NEVER SAY DIE.

When it was finished, Mary Ward came out of the house, in a khaki trenchcoat, and wondered what was next, now that her brother was dead. A car was waiting for her, but she was not ready to go yet.

It was late Wednesday evening near Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Mary Ward's brother, Cardinal John O'Connor, the archbishop of New York, had passed away at his residence three hours earlier. Mary looked just like him, though much shorter--same sparkling eyes and jokey smile. In the following days the crowds would come to view the cardinal's body as it lay in state in the cathedral. Police barricades were already going up. At the funeral Mass the next Monday, Mary Ward would sit in the first pew. But at 11:30 Wednesday night she was simply a grieving relative. She and her son faced a lone radio reporter and myself. Mary Ward asked me, "Did you ever meet my brother?"

I had. I told her about meeting the cardinal once at his residence, and about the letters we'd exchanged over an article I'd written--the surprise of receiving a letter from him (his coat of arms on the creamy stationery) and the care I took in fashioning a reply. And I told her about one Sunday last June when I tailed him on his parish visitations. The day was a New York carnival. The first stop was 10:15 Mass at the cathedral. Outside, the Gay and Lesbian parade was about to begin, and the Dykes on Bikes were revving their engines. After a long homily, O'Connor apologized to the congregation for having to rush off. Half an hour later he was marking the feast of San Juan Bautista on a dusty ballfield in Central Park, clambering onto a makeshift altar atop a Parks Department trailer to give medals to Tito Puente and Mark Anthony. From there he went to a parish up in Ulster County, the far reaches of the archdiocese.

That Sunday was Cardinal O'Connor's last Sunday before he learned of his brain tumor. As I told Mary Ward about that day, she listened attentively. But I had a question for her, too, and now I asked it. Had she and her brother ever discussed that he was dying? All through the months of speculation, people wondered whether O'Connor was dying. Myself, I wondered why, if he was dying, he didn't directly say so. All of us die. The Catholic faith regards death as a passage to new life, and a means whereby the Christian is invited to become more Christlike.

In 1996, when the archbishop of Chicago, Joseph Bernadin, bluntly announced that he was dying of cancer, the outpouring of sympathy and recognition was so great that by the time Bernadin died he seemed the patron saint of candor. As for O'Connor, he never said that he was dying, and I wondered why. But there on the sidewalk, I simply asked his sister whether he had spoken to her of death and dying. And she said he hadn't. It just wasn't the kind of thing her brother talked about, she said.

She began to tell me how his prayers had cured her of cancer three years ago. It was a tabloid headline in the making: the cardinal's miracle. But her son swiftly interrupted, reminding me that she was the cardinal's sister--that is, she would be inclined to overstate the case--and saying he wanted to get her home.

I stood there pondering. Could it be that all the elaborate circumlocutions of the past few months about the cardinal's condition went right to the heart of the man--that he was not simply refusing to comment to the press about the extent of his condition but refusing to comment--period--to anybody?

It could be. Cardinal John O'Connor died as he lived. He made the evening news, but left a good deal unsaid.

The Catholic tradition spoke for him, however, through his ubiquitous communications director, Joseph Zwilling, who announced earlier that Wednesday afternoon that the cardinal was "in the hour of his death." As archbishop, John O'Connor was never at a loss for words; but his last words, in a sense, were not his own but those of the Hail Mary, the words of a penitent: "Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death." For a man who never quite seemed humble, though he often gibed about humility, it was a moving--and humbling--final effect.

Paul Elie, a frequent contributor, covered Cardinal O'Connor for the New York Times Magazine.