Years that Week pr.d.1

     Sometimes when you don't even know someone, you know someone. They sat behind us every Sunday morning for the early mass. The kind of couple that has been together for so long that they even look the same. Both very old, enough that you would notice that sort of thing. She hardly ever spoke. He would sometimes come up and do the readings. I always liked that because of how he would pronounce his words like a gangster. "A readin' from da letta of Paul ta da Romans...." They would nod to us when we walked in, my father, my sister and I.

     Somehow my sister met them along the way. They took a liking to her. I think it was a spirituality group or something, a collaboration between the young and the old and they thought she was 'just....' So she would say 'hello' now in the mornings and they would smile to see her. I would wonder about them often. Especially when an old couple renewed their vows after fifty years of marriage one of these past Sunday mornings. Do they speak anymore to each other? Is there discussion over dinner or simply the silent conversation between old lovers? I even thought for a moment they would go home and combine back into the one person they were, separate only in the eyes of the public.

     Someday later my sister told me I was supposed to pray for this woman, she was diagnosed with cancer, her turn I suppose. I did, but it did not make the cancer go away. I don't know if I expected it to either, maybe that's why it didn't work. They still showed up every Sunday, same seats as always and always there before us, as if they did not move from week to week. Nothing seemed to really change on the outside. Maybe it is hard to notice on people who already look old. But then one Sunday came, and there was no one to nod to in the back row.

     Some people I guess really are of one heart. He came back to mass one week later and several years older. She was not with him. I felt a fraction of his pain and imagined what the whole of it must have been. I knew then some of the reason his shoulders slouched and his cheeks sagged; the heaviness of his loneliness. He comes now to stare at the Cross and wait his turn.