From December 6, 2014

The traffic light changed as I drove up the street approaching the assisted living facility where my father had spent the last six months of his life. William, my three – going on 27 – year old grandson had been quiet in his car seat behind me.
“Where’s Great Papa?”
Did you ever feel like a lightning bolt has hit your spine and is traveling through your upper body?
“He’s in heaven”, a quick and knowingly inadequate response to his question. William has the same questions… questions without answers that we all have. 
There was quiet in the back after my answer and I silently hoped that my response would satisfy him, all the while knowing that it would not.
Then, after a moment of reflective silence: “What do they eat in heaven?”
When William was two he had a baby brother Benjamin. There was a great deal of fanfare leading up to his becoming a “big brother” and when Benjamin was born William in his “Big Brother” shirt posed with his new healthy beautiful little brother. 
Benjamin died at 18 days of age and suddenly… with no explanations… no more big brother talk… and most significantly no more little brother.
William is now almost four and has been nibbling around the edges of this dilemma: “Mommy what happens to babies who go to heaven before their mommies and daddies? Who takes care of them? ”
William is now a big brother again with one-year old Ian as his little brother.
More recently: “Mommy do I have a another brother?”
We’re all inadequate to answer William’s questions because we don’t know how. None of us know what they eat in heaven and for many of us life after death is more of a hope than an assurance. 
How do we explain the fact and inevitability of death to a pure and innocent child when we have no understanding of it ourselves?
As adults, a dead eighteen day old baby is something we experience, grieve, accept and move on with our lives; an occurrence that is unfathomable even at the deepest level of spiritual or religious insight. 
Our experience of death, as we know it, is from this side of the grass. Soon enough, after that fleeting interval we call a “lifetime”, we’ll have a perspective from the other side of the grass… or not. 
The fact of your mortality weighs heavily on you as it does on all of us. The fact of death is less troubling then not knowing the reason we live.
“What do they eat in heaven?”and “What happens to babies who go to heaven before their mommies and daddies?” are legitimate questions for all of us, real questions articulated through the thought process of a young child.
I guess that in heaven they can eat whatever they want. 

Oil wells and oil… religion and spirituality.  
Much like a drilling platform set in the ocean exploring for oil, organized religion is the platform through which many seek to drill down in search of inner spirituality. For many of us then, religion is merely the surface manifestation of (as well as the means to develop) a transcendent inner life of the soul. 
The oil derek is a means to an end in that it facilitates the search for oil and is the vehicle for bringing it out of the ground. When you see people working on an oil rig, you’re aware that they’re looking for oil. When you see people in church you assume that they’re there to seek their inner, core spirituality. 
Religion can facilitate the search for the spirituality that lies deep within each of us… spirituality, the awareness and experience of that which is beyond words to describe and to which we owe our existence and purpose in life. 
Just as we wouldn’t confuse the oil rig with the oil though, we shouldn’t confuse religion with spirituality. 
The sincere practice of religion, any religion, can for many be an instrument, a means to attain the deep inner awareness, realization, and self actualization of ones role in this ongoing and unfolding act of creation. 
For others religion acts merely as a distraction from that search, an end in itself rather than a means to inner spirituality. 
The Buddhist Koan that we should not confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself may help us here: we should not confuse religion with spirituality. 
If we limit our search for “god” to the various religious beliefs, scriptures and rituals we will likely be deceived disillusioned or disappointed. Developing a surface belief and reliance solely on the oil wells of religion will limit the growth of our inner far deeper spirituality. 
We must drill down to the core of our being, the wellspring of our existence and that place to which we all yearn to go. 
A belief system and ritual can be the surface supports that help us drill down to the reservoir of spirituality at the core of our existence; they should not however be a distraction from that exploration, that journey, and become an end in themselves. 

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You’ve heard the phrase about “being one with the universe”… to me in the sixties and seventies that used to bring to mind visions of kids in jeans, sandals and tie-dye shirts sitting around passing a joint. 

The concept of living a life that embraces and reflects the natural rhythms of existence sort of evolved for me as I lived my own journey through to maturity.  

Today as I rocked my one year old grandson on my lap, I again experienced that sensation… the feeling that this was the center of the universe for me. Nico looked at me with his huge saucer shaped baby blue eyes, fighting the sleep that I think he knew he’d eventually succumb to, taking me in, enveloping me body and soul as I did him. 

A seventy-three year old grandfather, locked into a mind meld with the son of his own son. The moment was primal, beyond articulation in words. As we rocked slowly back and forth I sang to him, stopping when his eyes would close and resuming when he’d lazily open them. His was a losing battle and I hope that at some point in his life, long after I’m gone, that he’ll replicate the experience with his own grandchild, and feel as I did, that he’s one with the universe, one with the child of his child, a multigenerational experience of life. 

When I think of all the wonderful people who have passed through my life. I sometimes wonder if they got as much out of knowing me as I got out of knowing them.
Obviously, there are some exceptions to this experience. I have run into an occasional jerk; these are people who for whatever reason were not in harmony with me, nor I with them; whether that was my fault or their fault, we would have been better off had we never met or interacted. Though I refer to them as “jerks”, they probably had the same impression of me.
I guess the basic premise is that our lives revolve around each of us individually. The rest of the world is seen and evaluated through the prism of our own individuality. I guess that in this regard it’s not inaccurate to say that I’m the center of my own universe, as you’re the center of yours. 
I think of the fulfillment I experience out of relating with my wife my children and my grandchildren. I hope that each of them gets as much out of our relationship as I do. 
Especially for those who have gone before me, I hope that knowing and interacting with me was a positive experience for them on their journeys through life.
In a mature adult relationship, the emphasis should be not on what the other can do for me, but on what I can do for that person. 
I would hope that the people I, through fate, interact with would come away from our interaction more fulfilled because of that experience. 
For ongoing relationships we should try to make each day we interact with someone the best day of their lives. 

Repotting some root-bound plants, I was sitting in my back yard when he hopped up to within three feet of me. “You should be afraid of me” I said, and the baby bunny just sat there looking at me with the curiosity of innocence and unknowing that the newborn of all species possess. I don’t think that he (or she… I’m not really sure how to tell from a distance) was more than four inches or so long from the tip of its nose to the tip of its cottontail. 
We didn’t commune together for a very long time, though for that short period we were fully engaged in visually examining each other. I must have been a new phenomenon for it to behold. I on the other hand was reluctant to play Mr. McGregor to his Peter Rabbit. 
“Look little rab,” I said, “please don’t eat my lettuce.”
My bunny friend just looked at me, probably hearing the sound of human speech for the first time in its life. 
Presently it unhurriedly hopped off through the stairs and under our deck off the back of the house, leaving me to digest our brief but unusual encounter. 
I hope the little fellow goes on to a fully productive and fulfilling life as lives in his species are won’t to go. Though, especially given his naiveté, I wouldn’t be surprised if his life were shortened at the claws of a cat, a hawk, or even a fox in our built up suburban neighborhood. I hope he stays out of the street though; that might be his greatest peril. 
He and I both share the environment we inhabit together. I did discover a rabbit hole on my front lawn last year, maybe the entrance to his own den, and felt then that its presence was no less entitled to be there than the house my wife and I live in. 
Though I’m apparently higher on the food chain, and as long as we can show some respect for each other’s space, I suppose we can live together, the little rab and me. 

I did, however, move most of the pots of lettuce off the ground and onto a table. 

July, 2016

It’s warm today and I’m sitting on our patio beside my sleeping three year old grandson, wondering about the meaning to life and contemplating the concept of eternity, an exercise that a friend of mine finds particularly problematic. 

In front of me a series of little brown birds, Sparrows, I think they are, keep flying in and out of the nest they’ve built in our downstairs bathroom vent. They don’t seem overly concerned with the prospects of living some sort of life in eternity, only in doing what comes naturally to them and their species. (Including defecating all over our patio)

Does it come naturally to us to be concerned with what happens to us when we die? We’re blessed… or cursed with the power of reason. Unfortunately that God-given power has limits and it can only take us so far before it’s boxed in… corralled… limited. 

This “gift” of reason ultimately leads us down a dead end trail when it presents us with questions without answers. Syllogisms, verbal constructs of all nature… math tricks… word tricks, all designed to tempt us to lead us on to the edge, to the fence… but not beyond.  

But wait… Is there no exit out of this spiritual and intellectual trap? Is this the same phenomenon we each faced prior to birth in utero? In utero we grew to escape the limitations of our existence through birth, physically breaching the corral that kept us limited in form similar to how our reason and our mortality box us in and limit us in this phase of our existence. 

As we pass from life… escape beyond reason… is it likely that death is the portal, similar to birth, that takes us to yet another manifestation of our existence? Maybe my limited powers of reasoning that posit this scenario will outgrow the limitations of this life in similar manner as I eventually outgrew the bounds of living in utero. 

Will there be another iteration of my existence along a never ending road that might be called eternity. 

The Sparrows just do their thing, continually searching for food, building a nest and bringing up their young. 
Oh… to be a Sparrow, devoid of this trap we call reason, concerned only with the continuation of our species, ignorant and unconcerned about eternity. 

Father Mike our pastor motioned my wife Barbara and myself over as we were standing in the back of the church after the eight o’clock Mass chatting with our parish Deacon. 

Thinking that he wanted to speak privately with Bob, I said something like: “OK; we’ll move on and let you guys talk.”
“No Dan… hang on… I wanted to talk with you and Barbara. Mary was talking with Sister Margaret yesterday who told her that she has pancreatic cancer ”

“Oh boy… not good news…”

“Mary said that Sister doesn’t want any invasive treatments…”
“Thanks Father. We’ll try to call Margaret later today.”
Barbara and I go back a iong way with Sister Margaret. When our daughter, our first child who’s now 42, was about five years old my wife had a “come to Jesus” talk with me. I had stopped going to church when I was a sophomore in college and had been MIA for about fifteen years. 
“You know… you’re a role model for this kid now and I think you should get your ass back to church.”

The idea didn’t sound offensive to me; I had tried to take my parenting duties seriously for five years, even to the point of using cloth diapers, instead of disposable because they were better for the baby… no matter how many times I had jabbed the damn safety pin into my thumb. 

Giving the kid a religious upbringing did seem to be something a person serious about parenting would do, so I agreed and the following week the three of us, with her two year old brother went to the parish’s family Mass. 

Agnostic that I had become, I was scornful about the post Vatican II banners and guitars when I dropped back in. But, I did enjoy the social get-together after Mass with other young parents All of this, I had learned, was being organized by our pastoral associate, a nun named Sister Margaret. 

As comfortable as I was about being back in the fold, I was still apprehensive about how to handle my fifteen year absence should anyone find out about it. 

Then it happened. She came up to me one morning while I was sipping on a hot cup of coffee. 

“Hello Dan.”

“Hi Sister” I said gulping my mouthful of coffee and nearly burning my throat in the process, how’s it going?”

“It’s going well Dan.” spoken with the clarity and slow cadence that nuns frequently exhibited in those days. 
“It’s going well, but I wanted to ask you something.”

“Oh… Oh”
“We’re short of Lectors and I was wondering if you’d be a lector.”

I wished that the redness in my face could be interpreted as being a result of the hot coffee. I was sure that my confrontation and exposure were at hand. 
“Well Sister… I… ah… I’m not sure how to say this but… I… I…”
I was sinking fast and sure they’d run me out of church on a rail and I’d be fortunate if they didn’t tar and feather me as well. 
“I… I… ah… well… I’ve been away from the Church for awhile… about fifteen years… and I’m just starting to get back.”
OK… now it comes: “Get out of here you heathen scum and don’t darken this door… ever again!!” The wrath of an Angry God would surely be poured out on me through the instrument of this Nun. 

“Oh, isn’t that wonderful. Welcome home!”
“Huh?” Not the reception I had imagined, though, once back in the fold I became 

in sequence a lector, Eucharistic minister, president of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, parish council president, member of the choir on the pre-Cana team and ultimately on the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council. It was like collecting ecclesial merit badges and by now we had two sons as siblings to our daughter. Sister Margaret stayed in our parish over this time and things were chugging along famously until the sexual abuse crisis broke. Attendance dropped, the Archdiocese wanted to close our parish which, coincidentally sits on twenty acres of land about a fifteen minute ride to the center of down-town Boston. 
By this time Sister was in semi-retirement and living with other nuns in an apartment in a Boston suburb and we were in “vigil,” occupying our parish church 24/7. She was never far from my heart and especially when I along with my future Deacon friend Bob would spend Thursday evenings sleeping

In the center aisle of the upstairs church. 
Eventually Sister went back to the mother house outside of Pittsburgh and we went on with our own lives, keeping in sporadic touch with her, after all if it wasn’t for her I’d still have been in my adolescent agnostic phase. 
Now our kids were grown and out of our house with kids of their own and we took a couple of trips to Pittsburgh to meet her. The visits were wonderful, both inspiring and heart-warming.
We flew down to see her last, this fall, her eyesight failing and resident in the “Old Nuns’ Home,” she was as chipper as ever as we reminisced over times past. We traded stories about how our lives were going, pictures of grandchildren that she marveled at – whether she could see them or not I’ll never know. She was 98 now and we promised to come back in two years for her birthday party.  
That was six months ago. 
“Hi Sister. It’s Dan; I have you on speaker with Barbara.” 
We talked for about fifteen minutes, much of the conversation about how she felt about her impending death. When it’s time and the dying process leading up to that. Essentially she said that “When the Lord wants me, he’ll take me. I’ve lived my life and I’ll be ready.” Not a tinge of fear, regret or remorse. 
If anyone should be ready to live up to their mortality and face their god, it should be Sister Margaret, a spiritual mentor and support to very many others besides myself. 
Her life and impending demise raises the question for all of us: “How will I die?” Will I go kicking and screaming to the end or will I accept the fact of my mortality as the imprimatur on a life well lived, the explanation point on my journey through time and space, as I prepare to join the billions of my fellow human beings who have trod through this world and left it… departed when the number of their days, hours and minutes had run its course?
Having lived into my seventh decade I’ve experienced the death of others from my 94 year old father to my 18 day old grandson, each of which was different both by the length of their lives as well as by the manner of their deaths. For the one, much like Sister Margaret, death was the capstone finishing a life that had run its course, sad but neither inappropriate nor unexpected. For the other, struggling for every breath, his little body fighting to survive and losing that fight inch by inch, a death of tragic proportion for those who loved him. 
There is no formula for living and dying and whether we realize it or not the face of death is never far removed from our lives. Your death and mine could come at any instant through any cause. 
Coming face to face with death, my own mortality, is something I frequently do throughout the day, not in a dour or mournful sense that I’m facing the certainty that I will lose all that I have, the richness and fulfillment of my life, the wonderful people I am related to either by blood or through communication, but rather in a joyful and positive sense that makes me aware and deeply appreciative of all of this today, knowing that it will not be like this indefinitely. 
If instead of reveling in the joy of my life today, I focus on its terminus, I’ll lose that joy, the joy of every minute, the joy of being alive and part of god’s creation this very instant
Although, I acknowledge that not every individual moment of my life has been joyful and that in the future other moments may be as painful as some that have gone before them. 
Besides Sister Margaret, I’ve encountered others who were experiencing the end stages of their lives with grace and dignity. My cousin Susan, dying of brain cancer wrote out cheerful messages on Christmas cards, knowing that they would be delivered a month or so after she had died. 
My father, knowing that his death would occur in a matter of hours or days at most regaled our family, gathered at his hospital death bed to say goodbye, with stories of his youth, happy to entertain us all and seemingly oblivious for that brief period period of time of the fate that shortly awaited him. 
When we had all said our goodbyes and people were filing out I asked my dying father if there was anything he would like. He responded: “a strawberry sundae.”

I got him that followed by a chaser of vanilla and chocolate ice cream. He died two days later. 
My mother’s heart stopped beating and she was revived. I went to visit her in the hospital and she told me not to worry because she was feeling no pain. At one point we had taken our three young children to visit her in the intensive care unit of the Lahey Clinic when she arrested in front of the children. Again they revived her and she had us bring the children in so that they wouldn’t be afraid. She didn’t fear death and when she again arrested for the third time in a matter of months, it did, this time conquer her, unafraid though she was. 
And, finally my aunt and uncle, Veronica Euphemia, Walkowska Gentilucci and her husband, Joe Gentilucci, as I’ve referred to him in the past, the noblest of all Romans. 
Ronnie was my godmother, as loving and giving a human being as ever lived. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a short time to live. I went to visit her in the hospital “to cheer her up” I thought to myself. I tried to talk but broke down crying. “Don’t be sad” she said to me; “everyone dies; this is just my time. You’ll get your turn but right now it’s my time. I have a wonderful husband and a beautiful family. It’s all right Danny… it’ll be all right…”
She died shortly after that. 
My uncle Joe went on in his grief, supported by my cousins, his children and their children till suffering from kidney disease and worn out by dialysis he terminated that procedure knowing that he could not live without it. 
So those are the stories of the people I know who bravely and matter-of-factly faced their impending death. Come to think of it I don’t recollect anyone I’ve known who went out screaming and kicking. 
I guess the question we each face, you and I, is how we will face our demise… as an irrefutable matter of fact, an experience to be undertaken, the obverse side of the life coin with birth on the other, or an undertaking to be fought bitterly, angrily and with futility. 
Our good friend and my spiritual mentor Sister Margaret is undertaking the dying process as I write this. Her experience is one of dignity and grace, a model for all of us. “When the Lord wants me he’ll take me. I’ve lived my life and I’ll be ready.”
We should all be so fortunate, prepared and accepting. 

Religion grows out of imagination and fantasy whereas spirituality grows out of acceptance and openness. Religion is dogmatic and based on externals whereas spirituality is free form and based on introspection. It is true that for some adherents their religious beliefs can lead to spirituality, but many others remain mired, as it were, at the level of dogmatism, never transcending that stop… never opening themselves to their god within. 

June 16, 1996. He was a handsome young Marine and his friend a Naval aviator, College chums, they had graduated together from Brown University before going off to war in the service of their country. Leaving their young brides behind, they each had found their way to the South Pacific theater of operations in World War II, one as the commander of an anti-aircraft battery, the other as the pilot of a torpedo plane. 

Their’s was the common fate of many young men of that time who were called to war: lonely, probably afraid, separated from the women in their lives who were waiting anxiously for their return. They each did return to start their lives and have families, find careers and look to the future together. 

Fifty-two years later they were standing together on a comfortable summer’s night, the Naval aviator supporting the handsome not-so-young Marine so he would not trip as he shuffled across the floor, his feet controlled by the same Alzheimer’s disease that created the fog of confusion in his mind. 

There were seven of us, all dinner guests of the widow who had been part of the group of three couples who had gone to college together and who had reconnected when the madness of war was over. They had been given the gift of growing old together and though their best days were behind them you couldn’t tell that by their attitude or their conversation.

My wife and I were honored to be in their presence. 

This is from October 2, 2001
I had lunch today with my son Sean. It was one of those magic times where you live in the moment and try to capture the moment in your memory. We had shared one of those glorious fall days that make New England the only place to live.
Watching him grow into a great bear of a man, a good gentle kid, kind and compassionate… that strikes a chord of pride, fulfillment and satisfaction deep within me at a level that is beyond articulation in words.  
It’s not a possessory feeling; we can never possess our children, only guide them for those few short years when they’re entrusted to our care. Rather, it’s a visceral feeling probably coming from some strand of DNA that we all possess. It’s a feeling of pride and love and contentment that we’re related by a bond of flesh: son and father as well as by a bond of love that permeates my whole being.
Many years ago a neighbor of mine with grown children,then at the present age of my own children,mentored me on the joys and pitfalls of parenting and concluded by saying that there must be some innate satisfaction, some inner reward in having children, otherwise we wouldn’t go through all of the associated pains of parenting. He was right… I know what those joys are and how they get deeper and better as we age together.
I was fully alive that wonderful moment at lunch today with my son Sean and the memory of that lunch will, I’m sure, sustain me when I face days in the future that I rather would not.

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