The first half of Rose Hawthorne's life held many sorrows -- her parents' early deaths, the loss of her only son, her husband's alcoholism -- yet it offered relative security.  At age 45, with no family surviving and her marriage over, she found herself on her own.  She could have sought out comfort and ease.  Instead, she developed an overwhelming compassion for those far worse off: impoverished cancer patients, stricken with a disease believed at that time to be contagious and met by most people with dread and repulsion.  "A fire was then lighted in my heart," she explained, "where it still burns."  Gratefulness for the circumstances of her life helped turn her adversity into impassioned work for the greater good.
-- Margaret Wakeley

“I tried to acquire a fondness for the very poor, and I finally came to like them very much if they were rather good.  But I was not satisfied with liking them; I wanted to love all the poor whom I met.”

Rose Hawthorne was born on May 20, 1851.  She was the third and favorite child of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great American writer and author of The Scarlet Letter.  Her father died when Rose was thirteen, and her mother’s death followed only a few years later.  Bereft with this loss, Rose accepted the marriage proposal of George Lathrop, a young American writer she had met in Europe.  They were married in 1871, soon after her twentieth birthday.  They had one son, who died at the age of four.  This sorrow was compounded by the gradual deterioration of her marriage, largely as a result of Lathrop’s alcoholism.  For a time a common attraction to Catholicism held promise of restoring the marriage.  In 1891 they were both received into the Catholic church.  But two years later they formally separated.

Rose at this time was in her forties.  Her life had been spent in devotion to her husband and in the frivolous obligations of what was called “society.”  Now finding herself alone in New York City with no family responsibilities, she felt that she was called to some more heroic expression of her faith.

She had become aware of the terrible plight of the impoverished victims of cancer, a disease for which there was little available treatment.  Once diagnosed, such cases were not permitted to remain in New York hospitals.  Those without family or other means were banished to die in bleak isolation on Blackwell’s Island.  Rose became convinced that her vocation was to provide an alternative to this fate.

Immediately she took a nursing course and then found lodging in the squalid immigrant quarter of the Lower East Side.  At first she set about visiting cancer patients in their homes.  But eventually she began inviting them into her own apartment, where she offered them loving care and companionship until they died.  For support she relied on contributions from friends, for she adamantly refuse any payment or gift in exchange for her services.  For a woman of refined taste and fastidious habits, it was not an easy or natural adjustment to this new life.  Day after day she spent washing the cancerous sores and changing the dressings and bedclothes of her impoverished guests.  But rather than simply providing nursing care, Rose was determined to extend friendship and respect, to convey a sense of dignity to those who had become outcasts.  Inspired by the example of St. Vincent de Paul she borrowed his motto to describe her mission”  “I am for God and the poor.”

After the death of George Lathrop, Rose believed she ought to formalize her vocation by entering religious life.  In 1900 she and a companion in her work, Alice Huber, were received into the Dominican order.  Six years later her own Dominican congregation, the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, was formally established, and she became known as Mother Alphonsa.

She died at the age of seventy-five on July 9, 1926, at the mother house of her congregation in Hawthorne, New York.  The work of her congregation continues today in a number of homes around the country.  According to the strict rule she established, no money is accepted from patients, their families, or even from the state.

This trust in providence later inspired Dorothy Day, who was reading the biography of Rose Hawthorne when she decided to launch the Catholic Worker.  Hawthorne, Day observed, had not waited for official authorization or financial backing before beginning her charitable mission, working out of her tenement apartment and trusting that if it were God’s work, money and support would follow.

So the influence of Rose Hawthorne has extended in many directions.  The modern hospice movement was begun without reference to her example.  But she may fairly be credited with pioneering this new attitude toward “death and dying.”  In her ministry she affirmed the sanctity of life, even in its most distressing guise, even in its final moments.

To read Rose Hawthorne's books online, please see the Project Gutenberg site.