I can recall the month of family melancholia whenever my mother found out that her only brother, William Paholich, was dying of a brain tumor. I must have been about 10 at the time.
I had never seen my mother cry so deeply before then, even when my dad left our family.
We were out playing in the fields of my great-grandfather's farmlands in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, when my younger brother Brian came running out of the farmhouse.
"Mom is crying a whole lot and it's about Uncle Willie. She keeps saying 'the poor kid, the poor kid.'"
We ran inside and stood at a distance, watching our mom's deep grief. She'd lost a husband; now she was losing a brother.
I don't have time to go into the weeks of angst my mom endured as she hoped and prayed that Uncle Willie would get better, but one night she received a phone call: he had passed away. The tumor had its victory.
I recall a week later when Mom came and sat with me and told me two things about Uncle Willie that made a deep impression on me.
"Uncle Willie had always been a fireman," she said, "but in his hospital bed he told me, 'Kay, you know I've always wanted to be an artist. Now I get my chance. I believe God will let me be an artist in heaven.'"
And then she talked to me in the most serious conversation we had up to that time. She turned and said, "Last night I had a dream that Willie was in heaven on top of a hill. He was calling out to me:
'Come on up here, Kay. Come on up here' And he was smiling and happy.'"
Mom knew Willie was in Heaven. he was past his pain and suffering.
I began learning of the unknown ways of God here on Earth, but of His eternal love up in Heaven. I began learning that this life is just a brief visit. The real existence begins in the Home that is being prepared for us.
