Saying See You Later

Separation

I never thought that you would go away and never come back in person. Yet, here it is. The time has arrived that moves us forward. You have left this earth of sorrow and conflict. Because as St. Paul talked about, you have run the race, I feel nothing but peace and an ache in my chest.

The ache is an emptiness where I stored your physical heart. Your heart was part of my heart when you took that heart of stone that I arrived carrying like so many of my bags. You took it away and shared your tender human heart. You had Mary’s heart.

Now, you are with Our Lord and we share that. Before, we shared nothing because I was like a wild beast. Now, we share the peace of Christ. I am so grateful to you for that. You just gave so much of yourself for us. The biggest thing that you showed me was that you could be broken, too.

Anxiety

I shattered our hearts by turning into the thing that I had been. Repeatedly, I left you alone, made promises only to break them and in effect lied to you. I was sure that I would make it up to you next week, and next week and, then there was always something more important than our relationship. You always waited. Until you didn’t.

I always feared that you would give up on me. But what is funny is that you couldn’t. It just wasn’t in you to give up on others. There were so many people who saw you every week and to whom you brought peace and sustenance. You brought the joy of Christ to their sick beds, their homes and even to their places of business. You brought decency into one of the most indecent places and taught me what dignity truly means. It doesn’t mean dignified all the time.

I arrived there making small sculptures of the nurse’s cloth tape and left over paint. You visited me because you had to and I was so happy. For once, I wasn’t someone’s wife or girlfriend or whatever, but me. Just me. I was an artist you said. You gave me a pen for my dignity and a Bible for my language. I had to supply the paper.

I have lost all my paper and all that I have left is a Chinese Fortune that talks about integrity. It says that integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is looking. It’s the middle of the night and I am celebrating the fact that I will have plenty to do for the rest of my life. Tomorrow, I will exercise and go to confession. Your physical eyes will never look on me again with that specific hatred and your mouth will never say again that you don’t believe me. Now, that you have gone on, there is no more anxiety because I know that you now know that I never lied to you. You were the closest thing to a father that I ever had. How could I?

The Promise

Christ Jesus promised that whoever believed in him would never die, that who ever asked God for something in His Name would receive it, so now I pray to God in Jesus Name to allow me to be able to do his will without vacillation or inconstancy. I ask to be able fully confident that I can do this, not because I am somehow extraordinary but because He is.

I know that I will see you again. I have that faith. There are millions of stars in that sky. Billions of light souls leading our way through the stormy seas of this world. I see your light and am so content. There are so many people that you helped and led and you are still shining. Now, you know that when I told you that I loved you, I meant it as Scholastica to Benedict. She braved a storm to spend a day with him.

Let them say what they will. You taught me how to be. See you later, bro.