Death is the instant, Fr Peter Serracino Inglott often told me, when we deconstruct our vision, pride and pretension and start on our journey to discover the ultimate truth.
In August 2008, almost three years before he died 10 years ago on March 16, 2012, Fr Peter and I were discussing the afterlife at Tal-Ħursun Farmhouse. Peter was looking visibly tired, drained and crestfallen.
All of a sudden, he straightened his back, put up his hand, as if to tell me to stop recording our interview and said: “You know, Daniel, I think one of these days I’ll just go… I will stop shuffling and go... snuffed out like a candle in less than a minute!”
Did I stop recording? Of course, I did not. I told him, Peter hold your horses, we still have a deal of other audio tapes to record! He smiled impishly and said he would soon be going, anyway. As it happened, he was wrong.
Three years later, right up to the end of 2011, he was still shuffling at the university, at Dar tal-Kleru, in Birkirkara and in Tarxien doing what he loved best – preaching to his parishioners, writing incisive commentaries on social political affairs, advising ministers on recurring thorny problems and writing introductions for young writers before breaking into print.
He kept doggedly working late into the night, using magnifying lenses to read, straining his eyes and labouring his body; writing in large scrawling letters that seemed to want to fall off the page.
Still, he kept writing, like English author Andrew Marvell’s, knowing and feeling he could hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Still he kept going, no respite. His doctors recommended rest, advice often going unheeded.
Every week I visited him at Dar tal-Kleru where he would hear daily Mass and always take the lift to his room, where chairs and table lay encumbered with prints, piles of books and letters.
He was often out of breath and experienced frequent chest pains. He did no exercise and did not relish going up even one flight of steps. With good reason, he told me that for each time he exerted himself his heart would be racing. It was becoming patently obvious that partial rest, swallowing pills, putting a patch on his chest to widen the veins and frequent spraying of glyceryl trinitrate to mitigate cardiac pain would not always succeed.
Fr Peter’s favourite animal was the wise donkey and his earliest vocation was that of a benign life-giving priest and clown- Daniel Massa
Still, considering his manifold health problems, his capacity for voluminous reading and intellectual involvement continued to surprise me… That is, until just after Christmas of 2011.
During an official dinner at Castille, Fr Peter was uncharacteristically silent, confused and unaware of other guests, rattled by the clink of wine glasses. During the following days, his speech was slurred, halting, as if unsure what he was trying to say. As if the erstwhile master weaver of words and argument was labouring to express his ideas and feelings in a logical order.
By early January 2012 the problem worsened with frequent bouts of sweating, palpitations and partial loss of memory.
By January 18, when he was driven to Mater Dei Hospital for a check-up, his health deteriorated rapidly. As a result of several minor strokes, he lost his mobility and his speech and was confined to bed, hardly able to recognise his friends and visitors.
On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, on my return from Venice, when I visited him at Mater Dei, he was planted in an armchair with his faithful secretary, Margaret holding his hand.
He gave me a momentary flicker of recognition. When I showed him the colourful clown and donkey my wife had bought especially for him, his eyes lit up, his left hand seemed to want to hold it. Instead it contracted into a contorted palsied fist. And his eyes closed... for a very long time. Margaret told me he was still listening. I told him about our trip to Venice and about the Italian literary critic Dario Calimani and his newly published sonetti. And then I slowly recited Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23; our favourite sonnet. By the time I approached the ending – “Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines thou grow’st” – Fr Peter opened his eyes and was smiling broadly.
His glazed eyes fixed on the colourful clown and his donkey cart, reminding us all that Fr Peter’s favourite animal was the wise donkey and that his earliest vocation was that of a benign life-giving priest and clown; the crucial role of what he claimed to be the “final call to order” – deconstructing pride and pretension to discover the joys of ultimate truth.
Prof. Daniel Massa is the author of the biography PSI Kingmaker: Life, Thought and Adventures of Peter Serracino Inglott.