Eddie & Family
Growing up I didn’t realize how unique it was that my parents came from large, extended families and also built a community full of rich friendships.
I have to give a lot of this credit to my dad, Ed. I think his favorite place to be or thing to do is to be part of a team. As a successful athlete, my dad thrived in team settings. Whether it was being a three-sport starter at Iona Prep or as a recruited linebacker at Villanova University, he loved to be on a team.
Beyond gaining physical endurance or valuing commitment and discipline, these teams gifted my dad lifelong friendships. Over the years, I’ve met numerous of his friends - there is Bob, a grade school friend from Westchester County and Terry, where their friendship started at Iona Prep and continued on to Villanova and Jonn, who I hear referred to as Johnny Touchdown (Villanova ‘72).
These guys have accumulated over five decades of friendship. Which means they knew my dad as a young man, they knew him when he met my mom, and they have witnessed my mom and dad build their own ‘team’, established in May of 1980 and later with their three children in ‘86, ‘88 and ‘90.
It’s so true that there is nothing like an old friend, so to see a group of my dad’s oldest friends walk into my mom’s wake was so special. On such a hard day, it made my dad light up. They began pulling out photos from the sixties and seventies, some photos even from the summer my parents met!
As Iona Prep and Villanova University graduates, his friends have deeply rooted faith. John left a note for “Eddie & Family” the night of the wake. In his handwritten letter, John included a printout of a sermon by Father Michael of Cabrini University - it was a sermon on death that was delivered on All Souls Day, almost twenty years ago. Since then, John has shared this copy with friends and family in hopes it could offer a “profound sense of consolation; knowing that Nancy’s life is certainly not over, just changed.”
My favorite part of this sermon is when Father Michael references a poem that people have found to be helpful at the time of loss. It reads:
I am standing upon the shore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she is only a ribbon of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says “She’s gone!”
Gone where? I ask. Gone from my sight that is all.
For she is just as large in size as when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.
And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She’s gone”, there are others ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!” and that is dying.
Thank you for this beautiful message, John. It is a great reminder of our faith and the belief that our loved ones are not out of existence and are just out of our sight.