The Old Folks At Home

Thoughts About Language And A Sense Of Place (That Place Being West Feliciana)

Joe Rosenthal (left) and Murphy Dreher Sr., St. Francisville, early 1990s

Made it back home to Budapest just in time to take a shower, get a little something to eat, and get on for the livestream of Paul VanderKlay’s Estuary group. I’m going to be one of the speakers at the Midwestuary in Chicago (August 22-24), along with John Vervaeke and some other smart folks. Boy, this is going to be a great conference. On the video livestream, we talked about theosis — and it wasn’t the Orthodox Christian (me) who brought it up, but the non-Christian cognitive scientist Vervaeke — and the concept of pilgrimage. This promises to be a great weekend of serious discussion about the Meaning Crisis, and fellowship. Buy your tickets here while they’re still available!

Gosh, do I have so much to share with y’all! I fly out early Monday morning, so I’ll put together a meaty newsletter to post before I head to the airport. But for today, let me share with you something that came to mind reflecting on conversations in Sardinia. That photo you see above is a screengrab from this short feature on a Louisiana Public Broadcasting show. The clip focuses on an afternoon gathering of some of the old men of the town, on a bench outside a local real estate office. The clip is labeled 1998, but that can’t be right, because my grandfather, Murphy Sr., died in 1994. Here it is:

All these old men are long gone, but they were dear old salts. You may find their accents hard to understand, because they are small-town, Deep South men whose accents were formed before television, and even before radio. Besides, Mr. Joe Rosenthal had a slight speech impediment, which, in addition to his thick West Feliciana Parish accent, makes his words sound like slurry. But then, they all spoke in such a rich patois that it’s a treat to hear. My grandfather — we called him “Dede,” pronounced “dee-dee,” short for Dad-dear — begins by saying, “We been here a long long time.” Mr. Davis Folkes, a powerful state legislator in his day, responds, “Not long enough, have we?” — but you have to listen closely to make out the words.

Listen to Mr. Joe talk about how safe things used to be: “Used to go to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, stay two or three days, leave the house wide open. Never had a key. I said I don’t ever want to have a key.” I bet most of you won’t understand those words when he speaks them. I grew up hearing him talk, and I still had to adjust my ear.

Few if any people around there speak like that anymore. My grandfather tells a story about Uncle Clint — “Unclint” he says — who was a big boozer. He doesn’t tell that story that Uncle Clint, who died in the 1940s or 1950s, I think, had his horse trained to take him home from the bar in town, six miles out to Starhill, with him passed out in the saddle. I grew up hearing stories like that. If I’m any kind of storyteller, it’s because of the culture that formed me.

One of the men in the clip, who doesn’t have any lines, is Mr. Salvador Vinci. The Vincis came to town in the early 20th century, immigrants from Sicily. I was told as a boy that the white folks didn’t know what to make of them. They weren’t black, but they weren’t white like us Anglos were either, were they? They became white quickly enough. I bristled when I first heard scholars talk about “whiteness,” but then I thought about the Vincis — you don’t say it “veen-chee,” like a Sicilian would, but “ven-see,” in an American way — and realized that no, that’s really a thing.

What brought this to mind was a conversation around Giuseppe’s table about the way accents differ regionally, but also across generations. James C. grew up in Upstate New York, and says now you can hear the old way of talking only at the margins of his home region.

Dede was married to Lorena, whom all us grandchildren called “Mullay” for some reason. She was the matriarch of our clan. She was a gentle woman, but the center of it all. She died of a heart attack on a summer day, age 67, shelling peas one morning on her front porch. I was very, very close to her. In fact, standing next to a fig tree in Giuseppe’s garden in Sardinia, I told him how the aroma of figs instantly takes me bak to my childhood, standing at Mullay’s side as a little kid, holding a collander while she picked figs from the tree in her back yard, the sweet-spicy smell of the milk oozing out of its stem enveloping us like a cloud of Mullay-ness. I thought of her just yesterday, in Sardinia, far away from Starhill.

Mullay

I was very, very close to her. When she died in 1976, I was only nine. It was such a shock that I grabbed a stack of comic books, and retreated under my mom and dad’s bed, like a frightened kitten. My cousin Nancy eventually coaxed me out. A year later, my Aunt Lois (actually, my great-great-aunt; her sister Bernice was Mullay’s mother) died, and her sister, Aunt Hilda soon after went to a nursing home. Within two years, three of the most important women to my young life disappeared. I was only ten. To this day, I’ve lost so many memories of them, locked behind a wall my mind built to contain the pain. I wish I could somehow tear it down.

When Mullay died, the cornerstone of the family crumbled. I don’t suppose we knew it at the time, but that’s what she was. After a couple of years, the big family reunion, which brought kinfolks in from all over, faded away. The lifelong tension between her sons, my dad and his brother, which she had moderated, reasserted itself, and everyone began drifting apart. Funny how families depend on people like that. My father, who died ten years ago this month, was that sort of personality for my own family. He held us together, for all his flaws. When he left this world, he took us with him, in a sense. Nothing to be done, I guess. Daddy was the only one with the authority to heal the breach he, my mom, and my sister had placed between her girls and me. He wouldn’t do it, because that would have meant admitting that they had been wrong about me. So, the family exists today in name only. The trauma of all that had a lot to do with my divorce. I try not to be bitter, but… .

Here is a story that will be familiar to you readers who have been with me a while, or who read How Dante Can Save Your Life, in the chapter on the importance of forgiveness. I offer it to you again now that you can see the face and hear the voice of Dede. Here’s how it appears in the book:

My paternal grandfather, Murphy Dreher Sr., died in 1994, at the age of ninety. We called him Dede (pronounced “deedee”). In his final years, my father discovered that someone close to Dede was robbing him blind. Daddy confronted his father and the embezzler with the irrefutable evidence, but Dede, whose mind had grown feeble with age, couldn’t accept the facts. My father had a tape recorder hidden in his shirt pocket during this meeting. He played for me the recording of the embezzler confessing to the act and daring my father to do something about it. Dede took the thief’s side.

Daddy was crushed. It was his duty to look out for his father’s best interests, but his father had made that impossible. Still, Daddy continued to serve his elderly father, driving him to the hospital for all his appointments. When Dede finally died, with my father holding his hand, my sister, Ruthie, and I were relieved; we feared that our dad, in his anxiety and grief over his father’s disavowal, would go to his grave before Dede.

I flew home for the funeral. We buried Dede in the Starhill cemetery on a Tuesday morning, and I returned with my parents to their house. Exhausted by the events of the previous days, Daddy and Mama lay down for a nap. I sat working at a desk in my old bedroom.

Suddenly I heard three sharp raps on the window. I spun around and walked to it, but nothing was there. My parents live in the country, with no neighbors close by, and there are no trees or bushes by that window. There wasn’t a soul in the yard.

Maybe it was a bird crashing into the window, I thought, though I knew better than to think the same bird would whack the window three times.

The next morning at breakfast, Daddy looked worried.

“The strangest thing happened last night,” he said. “You and Mama were sleeping, but I couldn’t get to sleep to save my soul. I was sitting in my chair in the living room reading when I heard this knocking on the living room windows. It was after midnight. I went to the back door and looked out, but nothing was there.”

“The dogs didn’t bark?” I asked.

“Nope, not a sound. I sat back down in my chair, then I heard the door to our bedroom open and close,” he continued. “I looked down the hallway and there was somebody standing there in white. I thought it was your mother. ‘Dorothy, is that you, honey?’ I said. I didn’t get an answer.”

“What did you do?” I said.

“Well, I got out of my chair and went down the hallway. Nobody was there. I opened up the bedroom door and there was your mother, sleeping just as soundly as she had been when I left her.”

“Lord have mercy, Daddy, that’s some story,” I said. “Do you have any idea what it might have been?”

He did not. But it was plainly weighing on his mind. I told him about the rapping on the window. That unsettled him.

“Do you remember that story I did for the paper a couple of years ago, about that Catholic priest down in Bayou Pigeon who’s an exorcist? The old man who goes around to haunted houses with his helpers and gets rid of ghosts?”

Daddy nodded.

“I don’t want to be freaky about this, but would you mind if I called him and asked him to come up and bless the house, just in case?”

“But we’re not Catholic,” Daddy said.

“Doesn’t matter. He’ll come. I’ll call after breakfast.”

Later that morning, I phoned Father Mario Termini at his rectory on the bayou. I told him about my grandfather’s death and about the strange occurrences. He said he would come with Shelby and Florence, two Cajun grandmothers who help him in cases like this.

I had met them two years before on their mission to a poltergeist-infested house on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Shelby, who was about my mother’s age, had a powerful gift of spiritual discernment. I had seen her work. She was a large lady, but I had watched as an invisible force lifted her and threw her backward over a chair.

“We’ll be there tomorrow after lunchtime,” Father Termini said. “When we come in, don’t tell Shelby that your grandfather died. We don’t want to lead in any direction.”

At breakfast the next morning, my father was a nervous wreck.

“Last night, I was laying in bed asleep, when I felt the softest pressure on my back,” he said. “I woke up and realized I wasn’t dreaming. It felt like a baby’s arm, but bigger, the size of a man’s,” he said. “Then I felt fingers wrapping around my shoulders.”

“Oh my God!”

“I was wide awake by then. I pushed myself up fast, and I felt whatever it was let go. Then I heard this sound like a hiss and a pop, and it was gone.”

Later that morning, my parents were working together on a computer in a small detached office in their yard when my mother saw someone walk past the office window.

“Ray, get the door,” she said. Daddy opened the door, but no one was there.

After lunch, the dogs barked. The crew from Bayou Pigeon had arrived. I greeted them. Father Termini, a short, intense older man whose head was ringed by close-cropped white hair, stepped into the kitchen and took my mother’s hand.

Father Mario Termini (1917-2002)

Behind him came Florence, a stout older woman with a sweet, grandmotherly face and a warm manner. And then there was tall, broad-shouldered Shelby, wearing a plain cotton dress, looking timidly downward, clutching a rosary in her hand.

I introduced them all to my parents and led them to the living room. The three visitors sat together on the sofa. Shelby whispered something in Father’s ear.

“That porch swing you have in your kitchen—Shelby dreamed about it last night,” the priest said. “All I told her was that we had a job to go to on Thursday. When I picked her up today, she said she had dreamed that we were going to see some people in the hills, and they had a porch swing in their kitchen.”

Father Termini asked my folks for permission to pray a rosary, which they granted. I had been a Catholic convert for a year at that point, so I joined them. After we finished, Shelby asked my mother if it was all right to walk around the house. “Please, go wherever you want,” Mama said.

I followed her into my bedroom, where I had first heard the banging. Shelby stopped cold, and said, “There’s something in that closet.”

I called my mother into the room. We began to root through the closet, which was used for storage.

“It’s still there,” she said, after a minute. The air conditioning was going full blast, but Shelby’s face was beet red, and pearls of sweat were beginning to necklace her.

“Are you okay, Shelby?” I asked.

“I can’t stay in this room,” she said. “Keep looking in that closet.”

Mama stayed in the room digging in the closet for anything that might be suspicious. I followed Shelby into my parents’ bedroom. She meandered slowly, poking through their closets, to no effect. When she rounded the far side of the bed, approaching a bedside table with a number of framed photographs on it, Shelby began to shake. She held on to a bedpost to steady herself, then stepped to the table.

I stood by her side as she handled each framed photograph individually. Most of them she returned to the table, but three she dropped onto the bed as if she had picked up a hot skillet with bare hands.

“What’s the meaning of these pictures?” she asked me.

I glanced at them. “My grandfather died late last week. We buried him a couple of days ago. Those pictures are of women who were close to him. That one’s my grandmother, who died in 1976. That other one’s his mother, Florence. And that last one is his grandmother.”

“Don’t you have a picture of him in a frame?” Shelby asked.

“We did. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Find it,” said Father Termini, from across the room. “I think it’s important.”

We all returned to the living room, sat down, and began to pray quietly. Suddenly my mother, who was still in my bedroom searching the closet, shouted. I ran to see what was the matter, and met her in the hallway. She was crying.

She was holding our framed portrait of Dede. “It was in the closet, behind a board,” she said.

I rushed it to Shelby, who put it on her lap, laid her hand on it, and bowed her head. A moment later she whispered something to the priest. Father Termini leveled his gaze on my father.

“It’s him,” said the priest. “And he says he can’t move on unless you help him get forgiveness.”

My father froze.

“Daddy,” I said, “tell him about what happened between you and Dede!”

And so he did, revealing everything about the pain of his father’s rejection and his fidelity to the old man in spite of it all. After he finished, Father Termini said quietly to my father, “Do you forgive him?”

“I do,” said my father, nearly breathless.

Father Termini blessed the house, and a week later he had a mass for the repose of Dede’s soul. There were no more ghostly visitations at our house.

I believe that upon his death, my grandfather saw how much his son had loved him, and how his son suffered and sacrificed for his sake. And Dede was remorseful. His sorrow was so great that he could not advance spiritually. He could not let go of this world without his son’s forgiveness.

Can I explain this theologically? No, not really. But I believe I saw the power of a living man’s forgiveness free the soul of a dead man trapped by guilt and let him move on to the next life.

That encounter with the ghost of my grandfather has remained strong with me over the years. Though I don’t believe in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, I believe, with other Orthodox Christians, that an intermediate state for some souls may exist. I believe that my sister, Ruthie, is in heaven, but I pray for her anyway, and I ask her to pray for me.

In Philadelphia, a few days before we loaded the truck and moved south, Julie and I lay in bed talking about how worried we were that we would not be able to connect with Ruthie’s children. Just before daylight the next morning, I had an intense dream. In it, I was standing in our second-floor living room amid the half-packed boxes when I heard the door downstairs open and someone walking up the stairs.

It was Ruthie, wearing a snow-white angora sweater with a thick collar close around her neck. She was carrying a pan of muffins and smiling.

“I thought you were dead!” I said.

“Oh, I am,” she said sweetly. “I just wanted to tell you that everything is going to be all right.”

“Thank you for saying that. Will you stay for a while?”

“No, I need to get on back.”

Then I woke up. The dream had been so realistic that I wasn’t sure it had been a dream at all. Whether it was an expression of my imagination or a real visitation, I have no idea, but I will say this: when I was home in Louisiana, I learned from an old friend of Ruthie’s who had survived cancer that shortly after my sister’s death, the friend awakened in the middle of the night and saw Ruthie standing at the foot of her bed, smiling, wearing the same snow-white angora sweater.

Ruthie never owned a sweater like that.

In any case, it is an ancient tradition of the Christian church to pray for God’s mercy on the souls of the dead. Whether or not there is a spiritual abode like Dante’s purgatory, it is good to affirm with our prayers that those who have passed into the next life are still with us, still part of us. We remain one in the bond of love.

Driving my dad back from a doctor’s appointment in Baton Rouge after my return, I was eager to tell him about my reading in the Commedia and how it was helping me with my own struggles. The spiritual bonds we have with our families and with others are so strong that they even last beyond the grave, I told him.

“Don’t you remember the story about what happened with Dede and his ghost?” I said.

“Oh, I do,” he replied. “How could I forget something like that?” Then he began to speak about that grim time in his life, and how twenty years on, the memory of his father’s unjust treatment of him still causes pain.

“Daddy,” I said quietly, staring straight ahead at the road, “I feel the same way about the way y’all have acted toward me since we came back here.”

Silence.

We drove on, together, but apart.

As you know, if you’ve been reading me for awhile, or read the paperback edition of my Dante book, my father and I reached a reconciliation shortly before he died. But it was either too late for him to do anything to save the family from disintegration, or he wasn’t inclined to, or just wasn’t capable of it. Here’s the epilogue, from the paperback edition (that’s the one I’ve linked above):

That spring, Daddy and I were getting along much better, though sadly, his physical decline accelerated. He was 80, and knew he didn’t have much time left. We all did.

One Thursday morning, he called and asked if I would take him to town for a haircut. I picked him up after lunch. As we headed back home, we reached the bridge over Thompson Creek, and he said, “You know, I figure I’m about to round the last bend.”

“Yeah, seems like it,” I said.

I asked him if there was anybody he would like me to contact on his behalf. An old friend, maybe?

“No, can’t think of anybody,” he said.

“Is there anybody you would like to ask forgiveness of?” I said.

“Nope. I’ve never done anybody wrong.”

He said that with complete guilelessness. Daddy was a righteous man who was certain of his righteousness.

“Daddy, look, I have to tell you something,” I said. “You’re a Christian, right.”

“Yeah.”

“All of us are sinners. The Lord says we have to forgive, and ask for forgiveness. There have been a lot of people you’ve hurt in life. You haven’t always been good to Mama. And between you and me, we’ve had some conflict. You didn’t always do right by me.”

He calmly explained why in those conflicts, he had been right, and done the only thing a just man could have done. I could feel my guts tensing up. But then I felt bad for bringing it up. Hadn’t we left all that back at the hospital in December?

I apologized for raising the issue again, and told him that we were past that, not to worry about it. I pulled into his driveway, got his walker out of the trunk, and helped him inside to his chair.

The next morning, I went over early to measure out the tablets in his weekly pillbox. By that time, he was on 15 different medications. The dosages were far too complicated for either my mother or him to keep up with, so the job fell to me. That morning — it was Good Friday — I found Daddy in his usual place, sitting on his front porch in a rocking chair, reading the newspaper and drinking his coffee. He smiled at me, wished me good morning, and dragged his walker to the side so I could lean in and kiss his cheek.

I told him that I didn’t have time to stay that morning, that I had a lot of work to do. It took about ten minutes to get the pills sorted. I dashed out the door, then leaned in to kiss him goodbye as he sat in his chair.

As I drew back after kissing his cheek, he grabbed my forearm and pulled me in close. His chin was quivering. The old man looked frightened. Vulnerable. His eyes filled with tears, and he began to stammer.

“I … I … I … I had a long talk with the Lord last night,” he began. “I talked to him about, about my, my … transgressions against you. I told him I was sorry. And I think he heard me.”

There I stood, stunned. All my adult life, I had been waiting to hear something like that. My father, that mountain of a man, could not address his son directly and ask forgiveness. It just wasn’t in him to do. He had to hide behind a ten-dollar word to do it, and couch those penitential lines as a recollection of a conversation with God.

But there it was: Daddy was saying he was sorry. With a man as prideful as my father, that shaky, roundabout confession was as good as it was ever going to get.

I leaned back in, put my hand into the back of his thinning hair, guided his head to my chest, kissed him on the forehead, and told him, “Thank you. I love you.”

Then I walked away, got into my car, and drove off. I was afraid to look back at him, because I did not want to see him crying. I knew that’s exactly what he was doing.

As I drove home, I could not believe what had just happened. Daddy apologized. That wasn’t supposed to happen, ever. But it had.

The previous three years, since I had been home, had been among the most painful of my life, because they compelled me to confront the profound brokenness in our family — a family in which we all loved each other, but could not live in harmony. The shocking family secret — that for over twenty years, my father and my sister had been nursing a deep grudge against me for moving away, and had conditioned my sister’s children to reject me — sent me into an emotional, spiritual, and physical tailspin. Coming out of that dark, dark wood required a pilgrimage, including through the dark places of my own heart — a journey on which I was accompanied by my priest, my therapist, but which was led by Dante Alighieri.

And now, I saw daylight.

The main things I came to understand were these.

First, I had made an idol of Family and Place, embodied most of all in the person of my father, and without knowing what I was doing, had given my father the place of God in my imagination. This is why I could never escape the sense that God may love me, but He does not approve of me, and that if only I worked harder, I could win that approval. In truth, this was how my father saw me. Becoming aware of this, disentangling God and my father within myself, and repenting of the idol worship, was the first crucial step in my healing.

Second, I had to face down my anger over the situation. My family wasn’t going to change. It seemed like every day or two, there was something else to rub my nose in the fact that I wasn’t good enough, and didn’t belong. It was unjust, and it was painful. But Dante, and my priest, told me that I could not let my anger over this prevail. As my priest put it, love is more important than justice. Besides, God wills us to love those who mistreat us. As my priest put it, if Jesus Christ, on the Cross, asked his Father to forgive those who did this to him, because he loved them just that much, what right do we have to withhold our love from those who cannot return it, or who return it in an impaired, distorted form. Piccarda, a saint in Dante’s Paradiso, explains to the pilgrim Dante that his notion of justice does not make sense in heaven. She says simply, “In His will is our peace.”

If I was going to dwell within the will of God, I had to somehow work through my brokenhearted anger and love my father. This was not going to be easy. It was going to be like climbing the sheer face of a mountain. But what else could I do?

I did it — imperfectly, God knows, but I did it. And slowly, healing came. The healing was not only immediate, of my stress-caused chronic fatigue, but more profoundly, I found the burdens I had been carrying around all my life from my complicated childhood in Daddy’s house lifted. I thought I was going to be carrying that weight all of my life, but now it was gone. Who could have imagined that? Certainly not me.

Driving home that Good Friday morning, the truth came to me: that if I had known all the suffering that lay ahead for me back home, I never would have returned after Ruthie died. But if I had not done that, if I had not obeyed what my wife and I felt was a call from God to do this, I never would have been healed of this wound that I had been carrying all my life.

I never would have been there on the front porch to hear my father say, in his imperfect way, that he was sorry.

What had just happened on his front porch was my father putting a key into shackles — a key only he possessed — unlocking them, and casting off the invisible iron ball that I dragged around with me everywhere I went, and had done for most of my life.

I was free. And so, in a way, was my father.

Daddy’s physical decline accelerated that spring. The decay of his body was, for him, a terrible cross. He became housebound. In early summer, he entered a home hospice program. He spent the summer of 2015 waiting to die, measuring out his days in the pilgrimage from his bedroom to his chair in the living room, to his rocking chair on the front porch, and back again.

One August day, I received a call from him. Would I come over and help lift him off the living room couch and into his wheelchair so he could get back to bed? He had finally become too weak to stand at all, and my mother couldn’t lift him on her own. I sped over to their house, about a mile away. Mama and I wrestled to get Daddy into the wheelchair, and finally succeeded. The pain of humiliation on his face was searing. In the right order of things, he was the one helping others. For Ray Dreher, to be dependent on anybody else was like the tearing of the veil in the Temple — the violent disruption of the cosmos.

Yet there he was, defeated by time. Mama and I helped him to settle in the hospital bed that the hospice folks had set up in his bedroom. He would never again rise from his bed.

I moved in that morning with my dad. This was the end, we all knew. My mother was too exhausted to continue in her role as caregiver. I asked her to move into the guest room, and to let me take the bed she and my father had slept in for most of their marriage. It was next to his hospital bed, so I could be there to attend him.

I count it one of the great privileges of my life to have been able to live with Daddy on his last eight days on earth, and to sleep right beside him, helping him with all his needs, and giving my mom a break. (I should note here that his devoted friend John Bickham was heroic in his service to my dad and mom, doing far more than I did, or could have done.) As it turns out, the greatest gift my father gave me in life was the opportunity to help him when he was helpless, to suffer with him, to pray with him, to give him the medicines that helped him, to moisten his mouth when he could no longer swallow, and to pour myself out for him as I was seeing others, especially John Bickham, do.

Hospice provided Daddy with morphine to ease his pain and suffering. My job — and John Bickham’s job — was to administer it to him regularly. His mind was clear for a couple of days, but he began to recede into the mist, sleeping a lot, and seeming not quite to return to us when he would wake up. I read to him, prayed with him, prayed over him, talked with him, rubbed lotion into his dry, pencil-thin legs, and did everything I could to let him know that he was loved, and he was not alone. We never had a single “meaningful” conversation that week — but then, we didn’t have to. The communication was wordless.

Days later, the moment was at hand. We gathered around the dying patriarch all the family members who were near, and as many of the neighbors as could make it. Daddy had not been conscious for a couple of days. His bedroom filled with the people who had loved him for most of his life. They had come to see him off.

At the end, his breathing became fast and labored, and he writhed, as if trying shake off his flesh. Mama took his right hand, and I clasped his left. As Daddy drew his final agonized breaths, I looked into his face. It was the only thing I saw, and in it, I saw the face of Christ.

More importantly, I saw him, not as the man of whom I was in awe, the man whom I sometimes hated, the man with whose difficult legacy I wrestled in my heart for decades, but him as a fellow sinner and sufferer, and poor creature who needed my love as surely as I needed his. Death humbles us all. The hand of his that held me as a helpless baby, I held myself when his soul left his helpless body. There is perfect harmony in this, a harmony rightly divided and bound together by love — the love that moves the Sun and all the other stars.

My final words to my father were, “Thank you, old man, for everything.” They may be the truest words I ever spoke to him.

We all said the Our Father together over his body, then sang “I’ll Fly Away.” Someone went to call the funeral home. The word went out to the community that Mr. Ray had passed. People started coming by to pay their respects.

He died just after four in the afternoon. Mourners didn’t leave my mom’s house until after ten. I made it back to my own place at 10:30, utterly exhausted. It was the first time I had been home in eight days. I sat down at my kitchen table, alone with my thoughts, marveling at the sense of calm I felt.

I had just watched my father die, and lived through the day that all my life I have dreaded above all others. The thought of the world without my father in it had always been intolerable to me, and terrifying. I don’t know why, but it was. It was as if I would be annihilated without his presence to ground me, and all of us. Fear of his death was something close to a terror for me. In fact, I told my wife before we married that she should beware the day of my father’s death, because I was certain to fall to pieces.

And yet, here we were. Daddy was gone. And I was fine. I had no thought other than gratitude for his life, and gratitude that he was no longer in pain. The future did not appear frightening at all, nor did the present. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, as Julian of Norwich wrote. I felt this powerfully.

How was this possible? By what means did this gift come to me?

Then I knew: “In His will is our peace.” The words of Piccarda. Dante had led the way for me to dwell in the Lord’s will, not my own. I had to learn to abide in faith, hope, and love. That is why, on the day that was supposed to be my own personal apocalypse, I rested in the golden light, in the peace that passes all understanding.

That night, alone in my kitchen, I wept the only tears that ever left my eyes over my father’s passing. They were not tears of mourning. They were tears of gratitude. For him. For the pain and the joy of our life together, and for his beautiful death. For the divine gift of that exiled Tuscan poet, and how God used his art to restore me to life, and a father to his son.

In His will is our peace. Believe it. Live it. Suffer for it. There is no other way through this life of exile, to the far shore of home. This is the higher justice, and it is Love itself.All those stories, right there in those green acres we call Starhill. Walking on the dock of the marina last night in Porto Ottiolu, I mused to James and Giuseppe how blessed I was, as a writer, to have grown up where I did, despite all the pain and brokenness. There was a lot of good there too. I’ll be visiting my cousins next week. I always love doing that. They were older than me growing up, so I didn’t know them all that well. Getting closer to them since I moved back in 2011 has been a great blessing. They live right next door to Dede and Mullay’s house, which they care for. A little white cottage built during the Great Depression.

Dede and Mullay were the working poor, and lost everything in a house fire. But the men of Starhill came together and helped my grandfather rebuild a house for himself and his wife and little boys. That’s the kind of place it was. Maybe still is. I don’t know. I don’t live there anymore. I tried to, once.

Here’s news: They’re about to start building a huge data center in the parish, to power artificial intelligence. This week, I wondered what Walker Percy would do with that idea. He set his final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, in West Feliciana; the new nuclear power plant was a key part of the plot. Walker is dead. The story is there for me to write. I can’t shake the place. I can’t.