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| My parents' grave at the Naval Academy |
As November comes to a close, I'm thinking about how I want to keep Advent. Every month the Catholic calendar invites us to reflect on something special in the Christian life. For November, it was remembering the dead and I decided to go to a cemetery every day and pray the chaplet of the Sacred Heart. "O sweetest Heart of Jesus I implore that I may ever love Thee more and more." I only missed a few days and visiting cemeteries made me acutely aware of the shortness of life and the reality of death.
The longest life I found was a gentleman in a cemetery near my house who lived to the age of 110, but most in the graveyard lived far fewer years. Many died years before my current age. There were graves of young people in the prime of life. I wondered how they died. There were graves for babies who lived only a few days, and I thought of the grief of their parents as they laid their little ones in the cold ground and I prayed for their comfort. It was a month of mourning with plenty of tears -- for the loss of my own family and friends and for all the strangers many with names well-known in our little town.
