As Sister Ignatia she taught music for about ten years, until her body gave out. A doctor’s choice ended her music and sent her to a hospital desk in Akron, though the accounts disagree about when.
“You can either be a dead music teacher or a live Sister. Which is it going to be?”
Sister Ignatia took her first vows in June 1916. Her first post was music for the smallest boys at St. Vincent’s Orphanage in Cleveland. They wore out her nerves and her sleep, and she was moved to a fourth-grade class that proved just as unruly. Friends from her old life in music found her a piano, and marches by Sousa and polonaises by Chopin brought the room to order. The following March, with orphans at the piano and on violins, she staged her first musical, to celebrate the chaplain’s feast on St. Patrick’s Day.
Then her superiors asked her to set up a music school for paying pupils at the convent in Lakewood, which Darrah says was the first such school in Cleveland. Forty or fifty pupils came each week, for piano, violin and organ, and the fees went to the community. She was gracious, one sister remembered, and strict: when a brother and sister burst out laughing during a lesson, the boy remembered, “Sister Ignatia’s book hit the floor, hard.” She taught the novices church music, made her final vows before she was thirty-three, earned a degree in music from Notre Dame in 1925, and started a children’s orchestra at Parmadale Children’s Village that Darrah believed was Ohio’s first.
“I entered the Order in March, 1914,” she said in 1954. “It was wonderful for about seven years.” From about 1921 the strain grew. She clashed with Cleveland’s bishop, Joseph Schrembs, over how Gregorian chant should be sung. She slept badly, ate little and fasted hard. After a man broke into the convent rooms where she slept, the sisters told Darrah, she was never the same. By 1925 she was visibly tense; a sister in the infirmary remembered her coming in to “wring her hands and ask for a cup of tea.” Her superior’s verdict: “That Sister Ignatia is just working too hard.”
She collapsed soon after Christmas 1926. Early in February 1927 the sisters rushed her to St. John’s Hospital, her arms paralyzed and her stomach full of bleeding ulcers. She was thirty-eight. They expected her to die, and got rid of her habit and veil, so that when she recovered there was nothing for her to put on. They also burned a bag of her letters and keepsakes from the music studio, one reason so little of her early life survives. Her own description, years later, was brief: “a sort of nervous breakdown; nerves of the stomach, and paralysis of the arms.”
Her doctor, Frank Doran, an internist and diagnostician, put her on regular meals and rest and stopped the fasting. Within six months the worst was over. She lived on at the hospital’s convent, typing records for its clinic and filing claims, and her parents moved into an apartment facing the hospital. Late in the summer of 1928, Doran gave her the choice that ended her music, in words Bill W. and Darrah report differently (see Dr. Doran’s question). She chose to live. On September 28, 1928, her order opened St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, and she went to work in its admitting office. That, at least, is Darrah’s account; the others are in When did she come to Akron?
It’s February 1927, in Cleveland. A nun of thirty-eight is rushed to St. John’s Hospital. She can’t move her arms, and her stomach is bleeding.
She is Sister Ignatia, and for years she has taught music for her order: piano, violin, organ, a children’s orchestra, the music for a Mass at the cathedral. She has been fasting, and hardly sleeping.
The other sisters expect her to die. They get rid of her habit, and burn a bag of her old letters.
But a doctor named Frank Doran takes her in hand. Regular meals. Rest. No more fasting. Feeling comes back to her arms. A year and a half later, he puts a choice to her. “You can either be a live nun or a dead musician,” he says. “Which will it be?”
She gives up music. That September, her order sends her to Akron, to the admitting office of its new hospital.
Who told it, and when
Every account agrees that poor health ended her music teaching and sent her to St. Thomas Hospital in Akron. They give three different years for it. Here are four tellings, in the order each was set down.
Four labels. A memorial: Bill W.’s tribute after her death. AA’s books: AA’s own history of early Akron. A biography: the only full life of her, by Mary C. Darrah, with notes. A reference: an encyclopedia entry with no source for its date. Quotations are short excerpts.
A memorial
AA’s books
A biography
A reference
One source, two dates
Bill’s 1933 and Darrah’s 1928 may lead back to the same man. Darrah says Bill’s memorial borrowed heavily from Father Thomas C.’s eulogy, and his research notes are her source for several early episodes, Dr. Doran among them, and probably for the doctor’s question itself. He was chosen to write her biography, and died before he could; much of what he had gathered was lost.
For a closer look
Why so little survives, the two versions of her doctor’s words, and the last music she made in public.
Her life is thinly recorded, partly by her own choice. When the sisters thought she was dying in 1927, they burned the letters and keepsakes she had kept in the music studio. “She was that ill,” one of them told Darrah. Years later, when it was suggested that she write down the history of her work with AA, she answered with the line above, and she agreed to record her memories only in 1954, when Bill W. was gathering AA’s history and she wanted Dr. Bob’s part set down.
After her death in 1966, the priest in charge of the diocese’s religious orders wrote to her superior: “I hope that we will do something to preserve her memory before it is too late.” The sisters chose Father Thomas C., the Jesuit who had written her eulogy, to write her life. He died before he could, and much of what he had collected disappeared. His brother returned pieces of a draft and some of his notes, and Darrah drew on them a quarter of a century later.
The two versions of the doctor’s choice say the same thing and set it five years apart. Bill W.’s, at the top of this page, comes “By 1933,” after a warning: “You will have to take it easy.” Darrah’s comes late in the summer of 1928, with the two halves swapped, “nun” for “Sister,” “musician” for “music teacher,” and “Which will it be?” to close. This piece takes its title from Bill’s.
Tucked in the prayer book Sister Ignatia used every day, Darrah found Dr. Doran’s obituary, folded with care; her notes call him Francis Doran. He belonged to societies for medical psychiatry and clinical hypnosis, and Darrah guessed that he used hypnosis on her. That is her inference; Sister Ignatia’s own brief description of the illness doesn’t mention it.
When she was sent to Akron, a sister there remembered, the order had been told to keep her away from music and let her “take music just as she found it in people, ordinary people.”
In the summer of 1924 she went with nine other sisters to summer school at Notre Dame. The others came home; she stayed on. Community records don’t say where she spent the next year. Darrah offers the guess of the order’s major superior, Sister Joan Gallagher, that she went to a sanitarium for nervous disorders at nearby Rome City. By the summer of 1925 Notre Dame had given her a degree in music, with certificates in voice and in three instruments: piano, organ and violin. Darrah calls it a Bachelor of Arts in music; the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History calls it a Bachelor of Music.
Her last musical work, by Darrah’s account, was the music for her order’s Diamond Jubilee, a Pontifical High Mass at St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland on September 25, 1926. Within a few months she had collapsed. An AA member she had helped wrote in the Grapevine in 1964 that she once stood looking out of a window and said, mostly to herself: “That was a big step I took from music … to alcohol.”