I do so many weddings that I barely notice anymore how emotional they can become. I am usually thinking four or five steps ahead so that everything in the ceremony goes flawlessly. (Yes, I am a control freak. Deal with it.) Last weekend, I did a wedding of the daughter of two of my friends, who also happens to be one of my favorite people in all the world. Her name is Haley. It was a joyous, wonderful occasion. But at one
point, I almost lost it. And Fr. Kevin, the control freak, hates losing it. In the petitions for Mass, which we now clumsily call Universal Prayer, the bride added a prayer for a friend of hers who was killed in a car accident in 2010 along a lonely stretch of Augusta Bottoms Road in October of their Junior year of high school. That petition caught me totally off guard. I had to fight back my tears. Ella was a bright and sunny young woman. Her accident was eerily like my own car accident two years prior in 2008: slipping off the road to the right, over correcting to the left, tumbling down an embankment. Life is haphazard. I walked away without a scratch, she plunged into a pond and perished. During my thirty years at Borgia, four students died during their high school years. The first one was in 1990, a car crash took the life of lovely young woman named Christa Thompson. The second was a boating accident at the Lake of the Ozarks over the summer, another lovely young woman named Erin Pruneau. Last year, a troubled young man, named Jack took his own life. Each of those deaths were difficult and painful. Brutal reminders of how fragile and precious each individual’s life is.
But what made Ella’s death especially heartbreaking was the fact that her father, her aunt and her cousin were all on the faculty at Borgia. This was a tragedy that cut deeply into the fabric of what we liked to call our Borgia Family. It hurt, bad. Nevertheless, Ella’s funeral was an amazing celebration of her life and in our hope of the Resurrection. I had the honor to preach and I talked about the process of grieving and how it takes feeling, memory, trust and love. I ended my homily with a poem I found which used the analogy of a ship setting out to sea for the experience of death. It looks from our perspective that the ship, the loved one, is gone but then it concludes with this hopeful line:
And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices
ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”
That line is such a powerful reminder of our eternal destiny and how faith, hope and love are vital parts of
our lives.
Father Kevin