The Rev. Daniel Mahoney, Father Dan, the firefighters' priest, came out the side door of the funeral home yesterday afternoon and shook his head.

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"I was just thinking," he said. "I remember when Kevin Kelley made lieutenant. It was the same year I gave him ashes on an Ash Wednesday at headquarters. It had to be 20 years ago. I gave him his ashes."

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Father Dan looked over to the place where Lieutenant Kevin M. Kelley was lying inside, in a casket. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Father Dan is the Boston Fire Department's chief chaplain, and he's there for the good times and the bad. He presides over firefighters' weddings, he baptizes their kids, he distributes First Communion, he does the confirmations. And when it's all over, when a firefighter dies, he's there again. He prays over them and then he buries them. More than 50 times in the 45 years that Father Dan has been a fire chaplain, he has had to break the news to a family that a Boston firefighter died in the line of duty.

Father Dan Mahoney will bury Lieutenant Kevin Kelley today, after saying his Mass at St. Ann's, which is about a 600-foot feeder hose away from Keohane Funeral Home, where they were waking Kevin Kelley last night.

"I already wrote the homily," Father Dan said, stomping his feet in the parking lot to keep them from freezing. "It wasn't hard with this guy, because he was a genuine hero. I know that word gets overused, but it isn't overused when you're talking about Kevin Kelley. There's no doubt in my mind he saved people's lives while losing his own. He saved the men on his truck. There's no doubt in my mind."

Kevin Kelley had seniority. He was the fourth most senior lieutenant in the Boston Fire Department, and he could have worked at any of the city's 34 firehouses. But he chose to work at the Huntington Avenue firehouse because it was the busiest in the city. Kevin Kelley was a worker.

As dusk fell yesterday, Bobby O'Neill limped past, having just paid his respects.

"There's the chauffeur," Father Dan said, bowing his head and using the word that firefighters use for the driver of an engine or ladder. "Poor Bobby."

Bobby O'Neill was behind the wheel of Ladder 26 when it careered down Parker Hill Avenue the other day. He pumped on the brake pedal but it hit the floor, over and over, and nothing happened.

"Bobby said Kevin saved all their lives, and I believe this is true," Father Dan said. "Every man on that truck is alive today because of Kevin Kelley. Not just what he did on that terrible day. But the way he taught them, every day. He taught all of those kids in that house. He was a great teacher."

If Kevin Kelley, riding shotgun next to Bobby O'Neill, had any inkling he was about to die, he spent the last few moments of his life trying to make sure no one else did. He would not have had it any other way.

"I don't know if the public understands these guys," Father Dan said, looking over to the line that snaked out onto the sidewalk in Wollaston. "Every one of them would lay down their life for a stranger."

Father Dan understands firefighters. If he hadn't become a priest, he would have become a firefighter. He thought long and hard about it before he entered the seminary. Even after he got his Roman collar, 53 years ago, he worked some fires. He was a young priest, just a few years out of the seminary, when he saw flames leaping from a house near his first parish in Revere. He ran in and carried out a little boy, saving his life. That boy, Mike Mucci, grew up to become a major in the Massachusetts State Police.

Twenty-seven years ago, a synagogue in Everett caught fire. Father Dan ran in and saved five Torah scrolls from the flames. By doing that, he saved a congregation.

This is why, as night fell, and the sky in Quincy took on a funereal gray, some of the firefighters from Kevin Kelley's firehouse, the men from Ladder 26 and Engine 37, paid their respects to Father Dan before they paid their respects to their lieutenant.

And this is why the homily Father Dan Mahoney will deliver today will be so easy and yet so hard. He knows what it means to give all, whether it's in the line of duty or some years after retirement, when the lungs go, the heart goes, because of something that happened at some small, forgettable fire 40 years before.

Father Dan Mahoney knows what firefighters do, and that's why he loves them.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.


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