Call the Midwife’s Heidi Thomas says goodbye to Sister Monica Joan
The end, when it came, didn’t arrive with a whimper or a bang. Instead, the conclusion-for-now of Call the Midwife will have been met, in living rooms from Aberdeen to Zouch (Nottinghamshire, trivia fiends), with sobs and sighs. Certainly, it was a tearjerker of an episode in which Midwife’s, er, midwife, showrunner Heidi Thomas, had doubled the usual doses of bittersweet poignancy and shiny optimism, injecting them into proceedings like emotional steroids. From Rosalind and Cyril’s shotgun nuptials and Beryl reconciling herself to being a Sister and never a mother, to Susan Mullucks gaining an independence unimaginable when she was born a thalidomide-affected baby a decade earlier, our 133rd visit with Nonnatus’s nuns’n’nurses delivered. Well of course it did. It was never more affecting and tender than when concerned with the passing of Sister Monica Joan. Hers was a death foretold, mostly by Sister Catherine, who was two-for-two in her predictions about Monica Joan’s demise – how her condition would worsen without treatment and who would guide her to the pearly gates. (With prognostics like …








