It was not going to be an easy day. Just two weeks earlier the family had gathered with profound sadness to bury my mother. We all knew she was the glue that held us together.

I heard a story once of a little girl who was lost in the woods. She wandered around looking for the family she had been separated from, but she soon grew hungry and tired and lay down and fell asleep.

No one saw much potential in Billy. It's not that the staff at the orphanage thought badly about him; they just didn't think much about him at all. He seemed to feel comfortable floating beneath everyone's notice—not getting in trouble but not getting much attention either.

My dad was a regular attendee of wakes and funerals. The natural politician in him made it a good way to stay connected with his people: family, friends, and business associates.

In the last years of my grandfather’s life, he suffered from worsening dementia. I know this isn’t the case for everyone with that terrible disease, but for him, even as his memory painfully vanished, his personality hung on, and for a long time, it was such a consolation. 

A parish in which I once served holds an annual egg hunt on Easter morning in the park behind the church. It is a delight to watch hundreds of toddlers filling their baskets with plastic eggs, each with a piece of candy inside.

I first met her at Mass. She walked into church and welcomed me to “her” church. She walked slowly with an ornate cane. She told me about her arthritis and other maladies and that they would soon keep her from coming to church.

Early in my marriage I had the horrible habit of becoming extremely drowsy whenever my wife wanted to deal with a difficult issue. It was a highly inappropriate psychological coping mechanism, and I had the hardest time overcoming it.

I once heard a TV commentator say, "The difference between a rut and a grave is only about 5 and a half feet." I thought of that this week when I was reading the bold and amazing promise that Ezekiel delivers: Thus says the Lord God, "I will open your graves and have you rise from them."

A mother came up to me with her second-grade son at her side. She told me that he had something he wanted to ask me. He held on to her hand tightly. The words clearly were difficult for him to formulate.