from my Substack archives: Cindy Phillips, 2 July 2025
Hyannis Port, Mass., July 2 (UPI) – President Kennedy mourned tonight the death of Ernest Hemingway, whom he called one of America’s greatest authors and “one of the great citizens of the world.”
JFK’s statement was in response to the statement issued earlier that day by Mary Hemingway, the fourth wife of the revered author. In her bed that morning, she heard a shot downstairs, put on her dressing gown, and walked down to find her husband in a muddle of blood and brains in the entrance hall of their farmhouse. She did what she had always done, covered up for him. Her statement to the press appeared in the papers the next day: “Mr. Hemingway accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun this morning at 7:30 A.M. No time has been set for the funeral services, which will be private.”
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The signs had been there, of course. And perhaps today, when we talk more openly about mental health and addiction, and when even the word suicide is less shrouded in shame, things might have ended differently for Mary. Hemingway was depressed, paranoid, and convinced he would never retrieve the manuscripts he’d left behind in Cuba. He believed he was being watched, and he was deeply anxious about money, memory loss, and creative failure. Though he was eventually taken to the Mayo Clinic for treatment, under an assumed name, his experience with electroconvulsive therapy left him even more disoriented. “What is the sense,” he asked, “of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.” In the end, he was sent home “in ruins,” barely able to write a paragraph. It’s astonishing that nobody joined the dots; in his final years, Hemingway’s troubling behaviour was reminiscent of his father’s decline before he too had committed suicide; an unsettling pattern that may have stemmed from hereditary hemochromatosis, a condition causing iron to build up in the body and gradually damage both mind and body. This diagnosis was confirmed by medical records from 1961, and is echoed in the fates of his siblings Ursula and Leicester, who also killed themselves. His granddaughter, Margaux Hemingway, my teenage idol due to Faberge’s perfume Babe, became the fifth family suicide on the 1st of July 1996.
Mary Hemingway did what she had always done for Papa: she told the world it was an accident, and then she mopped up the mess. “I [always] wanted him to be the Master, to be stronger and cleverer than I; to remember constantly how big he was and how small I was.” She made the funeral arrangements, and called the caterers to arrange the menu for the mourning masses.
It is tempting to leave it there, with the tidy legend and the literary estate. But I grew up with an Anglican convent-schooled mother, and so today, the Feast of the Visitation calls to mind another Mary, one who moved not to conceal, but to serve. At the time, she was simply a wife and mother, a Dear Woman. The earliest biblical references to her don’t even name her; she was just “a woman” through whom the promise comes. When Jesus does speak to her in biblical passages, it is with a term that, in the original Greek, could mean “dear woman,” not “mother.” And there was slander around her, too. She was young, unmarried, and pregnant, and her story was decidedly dodgy because she claimed she was told by an angel that she was carrying the child of God. Joe, her fiancé, planned to leave her quietly, until he too had a dream.
I’m eating chickpeas on toast at my desk, and wondering what they ate at Elizabeth’s stork party two thousand years ago. Today The Feast of the Visitation commemorates Mary’s journey into the hill country to support her cousin Elizabeth, who was also pregnant. It’s a feast about solidarity, joy, and holy recognition: two women, miraculously pregnant, meeting in a moment of shared awe. Baby John the Baptist happily leaps about in utero kicking at the walls of his mother’s womb, and his auntie Mary sings her Magnificat. The feast took centuries to settle into the Church calendar, finally fixed on 2 July by Pope Urban VI in 1389, as a hopeful gesture during the Great Schism. But if you strip away the layers of ecclesiastical timing, what you’re left with is something achingly simple.
If you read deeper into the history behind the story, it was basically Lizzie’s baby shower Mary travelled to, to bless her bestie’s baby, with all the aunties and cousins clucking around them at how expensive chickpeas were. I hauled out my atlas this morning to find the hills where they had the baby shower. Turns out the Hill Country of Judah isn’t just poetic branding. It’s a rugged strip of land stretching about 40 miles from Jerusalem down toward Beersheba. The hills rise steeply, up to 3,000 feet above sea level, carved out of tough limestone into deep, V-shaped valleys with terraced slopes. It’s not the kind of terrain you pop through for a casual visit. In fact, the whole area is naturally fortified by its topography hard to reach, and even harder to leave in a hurry.
So for Elizabeth to make that journey? That wasn’t a Sunday drive. That was a proper schlep, and then some, for one woman to support another during times of conflict and confusion.
As always, my mind turns to a scene from my favourite quote from my personal bible of brilliance by the greatest living writer in my pantheon, Alan Bennett in The History Boys. There’s a moment when the lone female teacher, Mrs. Lintott, delivers a truth to a group of know-it-all teenaged boys, so sharp it lands in silence: “What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.” It’s a line I quote often, especially to men who decline my invite to Netflix and chill and watch the movie for my 3000th time, their first.
In The History Boys, Mrs. Lintott, (played with such jaw-dropping authority by Frances de la Tour that she practically steals the show by using her eyes) goes further. She explains that women don’t get to rewrite history because they don’t get seats at the conference table where history is made, only the clean-up detail afterwards. While her male colleagues debate the cleverness of narrative and perspective, she brings something far more disruptive: emotion, gender, and realism. Unlike young, new Mister Irwin, who teaches the boys to bend history to their advantage, or Hector, who romanticises it, Mrs. Lintott names what history leaves out.
And that’s not just a plot point. It’s the whole fucking bucket.
Which brings me back to chickpeas on toast, and why I shouldn’t let breakfast become a battleground. It’s always better to turn up the volume and take a page from another Mary’s playbook, Let it Be. Paul McCartney has shared that the song came to him after dreaming of his late mother, Mary, who offered a message of comfort in the dream: things are going to be all right. While some hear echoes of the Virgin Mary in the lyrics, McCartney’s always been happy to let people find their own meaning.
And that, really, is the point; sometimes it’s less about being right than about finding peace in the mess.
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REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
· Ernest Hemingway, Author, Dies in Idaho. (1961, July 3). The New York Times. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-obit.html
· Wallace, A. T. (2024, May 29). The Liturgical Home: Feast of the Visitation. Anglican Compass. https://anglicancompass.com/the-liturgical-home-feast-of-the-visitation/
· Coroner says death of actress was suicide. (1996, August 21). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/21/us/coroner-says-death-of-actress-was-suicide.html
· The History Boys is a British comedy-drama film released in 2006, adapted by Alan Bennett from his acclaimed 2004 stage play. The production had already earned major theatre awards, including the Olivier and the Tony for Best New Play. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, who also helmed the original Royal National Theatre staging. The film features the same cast that brought the play to life on stage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Boys_(film)
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