Saint Monica dies at Ostia on the ninth day of her fever

OSTIA, autumn 387 AD — Saint Monica, a widow of Tagaste in proconsular Numidia, died in recent days in a rented house at the mouth of the Tiber, on the ninth day of a fever. She was fifty-five, and her eldest son, Saint Augustine, is thirty-two. She had come the length of Italy with her household to take ship for Africa, and was resting here for the voyage when the fever took her.

Her sons St. Augustine and Navigius were in the room, with her grandson Adeodatus and St. Evodius of Tagaste. St. Augustine, who was baptized at Milan this year, closed her eyes. He did not weep. He fought the tears down as they came: “there flowed a great sadness into my heart, and it was passing into tears, when my eyes at the same time, by the violent control of my mind, sucked back the fountain dry.”

The fever came on less than a week after a conversation he and his mother had at an upstairs window of the house, looking out over the garden — about a fortnight ago. She was ill for nine days.

On one of those days she lost consciousness and for a short time knew nothing of what was around her. Her two sons hurried to her. She came back, looked at them, and asked, “Where was I?”

Then she looked at the two of them, standing there in their grief, and said: “Here shall you bury your mother.”

St. Augustine said nothing. Navigius said he would rather his mother died at home than abroad. She heard it, stopped him with a look, and turned to her eldest son: “Behold what he says.”

To both of them, a moment later: “Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.”

That instruction gave up a grave. St. Monica had bought and prepared a place for herself at Tagaste beside her husband, Patricius, who died there and left her a widow at about forty. She had wanted it known among her neighbours that after all her travelling overseas the two of them, so joined in life, would lie in one grave. St. Augustine says his parents lived very peacefully together. He had known for years how much that grave mattered to her, and he was glad to find she no longer wanted it.

It is relatives who tend a grave, and a grave in Italy is one nobody of hers will come to. She had already been asked about it. On a day her son was out of the house, she had been talking with friends of his here at Ostia about how little this life is worth and what a good thing death is, and they, taken aback by her, asked whether she did not dread leaving her body so far from her own city. She answered: “Nothing is far to God; nor need I fear lest He should be ignorant at the end of the world of the place whence He is to raise me up.”

The one thing she said about her son from the sickbed, he wrote down himself. In that last illness she called him kind, and said with great affection that she had never heard a harsh or reproachful word from him against her.

When she died, Adeodatus cried out. He is fifteen, and was baptized with his father at Milan at Easter. The household quieted him, and he stopped.

With the boy quiet, St. Evodius took up the Psalter and began to sing, “I will sing of mercy and judgment: unto You, O Lord.” The whole house answered him. St. Evodius is a young man of Tagaste who left the imperial service as an agent for public affairs, was converted and baptized before St. Augustine, and joined the company for the voyage home.

Word of what was going on in the house reached the town, and many of the brethren and religious women came. Those whose office it is prepared the body for burial in the usual way. The household did not mourn her with weeping and loud lament; that, St. Augustine said, is how people are mourned who die unhappy or die altogether, and “she neither died unhappy, nor did she altogether die.”

The sacrifice of redemption was offered for her with the body set beside the grave before it was laid in, as the custom is here. St. Augustine shed no tears at those prayers. He went to the burial and came back dry-eyed, then went to bathe, having heard that a bath drives trouble out of the mind, and felt no different afterwards. He slept. He woke with a hymn of St. Ambrose in his head, Deus creator omnium, and let the tears come.

She was buried outside the walls, near the church of the martyr St. Aurea, the Christian girl who was drowned with a stone tied round her neck in the persecutions and buried on her own land, where the church was later built.

St. Monica came to Italy because her son did. He sailed from Carthage without her four years ago and left her on the shore, where she stood the next morning in her grief, crying out to God. She took ship after him and followed him over sea and land. At Milan he was enrolled among the competentes at the beginning of Lent, and she saw him baptized by St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, on 25 April, together with Adeodatus and St. Alypius of Tagaste.

The household then set out for Africa, meaning to live together with a holy purpose and looking for the place where they could be most useful. Milan to Ostia is about 378 miles by road, and St. Augustine calls it a long journey. A legion covers twenty miles in a day. This party did not: she was reckoned an old woman, and no one in the company was in a hurry. They stopped here to wait for a sailing.

It was in that wait that mother and son stood alone at the window over the garden and talked about what the eternal life of the saints would be. St. Augustine says they went step by step past all bodily things, came to their own minds and passed beyond them, and for a moment touched Eternal Wisdom: “we sighed, and there left bound the first-fruits of the Spirit; and returned to the noise of our own mouth.” His mother then told him she had no more pleasure in anything in this life; the one thing she had wanted to stay for was to see him a Catholic Christian, and God had given her more than that. “What do I here?”

Ostia is the port that feeds Rome, and the place a household bound for Africa waits for a ship. It has a Christian basilica given by Constantine, and since 336 AD it is the bishop of Ostia who consecrates a newly elected Pope. The town’s trade has been picking up, and the new building going up here uses stone taken from what stood before. What Ostia is now is chiefly a good place to live: for a hundred years, expensive houses have been fitted inside the older blocks. The house the household took has a garden, and an upper window that looks down on it.

The crossing they were waiting for runs to a fixed calendar. Sailing is reckoned safe only from 27 May to 14 September; from then until 11 November it is uncertain and close to dangerous; from 11 November until 10 March the sea is shut. The usurper Maximus has moved on Milan this year.

The four who were at the bedside are still here, and still bound for Africa. What St. Monica asked of them was one thing: that they remember her at the Lord’s altar, wherever they are. She had served that altar, her son said, without missing a single day.