To share in dignity, respect and beauty with the most sacred aspects of Catholicism was truly a privilege. When beginning to do my own research about veiling I simply typed into my search bar “Why do Catholic women veil?” The answer I stumbled upon was that veiling is an external sign of a woman’s interior desire to humble herself before the Lord truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. Wow.

Welcome to the team.

A vow is a sacred promise made to God. The vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are traditional for all priests in the Roman Catholic Church. Vows can be either public or private.

There will be restoration and redemption of broken families and broken hearts. There will be a gathering of all the holy love that was ever poured out. Love is never lost. It is only held in the crossbeam of salvation, held in the space between the nails and eternity, waiting to be glorified and released.

John Paul Raphael. His name was a prayer, a plea for him to reveal himself to me. I held myself in this sacred moment, spinning slowly through space. The veil between what actually is and what could have been seemed very thin and I imagined three alternate realities all at the same time.

We all want to feel like we are in control of our lives. We have dreams, goals, and plans that we work towards, and then there is life itself. Life has a way of knocking us off track when we least expect it, and often the hardest challenge is how to get back on track after something traumatic happens. When someone close to you dies or leaves, there can be many emotions, including sadness, anger, guilt, blame, and confusion about why it happened or who was at fault. These emotions make us feel stuck in our grief because we keep going over what happened instead of moving forward with our lives.

When we are grieving, the activities of our daily life can feel beyond us. Our mind and body can be easily overwhelmed, and we may find that we need help when we never did before.

It's hard to believe that a person can go through so much pain and still keep on living. But that's what grief does to you: it makes you stronger, even if only in small ways. Grief hurts your body as well as your mind, though. If you're going through something similar, here are some common side effects of grief on the body:

What is strength in grief?

One of the hardest things about grief is that it makes me so hard on myself. For the first several weeks after my son died, I relished that there were no expectations on me or my feelings, from myself or anyone else. I was devastated and broken and the whole world around me knew it. Everyone accepted that I could not cook meals or drive my kids around or put a coherent sentence together.

One of the most painful parts of grief is loneliness. No matter how many people are in our lives, missing our son makes the whole world seem empty. No one can replace our son. Even if we have another child, we will still miss Cayse. This is why grief lasts, and in some way loneliness, too, for the rest of our lives. Accepting this loneliness is part of who we are. I think of my loneliness of my son as a way of keeping a space for him. It is a way of honoring the love we had.