Sister Grace is dying.
She was in the hospital and she was at the Mother House and now she is back on the street, on Carter Street, in a hospice bed in a living room where visitors crowd amidst the medical supplies and the sound of traffic passing by outside.
She wears a nasal cannula and is propped up in front of a little tray with a bottle of water and statues of the Holy Family and an empty, blood-smeared cross above the words, “It is finished.”
And maybe it is, but she doesn’t want it to be.
Either her life, or her work.
“I want to be out with the people, like I used to be,” she says. “I love people.
“They’re God’s creation, and they’re my friends. They give you life and hope.”
A priest had been by earlier, bringing Communion, and a dozen people had crowded into the room to receive it with her. In the hours after, others came and went, swapping stories and singing songs and embracing, all come to honor this nun 70 years past her vows and days from her glory.
Sister Grace Miller is the Mother Theresa of Hudson Avenue, a Jeremiah calling a generation of politicians to repentance. She has been loved and hated and undeterred in her 40-year ministry to the homeless of Rochester.
“Jesus went about doing good to the people. Wherever he was needed, he went,” she says. “He wasn’t a stay-at-home person.
“That’s what we did, after all. We’re here to continue his work. That is what we love to do.”
In 1985 at a hole in the wall on Central Park, with $20,000 from the Sisters of Mercy, she opened up her first shelter. A place where all were welcome, to come and go and stay as long as they wished. No one, no one ever, was to be turned away.
“I wanted them to know that somebody loved them. Many of them felt alone and that nobody cared for them,” she says of the homeless. “It was like having them come home, like we were waiting for them.”
She fed them and sheltered them and prayed for them, arranged their weddings and conducted their funerals, and she went to City Hall and the county office building to fight for them. And that put her on the evening news. The mother of the homeless became the defender of the helpless and heaven help any politician who got in her way.
“By nature, I am not an angry person,” she says, “but if I see something that’s wrong, I will become angry.
“I was there for the homeless, and I told them, ‘Take care of the homeless or face my anger.’
“It was Jesus who was telling us the right thing to do. That’s where my courage came from. My loyalty was to God – the Lord knows best.
“It was our commitment to the poor. We were going to stand up for them, no matter what the cost.”
Sometimes that cost was handcuffs and arrest. Once with Assemblyman David Gantt and Minister Franklin Florence, another time with fellow nuns Sister Rita and Sister Gloria – Sister Grace’s cousin. Each time, her twin brother – Father Neil Miller – bailed her out. The night he freed the three nuns, he took them to dinner.
One of the policemen who had arrested her that day told his mother the next week that he hated doing it, and to this day, many years into retirement, he is still a donor to Sister Grace’s ministry.
As she recounts this history, sitting quietly across the room is a man named Mikey. Years ago, he was standing outside her shelter, dumped off, left there by an undertaker who said he had no family.
“Leave him here,” Sister Grace had said, “We’ll take care of him.
“He was lost, and we took him in.”
Her mind is clear, but three times she tells the story of a man who came to the House of Mercy, one night well after dinner. “Are you homeless?” she asked him. “No, but I am hungry,” he answered. She brought him in and sat him down and made him a meal and when he had eaten it she asked if he would like more. He said that he would and she turned away to make him another plate and as she looked back he was sobbing, touched by a meal and a warm welcome and a love shown by deeds not words.
“Don’t pass by the hungry person,” she says when asked what advice she has for others. “Feed the hungry person, and find them a place to stay.”
Next to her, also on oxygen, is CW, whose home they are in. In the 80s, trying to run an off-the-books bar, he came to Sister Grace and asked her if she would buy alcohol to stock it. She said no, and called him to something better. Over the years since, he has been a cornerstone of her work, cooking and caring, watching and praying. At the end of 2003, sitting in the House of Mercy office, a man came in and shot him, angered that robbing a homeless shelter wasn’t more lucrative.
Also in the group is Sister Rita, whose t-shirt proclaims that she can do all things through Christ. Sister Rita is Sister Grace’s acolyte and successor, and will push forward with their new homeless ministry – La Madonna Della Strada – which currently houses five people. Before Sister Grace became ill, and before politics on the House of Mercy board deposed them, they drove around on cold and snowy nights, two tiny old women, looking for homeless people to bring to the shelter.
“They are God before us,” Sister Grace says, “so we do to them what we would do to the Lord. The Lord is in all of us – in all of us.”
And loving the Lord, she says, is paramount. Love God, and love your neighbor, and she adds that she believes very much in prayer.
“I know that the Lord is with me, watching over me,” she says. “The Lord is ever present. I couldn’t get by without the Lord.”
On the walls of her office at the House of Mercy she hung the funeral programs of guests and residents who passed away, so many that they papered the office, hundreds of them, all people, known and loved, passed but not forgotten. During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, she and Sister Rita recall, it was like they held a funeral every other day.
When asked if she thinks these hundreds will be waiting to welcome her as she passes over, she smiles broadly and freely.
“I hope so,” she says. “Oh, I hope so.”
Sister Grace is dying.
But she is doing so with the satisfaction of knowing that she truly lived. She lived a life of service to God by living a life of service to his children. She became her brother’s keeper in the most dire and difficult of circumstances. The TV cameras were there when she disrupted the County Legislature and protested at the welfare office, but there were no cameras as she cleaned people of their vomit and feces and prayed with them as the rigors of addiction or mental illness racked their bodies, minds and souls.
She held the hands of the dying and filled the bellies of the hungry, and offered peace and redemption to the drifting and lost. She wore the cross, did the deeds and preached the words of Jesus Christ, she was a light in the dark place.
God in his divine wisdom makes us different, and puts us each in our appointed place and time to find our duty and do it. No one is always right and no one is always wrong, and we flawed humans labor through life’s day to do the best we can the best we can.
And that is what Sister Grace did.
She placed her life on the altar of Christ, in the service of her fellow man, and she never looked back.