. . . Then the other prisoner was back! “This was in the book,” he said as he propped a photograph against my small TV screen. It was the photo of my mother and Frances that I had lost four years earlier – the photo I searched for in vain when my mother died. Just as Mass began on my mother’s birthday – at the very moment I was offering the Mass for her and her sister – their last photograph together found me. An accident? Mere coincidence? It’s a greater leap of faith to dismiss such events as coincidence than to accept them for what they are: personally miraculous gifts of actual grace. When I looked at the photograph, it was as though someone had lifted a tiny corner of the veil between life and death. I saw something in the photo I hadn’t noticed before. The two sisters stood side by side – my mother on the right – on the shore of a new life, being prepared for the Presence of God. I never saw my mother look happier. I never saw more contentment and hope in her eyes. I never felt so happy for her, so filled with promise that her journey is near its end: Home, her New Found Land. . . .
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