On a whim…

Remembering Joe on All Saints Day, and finding again that love doesn’t end — it just changes direction.

I’ve come to think of remembrance as its own kind of liturgy — a way of practicing presence until the veil thins. This reflection began that way, on a cold November afternoon in Somerville light.

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The sky was that pale, unforgiving white that settles over New England in November.

All Saints Day — a day built for remembering.

The calendar had lined itself up with Joe’s funeral again, so we went as a family — bundled against the wind — to stand a few minutes by his grave. Nothing ceremonial, just the old discipline of showing up. Letting silence say what words can’t.

Time has thinned the noise around my grief, and what’s left is simple: I miss him.

Joe wasn’t just my brother-in-law. He was a gatekeeper, a protector, and, in time, a friend forged in the odd fraternity of honor.

I can still see that first dinner — the table at Applebee’s, the air thick with steak sauce and family laughter, the eve of my marriage to his sister so near it made me clumsy. Joe watched me across the table with that steady, measuring gaze of his, as if weighing the man about to marry the woman he’d sworn to protect.

When the toasts ended, he drew me aside. His voice was low, stripped of charm.

“Listen closely,” he said. “If you ever hurt her — if you ever cause her unnecessary pain — just hear this: I know people,” his Somerville, Massachusetts accent making the words unmistakable.

It was half threat, half blessing. I understood both. Beneath the warning was love in its purest form — love that guards as fiercely as it gives. To marry her was to step inside a circle of unbreakable loyalty, and I never forgot it.

Years later, at his funeral, I met some of those people — men of quiet, intimidating bearing, the kind who keep their promises long after the one who made them is gone. By then Joe and I had settled into something easy and real. I think he knew that, too.

This year, under that washed-out sky, we stood again — his widow leaning on his son. The wind had that dry, papery sound only graveyards know. In the stillness the daughter turned to me.

“Uncle,” she said softly, “would you offer a prayer?”

I wasn’t ready. I haven’t been a public pray-er for years. The pulpit gave way long ago to the desk; spoken faith turned to written faith. My ministry now is metaphor — the quiet sermon that arrives on paper. But her eyes asked for something I couldn’t withhold.

I closed mine and waited. A recent poem of mine surfaced — about a man lost in the snowy woods of New England. He’s wandering, the trail gone, when he finds a doorway standing by itself among the pines. Out of place, yet warm light spilling from within. He doesn’t know where it leads, only that he’s drawn to it.

That doorway has become my theology: the life beyond this one as passage, not conclusion. A threshold that feels strange and familiar all at once.

So I prayed. Not a sermon, just a few honest lines. I called on the Almighty — the only name wide enough — and gave thanks for Joe: for his humor, his loyalty, his steadfast love. I invited each of us to speak to God in our own language. Gratitude more than request. Then silence again.

When I opened my eyes, the cold seemed to ease. Joe’s widow lifted her face, her hands trembling on her cane. What passed between us wasn’t thanks but recognition. For an instant she seemed to feel him near — the warmth behind that imagined doorway brushing against the November air.

I felt it too — that quiet pulse that isn’t sorrow so much as longing, the need to stay connected, to trust that love alters shape but not direction.

And under that pale sky, I understood that this, too, is prayer:

  to live awake to presence,

  to remember without grasping,

  to keep watch for the door that opens, quietly, toward home.

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DW, November 1 · All Saints Day

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