The Healing Journey

December 5, 2024

When Joe saw his friend Dina’s obituary, he thought back to the first time he had met her and her husband Angelo at lunch in Southbury, where they lived in a senior residence.

They spent the afternoon laughing and talking about mutual friends and wondered why they hadn’t met sooner. Angelo died shortly afterward, and Dina moved to Rhode Island with her daughter. They never got together again although they shared Christmas cards for many years. And now she was gone. She was a devout and faithful woman, her obituary said. She was one of the kindest, most generous and friendly people he had ever met. When Angelo died, they had been married for 60 years.

“Dina loved to sing and read,” her obituary said. “She was an excellent cook, baker and plant-grower, but had a famously bad sense of direction. She loved flowers and trees and birds, good stories and old movies. She was honest, with a great sense of humor, and she was funny herself. Nobody laughed harder than Dina when she used the wrong word for something — and that happened plenty of times. Dina had a deep Catholic faith and was devoted to Angelo, who died in 2016. They were married 60 years.”

When he finished, he remembered a gift she had given him that day at lunch. It was a prayer shawl she had made for him. And all the while she knit it, with different shades of yarn, from blue to gray and purple and white, she was praying for him. He went into this drawer and found it and realized years later that a woman who was a living saint had prayed for him. And he whispered, “Dina, remember us in Heaven.”

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