay in touch with a bullfrog. I wrote a story about Angela almost eight years ago. It was about her work and her faith. It was a simple story about callings and making cappuccinos and the old gardener she liked to talk to across the fence of her apartment in Wooloowin, in Brisbane’s inner north. She shared this apartment with Nuala, her younger sister by four years and fellow Sister of Mercy. Angela and Nuala were a double act. They finished each other’s one-liners like they finished fixing each other’s tea. Nuala was light for Angela. Nuala was home.
Almost three years ago she sent me an email in which she informed me of Nuala’s death. I replied with as much heart and care as I could. I remember thinking that a woman such as Angela would be well placed to process loss because of all she had seen on endless nursing rounds; because of the endless conversations she said she enjoyed with Jesus, who walked alongside her as closely as Nuala. I replied with platitudes.
She sits in private now, eating a biscuit in the tea room on the ground floor of the soon-to-be redeveloped former convent. “Nuala died in June, four years ago, and I was there,” she says, softly.
They were enjoying a coffee in Toombul Shopping Centre, on Brisbane’s northside. She remembers one topic of their conversation. “I said to Nuala, ‘You know, Nuala, one of us will go before the other’. I said, ‘I hope we don’t feel that we should have done more for the other’, and Nuala immediately said, ‘No, we will never say that. We will never say we should have done more. We will never say anything like that.’ Then we walked out and I bought some fruit from Coles and then we were getting a taxi and Nuala was ahead of me and she tripped. I put my hand out to catch her and I tripped on the same thing, and we both fell on hard concrete. Nuala fractured her right hip and her right elbow, and I was lying on the ground and all the apples and oranges were running everywhere. I couldn’t get up. I didn’t know why I couldn’t get up. I had no pain or anything. I just could not move and Nuala looked at me and she said, ‘We always did everything together, didn’t we?’ ”
The sisters were hospitalised in the Mater for six weeks. Angela recovered from her injuries but Nuala’s health declined. “She said to me one night, ‘I can’t get better’. She said, ‘I want to come home to God’. I said, ‘Nuala, of course, whatever you say’. And she said, ‘But it’s going to be dreadful for you’, and then the pair of us were crying.” And tears well in Angela’s eyes with the remembering. “She was only thinking of me,” she says.
She breathes deep. “Nuala died and I was there when she died and that was all right but when she was dead I looked at her and I said, ‘That’s not Nuala. If that were Nuala, she’d be smiling at me, she’d have her hand out for me. She’d be welcoming me’. And I walked out of the room.” Angela was afraid to talk to her fellow sisters. She couldn’t do it. “I thought, ‘They’ll say those platitudes to me’. You know, ‘We won’t be worried about her now, she’s in heaven.’ And I thought, ‘If they say that to me, I will be so angry’. I felt like a piece of raw meat, I was so vulnerable.”
It took Angela six months to tell anyone she was struggling so much inside. “I need help,” she told a nurse who made outcalls to her fellow sisters. “Do you need to see a psychologist?” the nurse said. “I’ve never seen a psychologist,” Angela said. But she supposed it couldn’t do her any harm. “I saw somebody in about three or four days, just before Christmas… For the first time, I felt safe. I could say what I was thinking.”
She was thinking about how she was questioning every activity in her life. Something as simple as making a cup of tea in her unit was riddled with emotion and confusion and loss. Making tea didn’t seem worth the trouble anymore. It used to mean conversing with Nuala; now it was just a series of meaningless but troublesome steps. Confusion, loss and loneliness condensed into an image of a solitary nun alone in a room holding a dry tea bag.
“I told the psychologist then how I had walked out when Nuala died and she said, ‘But the funeral mass must have been very comforting’, and I said, ‘No, that was a function. I was nodding to people that were there. They knew me. I knew them and as for that coffin that was wheeled up past me, Nuala was not in that, it had nothing to do with me’.”
Then Angela’s physical health declined. She was admitted to the Mater, where she was informed that her very real grief was causing very real pressure on the functioning of her heart. “I was just so hurt in my heart,” she says. “It was giving me heart failure. Isn’t that awful? I used to think it was all in my mind. But it was in my heart.”
She speaks of this deep heart stuff reluctantly but she speaks of it only to illustrate a point. “I don’t know how you feel,” she says. “You don’t know how I feel. Nobody knows the depths of someone else’s grief or pain or loss.”
But what she does know – what she is certain of now – is that people need safe spaces where they are able to feel, and then work through, exactly what they are feeling. “And that’s why this project is perfect,” she says.
It’s almost lunchtime and all the corralled members of the group behind the Mater’s mother and baby family unit project have gone back to their day jobs. Sister Angela Mary accepts a ride with me across the street and up the hill to the Mater Private Hospital, where she has another meeting. She asks about my children, whose names she remembers from years ago. We talk about what it’s like to talk to loved ones who have died. She talks often to two of the best listeners she’s ever known, Jesus Christ and Nuala. She tells them of her hopes for the old Mater convent. She tells them she hopes to live long enough to see the new unit open.
I hope she tells them about today. How she told that story by the window when the lemon light was sun-bursting through the convent and she spoke of how there was a time when not a single person in the city of Brisbane knew that Sister Angela Mary Doyle existed. Then I said something awkward later about how she’s now a living legend to the people of Brisbane. An icon. She smiled and rubbed my forearm. “Ohhhh, am I now?” she said, straight from her heart. “Maybe I’m as important as that old rock wall out there.”
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