Time to get personal

Three posts in a day!

I've got some time on my hands as I'm away from my parish for a week.  I'm up in a tiny apartment in Olean, NY, way up north in the frozen tundra (for real, it was 36 degrees when we landed) where my grandfather, my Papa, lay in a hospital bed awaiting his return to the Lord.

It's a hard sight to see.  He wears a t-shirt and a diaper, and is clothed with a bed sheet.  He goes in and out of alertness, mumbling every once and a while about a conversation he just had with a deceased brother.  His hair is all over the place, like he just got off a roller coaster.  He grunts, falls asleep, waves to someone only he can see in the corner of the room, then falls asleep again.

This is a man I've looked up to for three decades, the one whose faith was so contagious that even I, at the barely-conscious age of 7, was swept into the river his love of Jesus Christ and His Church.  He taught me you can pray anywhere and everywhere, that Mary loves us like she loves her own Son, that family comes before all else.

My Papa is dying, and it's really hard to grasp.  It's hard to talk to anyone in the family about it, because we all end up in tears.  If not for the faith, I think we'd all be falling apart.  But this is a staunchly Catholic family.  As an active deacon, Papa took so much pride in the fact that his parishes did absolutely everything by the book.  I knew what the General Instruction on the Roman Missal was before I had memorized the Creed.  Papa talks to Mary every day.  He says she once told him not to tell Jesus, but that he was her favorite.  I'm fairly certain that in some of his less lucid moments, when it seems to us that he's lost on a cloud, he's actually conversing with the other side of eternity.

We all love this man very much.  I'll try to keep sharing my thoughts as I can.  Please offer a prayer for Deacon Don Radlinski, that the Blessed Mother walk him to the portals of Heaven where together, they greet the Lord.

Papa holding his great grandson, Edmund.  That's Grandma in the red shirt next to him.