And then, on 26 July, Radium Dial went above the IIC to file another appeal in the circuit court. They alleged the commission did not take into proper consideration the firm’s ‘judicial propositions’.
It was a shock: a stab to the happy balloon of hope that Catherine had been carrying. It was a blow from which she found she simply could not recover. ‘She had held on,’ Grossman said, ‘to a slim thread of life as long as she could, but yesterday’s move to deprive her of what was legally hers was too much. She had to let go.’
Catherine Wolfe Donohue died at 2.52 a.m. on Wednesday 27 July 1938, the day after Radium Dial filed its latest appeal. She passed away at home on East Superior Street; Tom and the children were by her side. She remained conscious until a short time before her death, and then just slipped away. ‘Those who were with her to the end agreed she died a peaceful death.’
She weighed less than 60 pounds.
As was tradition, her family kept her at home with them. They washed and dressed her in a pretty pink gown; looped her precious rosary beads through her still fingers. Her plain grey coffin was an open one, lined with ivory silk and covered with a veil, and as she lay there she did, indeed, look truly peaceful and at rest. Her casket was surrounded by garlands and tall candles, lending light against the darkness as she spent her final few nights in the place she had called home.
Now, the neighbours came. Some of them had shunned her before, but now they came to help. All day long, Eleanor, the housekeeper, took in offers of aid and dishes of food. ‘Everyone has been very kind,’ she said, perhaps a little tightly. Some of that kindness would have gone further when Catherine was still alive.
Catherine’s friends came, too. They brought flowers; they brought their love and grief. Pearl came dressed in the same outfit she had worn when she and Catherine had gone to Chicago on that long-ago summer day when they’d persuaded Grossman to take their case; perhaps it was a symbolic choice, chosen for happier times. Yet it did not work. As Pearl knelt by her friend’s coffin to pray for her, she was ‘almost hysterical’ at her loss.
Tom was strangely stoic, though his head was bowed and his cheeks sunken. Observers said his spirit seemed ‘broken’, but he had to carry on for the children. He dressed respectfully for Catherine in a black suit and tie, but his shoes were scuffed and unpolished; perhaps the sort of detail to which his wife had once attended. He and Eleanor got the children ready for their day, tying a ribbon in Mary Jane’s hair and slicking down Tommy’s (it did not work; bits of it kept sticking up). Tom paid his best attention to them, letting Mary Jane fiddle with the unfamiliar suit jacket on her father’s shoulders; giving Tommy a hug as his son shyly looped an arm around his father’s neck.
The children stood before their mother’s casket, but they did not understand. They spoke to her and wondered why she did not reply.
‘Why doesn’t Mommie talk?’ asked Mary Jane innocently.
Tom could not, he just could not answer. He tried, but his words were choked back by tears. He led the children silently away.
That first evening without Catherine, nuns from the St Columba parish school she had attended came to say the rosary by her side. They chanted the prayers, a song of loss and lamentation as they sent her soul on its way. They were still there as the children went through their first nightly routine without their mother and knelt to say their own prayers.
Mary Jane, aged just three, said hers in ‘a tiny piping voice’ that carried through the quiet house. As her mother lay downstairs – perhaps, to her young mind, merely sleeping – Mary Jane prayed as she had always learned to do.
‘God bless Mommie and Daddy.’
The night before Catherine’s funeral, as necessitated by Illinois law in cases of poisoning, an inquest was held into her death. Tom and Catherine’s friends attended; Grossman was there too. He branded her death ‘a cool, calculating, money-making murder’.
As dramatic as Grossman’s declaration was, it was Tom’s testimony which was most powerful, due to his raw emotion; the inquest was held the day after Catherine died. He was described as ‘a weary little man with grey hair, shaken with grief’ – but no matter how shaken he was, he had to testify at the inquest. ‘He spoke with great difficulty and choked up when he described his wife’s death,’ said a witness. ‘His breathing became greatly laboured and further questioning was cut short. He left the stand in tears.’
The jury of six men stayed silent throughout, as not only Tom but also Dr Dunn and Dr Loffler gave evidence. The jury was instructed by the coroner that they had ‘only to find the cause of death and that it was not their province to fix the responsibility for Mrs Donohue’s demise’.
But they did anyway. ‘We, the jury, find that [Catherine Donohue] died of radium poisoning absorbed while she was employed in an industrial plant in Ottawa.’ At Grossman’s suggestion, the name of the Radium Dial Company was added to the formal verdict.
‘It’s the only industrial plant Mrs Donohue ever worked in,’ he said sharply.
With the jury’s verdict in, Catherine’s death certificate was formally signed.
Was death in any way related to occupation of deceased?
Yes.
Catherine Wolfe Donohue was buried on Friday 29 July 1938. Her children were not old enough to attend the funeral, but hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects to this most exceptional woman: a quiet, unassuming person who had only wanted to work hard and love her family, but who made a difference to millions in the way she responded to her own personal tragedy. She was carried from her home by an assorted mix of Wolfe and Donohue relatives; this final journey, at last, causing her no more pain.
Her friends lined the street outside her home to accompany her to church; only Charlotte Purcell was missing, quarantined in Chicago caring for her children, who had caught scarlet fever. The women wore their best clothes; not black attire but floral dresses and coloured gowns. They dipped their heads as Catherine’s coffin was carried past, and then they followed her: past Division Street and on to Columbus, where the slow cortège turned left. They followed her all the way to St Columba, which had always been her spiritual home: the place where she had been baptised, where she had married Tom and where, now, she took her final bow.