Our Mother of Perpetual Hope
“I’d like to go with,” I say. “Don’t you have something on Saturday?” “Just another funeral,” I say, stifling a small nervous laugh. Five funerals in six weeks is a record in my world. For the first time I grasp a glimmer of what it must have been like for my brother Tim during the AIDS crisis of the 80’s when deaths of his friends kept coming, warning him of his future. As we walked in bitter cold toward the luncheon of ham and cheese sandwiches and hot coffee, another mourner remarked, “I don’t remember temperatures this cold since the
