Monica died at Ostia, the port of Rome, in the autumn of 387, while she and her son Augustine waited for a ship back to Africa. She was about fifty-six. The Church keeps her memorial on August 27, the day before her son's.
The ninth book of the Confessions records the conversation the two of them had at a window overlooking the garden of the house at Ostia, a few days before she took ill — the passage that later readers call the vision at Ostia. Augustine also records what she said when he asked whether it troubled her to die so far from her own country: that nothing is far from God, and that he need not fear that God would fail to find her there at the end of the world to raise her up.
She had been born at Thagaste in Roman Africa around 331, married to Patricius, a civil official of pagan religion and difficult temper whom she saw baptized shortly before his death. She followed Augustine to Rome and to Milan through the years of his Manichaeism, and it was Ambrose whom she found there and Ambrose who baptized her son at the Easter vigil of 387. The bishop of Thagaste who had wearied of her tears told her that the son of so many tears could not be lost.
She was buried at Ostia, beside the basilica of Santa Aurea; the fragment of her original epitaph was found there in 1945 by two boys digging a hole. Her relics were brought into Rome in 1430 and lie in the church of Sant'Agostino in Campo Marzio, in a chapel to the left of the high altar.
