I'd almost forgotten I have a blog

2020 was the year that stretched and formed me more than any other in recent memory, and I'm not talking about the Covid.

Last August, I started teaching full time at a small Catholic, Classical school in Rochester. While I love my work and my students, the 50-55 hours a week are grinding me into a pulp. No brain matter for anything else, really. It has forced me, though, to be attentive to how I spend the time I have outside of work. Prayer is my priority - resting in His Love and praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I'm back to reading akshual books, which is a great gift of itself. Current read:  A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken.

But 2020 left me an orphan. After a year's struggle with gastric cancer, my brother Patrick passed into eternity on Nov. 27. Yes, the man who'd spent years in retail died on Black Friday. I can't help but think that was no coincidence. 

Thankfully, we his family were with him during his last week. It was far more grueling than what I went through with my mother, if for no other reason than he was with me during my mother's last hours. There were grace-filled moments of awesome depths where my spirit and his touched. There were no barriers there. There were other moments of horrific pain and suffering, which I consider a blessing to have shared with him, although those images come to haunt me sometimes. And through God's grace, his wife, son and myself were with him as he finished his race and died. It was startling and unreal that this could happen to him - HIM of all people.

I am still unable to fully process this. I have endured losses in my life - my father's death when I was 11, my mother's death only twelve years ago, my ex-husband's infidelity and perpetual lies (feels like a lifetime ago), but this... this loss has struck me to the core of my soul. My response has been to live more deliberately, and to choose more wisely. To rest in God's arms rather than to sit around navel-gazing or crying into my wine. (Not that there hasn't been a lot of crying... or a lot of wine.) My brother is praying for me as I am for him. He is close by. And I feel his joy. But I also feel that my life is more precious than I ever realized. It is not to be wasted on melancholy, regret, or endless deliberating.

2021 will bring changes, I reckon, for the country and for us as individuals. I'm not tuning into the anger or the self-righteousness. I'm tuning into Jesus Christ, who is Love and Mercy and Justice. And my job is to do what has been set before me, to be faithful and steadfast, cheerful and joyful in the work of teaching and inspiring middle school students and in writing my own stories. This I will do, with God's grace and love. St. John Bosco, pray for us.  St. Anthony, pray for us.

Obituary for Patrick Cambio