Endings

Those of you who know me on FB know that my father-in-law died Saturday afternoon.

My husband and I spent most of Friday focused on the funeral mass for the young lady whom he had coached in soccer for five years.

She was a freshman at a Catholic girls' school, and half the sanctuary was filled with its students and alumnae. They all sang their alma mater so sweetly at the beginning of the service and
then began to cry at the end as Stand By Me (the last FB status of the young woman, who had collapsed at school a few days earlier) was piped into the sanctuary. The other half of the huge sanctuary was filled with people who have experienced the seemingly incessant stream of deaths of young people which has plagued their parish for the past three months. My spiritual director was one of the priests presiding, and we had a meeting scheduled for late that afternoon, which was perhaps a good thing for both of us. I don't know about him, but I went straight to bed afterward.

My husband's father has been quite ill, but there has been much optimism for for him during the last couple of weeks. However, on Saturday morning my sister-in-law called to say that things had suddenly gone downhill. We got there a couple of hours before he died, surrounded by most of his family, and spent yesterday on funeral planning. I am home now for a brief day of organizing and cleaning and then back to my in-laws' home for at least a couple of days.

As we talked over the funeral, some dear family friends mentioned how much they had liked some of what we did at Josh's. I don't know how it is for other people, but for us it's as if he died this morning, and so it seems like all of these losses are happening at once.

I know I have moaned mightily about the overuse of Psalm 23 (a complaint echoed, to my surprise, by my mother-in-law yesterday), but in my Catholic ventures this past year I have become very fond of the version above. I seem to like it particularly this morning.