My Dear Friends,
There is something really lonely about losing someone we love.
The world keeps moving like nothing has happened, like I’m the only one who feels this searing pain, all alone, just me. The sun still rises and sets. People go to work. Children laugh. Traffic moves through the streets. But for those of us left behind, something has radically changed forever. It’s as if the world doesn’t know or care what I am feeling. It’s like no one else can fully understand the emptiness I’m carrying inside my broken heart.
I see the empty chair at the table. I hear the familiar voice in my mind that I will never hear again with my ears. There is their telephone number I cannot bring myself to erase from my contacts. And sometimes, without warning, a song, a photograph, or even a familiar smell brings someone I love back into my heart so vividly that I am shocked at the power of the emotion that comes rushing over me.
That is what love does. It remembers. It never forgets.
St. Francis of Assisi had an extraordinary way of speaking about death. He called her “Sister Death.” In his beautiful work, The Canticle of the Creatures, St. Francis praises God for “our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living person can escape.”
Strange? Maybe not. Sister Death. Not the enemy. Not a stranger. Not some terrifying force waiting in the shadows. But like a sister, a sibling. It’s an odd name for someone who causes so much heartache, pain and tears.
St. Francis was not naïve about death. He knew its pain. He knew the sorrow of separation. He knew that death could break our hearts. Yet, even as his own life was coming to an end, he welcomed Sister Death as part of God’s creation and trusted that she would lead him not to an end, but to a passage, not into emptiness, but into the arms of the One he had loved and served, a homecoming.
For most of us, Sister Death is not someone we welcome but rather try to avoid. She takes our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters, our spouses, our friends, and sometimes, heartbreakingly, our children.
And she leaves us with something we never quite know what to do with: an enormous amount of love for someone who is no longer physically here to receive it.
But maybe that love is not really lost.
I believe it lives in the kindness we learned from our mother, the courage we inherited from our father, the laughter of a dear friend, or the lessons of someone who believed in us when we could not believe in ourselves.
Those we have loved become part of who we are. Their lives continue to touch the world through our touch. Lives can change from the love we learned from them as we pass it on to others. And then, one day we realize that the people we have lost are still doing good in this world—through us.
On All Souls’ Day, the Church invites us to remember our beloved dead, to pray for them, and to entrust them to God’s mercy.
Join me and think of someone Sister Death has taken from your life. Remember their face. Hear their voice. Then, remember one beautiful moment you both shared.
Now, rather than feeling only the sadness of losing them, thank God for the gift they were in your life.
Maybe you’ll find yourself smiling through your tears. I do.
And I always wonder – what if the people we have been missing are the very ones waiting to welcome us home? And maybe all this time missing them is only the time between our last hug and the next one?
Maybe that’s why St. Francis called her Sister Death, because he understood something we forget:
Sister Death doesn’t come to take our love. She leads us to Love itself.
May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace, and may perpetual light shine upon them,
Amen.
Fr. David Convertino, OFM