Amy Welborn - Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope

Copyright 2012 by Amy Welborn

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Welborn, Amy.
Wish you were here: travels through loss and hope / Amy Welborn. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Welborn, AmyTravelItalySicily. 2. Sicily (Italy)Description and
travel. 3. WidowsBiography. 4. CatholicsBiography. I. Title.
BX4705.W4515A3 2012
282.092dc23
[B] 2011017119

eISBN: 978-0-307-71639-2

Cover design by Erin Schell
Cover photography Gary S. Chapman/Getty Images

v3.1

I N G RATEFUL M EMORY
M ICHAEL D UBRUIEL
19582009

To belong to him, to be called by him, is to be rooted in life
indestructible.

J OSEPH R ATZINGER , Eschatology

I RACED INTO THE BACKYARD JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT . Barefoot, in pajamas, I raised an empty brown pill bottle into the frigid Kansas darkness, swept it through the air, snapped the white disc of a lid on top, and then rushed back into the silent house, through the hall into my room, wrote on a slip of paper, and taped it to the bottle.

Airthe label saidfrom 1970.

The bottle still rattles around in a drawer in my fathers house, I think. I wouldnt throw it away if I ran across it. I wouldnt open it either. I dont know why. After all, its only air.

Heres what I remember from the first days of a February years later.

Sunday morning, we arrived at Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows parish so late that the only seats left were in the balcony. The first scripture reading was already happening by the time the five of us squeezed into the pew: me; my husband, Mike; our two little boys, Joseph and Michael; and Katie, my teenaged daughter from my first marriage.

The elderly pastorelfin in appearance, but resonant and dramatic in tone, always ending his sentences with a forceful, downward emphasis as if his words were screws he was forcing into a particularly tough boardbegan to preach from the sanctuary below us. In the Gospel that morning, Jesus had exorcised demons, but this would not be Monsignors subject. That would be death, of course.

Mike and I glanced at each other, amused. For in the five months we had attended Mass in the parish in our new city of Birmingham, Alabama, wed noticed this about the pastor: he liked to talk about death. No matter what the Gospel or the feast, it seemed, hed find his way to it: we are all going to die and there is no more important task than preparing for the certainty. No surprise, really. The man had spent his adult life ministering to the dying and the grieving, and he was in his late seventies himself. Death might be on his mind.

So that morning, nodding only briefly to Jesus and the demons, Monsignor moved on to a book hed been given about life-after-death experiences, and here we were again at deaths door, where he would talk to us about death andalways his most repeated pointbeing prepared for it.

So yes, I remember glancing at Mike and him glancing back and I remember sharing knowing, slight smiles at deaths introduction. And we settled back to listen, to pray, to think about work tomorrow, about the next book or article deadline, all of us up there in the balcony, an enormous bas-relief of that Lady of Sorrows cradling her dead son on the sanctuary wall behind the altar straight ahead of us, in plain view.

I remember Mike kneeling beside me after Communion. I remember because his posture was just a little different than normal. He usually looked ahead, or down at a misbehaving son, or just rested his chin on his folded hands. That morning, I remember, he knelt there, his face buried in his hands.

I remember that we went to Whole Foods after Mass and the boys picked out muffins and Katie got a croissant and Mike wandered off to look for something and he came back with a bag of loose tea because that was his latest thing. He said this was part of his renewed project of getting back into shape, a project interrupted by our move and the substantial pressures of his new job as director of evangelization (and the Pro-Life Office and the Family Life Office and the Campus Ministry Office and the Child Protection Office he seemed to add a job every month wed lived there) for the diocese. Mike was a man of routines, and this transition had messed with his running and lifting schedule in a big way. He wasnt in the worst shape hed ever been but neither was he in the best, so in this new year, hed get back on track.

For some reason, the tea would evidently be a part of that. I remember him walking down the aisle, cradling boxes of tea and a box of filters in his arms. The tea was green, because cutting down on caffeine would be part of the renewed health regime too.

And I remember him wrapping his arms around me at the Botanical Gardens a few hours later.

It was February, and although a few weeks later it would snow, that day it was mild enough for a walk in and through the various, quite diverse areas of that beautiful public space: the Japanese garden, hills rich with ferns, the greenhouse desertall of us except Katie, who stayed back at the apartment, swamped with homework.

I remember how when we had arrived and I was getting ready to close up and lock the car, I held my camera in my hand and debated whether I should bring it along or not.

I looked around at the still mostly dead, not quite budding vegetation. I considered the boys and Mike waiting for me near the fountain at the entrance. No, I decided. There will be another timelater, when theres more in bloom and more color. Well all come back then and there will be more pictures.

Yes, I remember how Mike grabbed me and hugged me in the middle of the Alabama Woodlands, boys tramping through the dry brown leaves thick across the ground around us. I remember how happy we wereecstatic, evento be back in the South, to never have to endure another northern Indiana winter, those months of backbreaking snow that just seemed to go on and on. Not here. Very soon, the dogwoods would be budding, the pink and violet azaleas would be blossoming, and we would return to walk in the gardens again, to see the colors, to relax in the certainty of new life gently but surely overwhelming the old. It would all happen, we were certain: another walk, another spring. Years of them, stretching ahead.

I remember the next evening, which was February 2, the Feast of the Presentation, a celebration of the day Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus to the Temple forty days after his birth as a symbolic offering of their child to God. I decided we would do a special prayer before dinner, so I printed out a very condensed version of Night Prayer: the last of the daily prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours. Now, that Night Prayer, or Compline, always includes a prayer called the Nunc Dimittis, words taken directly from the Gospel of Luke. An elderly man named Simeon met the Holy Family at the Temple that day and thanked God in words very appropriate for those minutes before we release ourselves to sleep: