THE CHILDREN WATCH

CARRIE & SHAMUS FENNELLY, 43 DAYS INTO THEIR MOTHER'S PAST OF PROTEST

Carol Fennelly's children keep their vigil in the living room of the house where she is fasting. In a bedroom upstairs a doctor is monitoring their mother's heart.

"She's fasted before," says Fennelly's 19-year-old daughter Carrie. "The furthest she ever went was 40 days and then she started blacking out."

"This is the first time she's been bedstricken," says her 17-year-old son James, nicknamed Shamus. "That's the scary part."

It has been 43 days since Fennelly has ingested anything other than water. She is joined in this endeavor by her companion Mitch Snyder and other members of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, but Fennelly's fast has taken the greatest toll. She hopes to hang on until Election Day to protest cuts in the federal housing budget and to call attention to the plight of the homeless.

Fennelly has promised her children she won't starve herself to death, that she will break her fast early if it comes to that. But they worry that their mother may not be able to act in time to save herself.

"I just keep thinking about a funeral and what would happen if she died," Carrie says. "Would Shamus come and live with me? How would I react toward Mitch and the rest of the Community? Would I be angry or would I let them be supportive? Would they be enemy or ally?"

Carrie is a petite young woman with bright blue eyes and dark hair that dips across her forehead. She works at the Red Cross, takes classes at the University of Maryland and lives with three roommates in an apartment several blocks from home. Her voice has an almost Betty-Boopish quality, but her conversation runs from existentialism to the tactics of nonviolence.

"When she started this fast I said, 'What is your goal?' " Carrie remembers. "It's harder for me to understand and to agree with this one because before, they were fasting to get what they wanted ...

"This time it is just to protest. I just started understanding the other reason for putting your life on the line and then they throw this other one at me."

Shamus, a senior on a scholarship to Archbishop Carroll High School, is a small, rangy young man with a modified pompadour and the same keen blue eyes. He remembers how his mother "got off" on making him dinner when the fast began. "She loved to smell the food," he says. He speaks of the fast in tones of sincere confusion.

"The reasons why she's doing this make sense," he says. "But sometimes people say, 'Wouldn't it be better to stay alive and to keep fighting?' And that's something to think about too."

For most of their lives, Carol Fennelly's children have been molded by the sacrifices their mother's conscience demanded of her. To love her is to suffer and to question what that suffering is worth.

"You wonder if Mitch or if my mom died, what would happen then," Carrie says. "There would be a piece in the paper and it would be on the news. And there probably would be a parade downtown, a parade of all the homeless people. But when the glitz wore off, would it have been worth it?"

Many of Carrie's friends and her coworkers have said no. "One of my friends said, 'The bums aren't worth it,' " she says.

" 'Tell them to get a job,' " Shamus says with the air of someone who has heard this kind of argument before.

There were times when Carrie and Shamus harbored similar sentiments. Those were the years when they lived in shelters because their mother felt she was called to help the poor by living among them.

"When we were younger," says Shamus, "it was 'Why don't we live how other kids do?' "

"We couldn't bring our friends over because we had homeless people in the house," Carrie says. "Now I look back and I say, what a learning experience. You saw things at 9 or 10 that other people don't see in a lifetime."

"When all the publicity started," Shamus says, "and the movie {"Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story"} came out and everything, I said to myself, 'I was around when this first started and why was I thinking the way I did about it?' "

They marvel now that their mother was able to instill in them such traditional values in so unconventional an environment.

"We lived in a ghetto for a while and the kids we grew up with had no goals," Carrie says. "Thinking of going to work at Burger King and then becoming the manager of Burger King for them was so major. I made a vow to myself never to work in a fast food restaurant."

After a lifetime of observing their mother's spiritual evolution, they have begun to wonder what they will evolve into themselves.

"I've always had a fear, growing up around homeless people: What if I turn out like that?" Shamus says. "That fear is pretty much gone, but I still don't know what I want to do. This is my confused state."

He is currently considering whether to accept his father's offer to live near him and attend the University of Hawaii next fall. (Jim and Carol Fennelly were divorced in 1976.) Carrie, who like her mother became a Catholic three years ago, is searching for a cause that moves her as profoundly as the plight of homeless people moves her mother.

"The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me," says Carrie. "The question is: What am I here for? I feel like I was put here to do something. Just like Mom, I'm supposed to do something. I don't know what it is.

"I guess everyone deep down would like to die for a cause. I could be wrong there. Maybe it will never materialize. For a lot of people it never does.

"My mom said, 'You'll figure it out just like I did.' I guess I'm in limbo right now."

They are all in a kind of limbo until the fast is over. Carrie is trying to imagine Thanksgiving -- "whether she'll come to my house or I'll come to hers." Shamus is looking forward to when his mother is well enough to keep a promise she made him.

"She said when the fast is over she would take me wherever I want to go," Shamus says. "She said she'd take me to Kings Dominion and I said, 'Kings Dominion is closed.' And she said, 'Well, we can go to dinner.' "

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.