You know it will happen -- sooner or later. Knowing it doesn't prevent,  because it will happen, sooner or later. You know that from before you can remember knowing it. Maybe it will come with the phone call that interrupts you from a good book and an easy chair to hear a stranger's voice telling you that the plane has disappeared off the radar somewhere in the mountains -- or maybe it will slide into the corner of your eye as the sudden appearance of the two steady-paced military men getting out of their official car and starting up the sidewalk toward your front door -- or maybe it will come in the look on the doctor's face as he enters into the family waiting room and with no voice yet to tell you what you try not to know you'll hear -- or maybe it will be in the feel of that lump on your breast (my God -- where did that come from? I never noticed that before). Sooner or later it will come to you, and to me, and to all of us -- come like a cold and deep blade that slices into your heart's blood, and then your soul floods with a taste of a terrible wretchedness that you can't spit out, no matter how hard you try. And all the talk of doctors so often having the wrong diagnosis, or of your child having died bravely in defense of our country, or of the policemen probably mistaking your daughter with the other girl who looks like her and your own girl being safe just this minute at school -- or of God just not possibly allowing this to happen to one so young and so good -- all that talk can't smother the strong and surging and clarifying sense of a careless and pointless wasting of things wildly precious to our hearts. We have all felt it, or we will, sooner or later. Because that's where we all meet: in our desperate aloneness -- our desperate but shared aloneness.

My mother, my father -- both from what we call natural causes; my dear and life loving and bright-spirited son Colin and my creative and lovely and in-all-things fascinated granddaughter Annmarie, both by accidental causes: they are all gone from me, and the loss I can never made up, nor explain away the seeming injustice to the two young ones dead long, long before their time. Friends have been most dear at those times, coming with hugs and pats and love and prayers and mute good will -and casseroles and even gifts. Lovely, lovely: that's the only word I can think of in the fullness of my gratitude. No, not "closure": I hate the word. There's no "closure" for us in cases like these. Benediction: cherishing: letting be. I prefer those. Yet I don't mean to speak of myself, but rather of better things, better people. On Mother's Day this year, my son Bill's daughter, Annmarie, was killed, at age 23. Oh the wild wretchedness that struck into us all. Yet in the funeral mass, and at the burial of her ashes in Bernheim Forest there was a lovely answering to something deeper than grief in my soul. My son Bill -- his voice steady and clear across the urgings and short breaks of grief -- spoke among the mourners of the child he loved so much -- and of the faith and the hope and the promise that it was well with her soul now. There he stood under the old tree where her ashes were to be scattered, knowing his own hand would spread them: and he stood torn by the searing grief that he somehow could bear -- could bear because such crushing grief had been borne by another long ago, borne for him, for us, and forever.

Bill had made up a little story for Annmarie, a parable, several weeks before her death; and she, with her fine artistic skills, was going to illustrate it. Now he read the parable, for her, for us, as the rain fell steadily over the landscape and across his pages -- like tears, I imagined. And he stood there in that rain, reading his words, asking us to illustrate the story in our imaginations, as she was to have with pen and paper. But most in my imagination was what my eyes brought to my spirit: his standing there in the summer storm, reading, recalling, pronouncing a benediction and a trust -and living a strength that came like sun after a storm, like a wondrous healing after a grievous wound, like Easter after winter. These two sons -- my own son, there in the rain, and that son of God so long ago hung up for everyone to see -- they suddenly struck into me a spirit-cleansing trust, a living faith and hope, a shared love. Myself, a father, now an old man in that same storm -- I became as a child, grateful and awestruck at such overcoming, at such steady, such hard-won and redeeming love.

At times, all of us huddle in a world-woe, just as we all dance at times in a world-joy. And we are not alone then: no, not alone. Someone better and stronger and truer and even more deeply feeling is with us, and at times, I believe, even in us. That happens, too, sooner or later, and we think it has suddenly come to find us when it has been there all the while, even in our sudden delights, even in our smothering griefs. Sooner or later -- sooner or later, we remember that Presence is the one thing that is abiding, unperishing, and with us -- with you and with me -- always.

Bill Campbell