TO crib a line from Emily Dickinson: Because Manhattan never stops for death, death kindly stopped for it.
Kindly because 10 mournful minutes in the life of the city on Friday afternoon teaches us a profound lesson about life and how to live it.
Two blocks of Fifth Avenue near St. Patrick’s Cathedral came to a ghostly standstill as John Cardinal O’Connor’s body was borne into the great church under overcast skies and a pall of sorrow.
Hundreds of solemn spectators lined the sidewalks as the hearse lumbered to a stop at the cathedral steps at precisely 4 p.m. A chopper overhead was the only sound in the heart of the capital of the world. Has Midtown ever been so quiet in daylight?
The cardinal’s sister fought tears, fronting a brave face to the mourners. Suddenly, silently, the vast bronze doors swung open, and 11 black-suited pallbearers stood at attention. Church bells tolled. A TV soundman took off his baseball cap out of respect for the dead.
The massive organ began to sound. The men gravely hoisted the coffin upon their shoulders and carried the cardinal into his cathedral for the last time. His family came next, and they were followed by nuns from the Sisters of Life, the pro-life order the cardinal founded.
“Now from the heav’ns descending, is seen a glorious light,” the sisters sang.
Minutes later, it was over. The ceremony continued inside the cathedral, but the crowds left, traffic resumed and the streets quickly returned to normal. If you had walked by at 4:30, you never would have known a great man had just passed and would never pass again.
That doesn’t seem right, but life is tragic. A passenger on a ship passing over the site where the Titanic went down would not necessarily know what happened there, or care. Time, like the ocean, remorselessly swallows every human endeavor. Death is a great and terrible humbler.
So what’s kind about any of this? Only one thing: that it grants us the opportunity to reflect on the fragility of our own lives and resolve to live so that we might meet our own inevitable deaths without regret over bad acts done or good deeds left undone.
On the day the cardinal died, I was outside New Orleans visiting a friend who is battling breast cancer. Although she is 50 years old, she is so filled with energy and joie de vivre that she still stays out till the wee hours dancing in Tipitina’s. She doesn’t look sick yet, but she is. And cancer, her first brush with her own mortality, is changing her.
“I never had children,” she told me on her front porch. “I didn’t think I had time for them. I was too busy pleasing myself. Now it’s too late, but I really do think I could make a good grandmother figure. I’m happy to give up some of my own pleasures for the sake of children.”
God willing, she will beat cancer, and the suffering she is about to undergo in chemotherapy will have been a gift. Suffering, a gift? Yes, if we allow it to make us wiser and more compassionate toward others, all of whom are born to suffer and die.
It appears to be happening to the famously combative Rudy Giuliani, as well as his antagonists, in the wake of the mayor’s prostate-cancer diagnosis. Good for him, and good for his opponents, who have, by and large, been generous in their statements of support for Giuliani in his hour of crisis.
Death not only humbles the proud but shames the arrogant – and this includes newspaper columnists – into hesitancy to speak ill of those for whom it is an imminent prospect.
That’s not to say that the mayor, or anyone else suffering from a serious disease, is immune from criticism. But it is to suggest that charity and humanity in the face of death requires decent people to treat each other with more respect, even as they work against each other.
When the roughneck Republican political operative Lee Atwater came down with fatal brain cancer, he contacted those he believed he had wronged over the course of his controversial career and asked them for forgiveness.
Now, there was nothing wrong with his running a tough campaign against Michael Dukakis, for example. But Atwater realized that he had crossed the line into cruelty in the attacks he orchestrated against the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, and from his sickbed he told Dukakis he was sorry.
The proud Atwater was lucky. He had time to make amends, and showed us all how to die.
The humble cardinal was luckier. He conducted himself in such a way that he had few, if any, amends to make before the end. He showed us how to live.
E-mail: dreher@nypost.com