the death of a child.

Today's blog was going to be many things, because there is so much to say. To explain that my heart has been scooped up by Rose Hawthorne is an understatement. Her life smelled like pipe smoke and leather-bound books dripping in the best 19th-century Americana literature and poetry had to offer. It tasted like English tea, corn cakes, and gingerbread with the sounds of her father, Nathaniel, discussing the state of things with greats like Thoreau and Emmerson while she played jacks in her New England home as a young girl. She reminded me of all the things I love about New England and learning about Colonial life, beautifully written literature—and the power of writing! As a convert to the Catholic faith and eventually a third-order Dominican, her life tells the story of a searching heart that ached for Truth and Tradition. Joking in this blog I imagined who Colonial Kelly would be, well in Rose, I found Colonial Kelly’s best friend

…But more than what her life may have smelled or tasted like was what her life felt like, that is what won my heart.

It felt like the crucifix around her neck that she clung to in the throws of a difficult, at times abusive, marriage to an alcoholic as she prayed for the courage to step away into safety. It felt like the cool wood of her only child's coffin after he died at the age of four. It felt like the grasping but weak hands of the terminal cancer victims she cared for so they didn't die alone. And, it felt like a slender, smooth quill that she used to write the story of her soul in prose and poetry.

I was going to write more (because if you know me, you know the more passionate I am about something the more words I seem to find…), but then I found her words in a poem she wrote about the death of her son, Francie. It made me cry, and it's more beautiful than anything I could think of writing. It shared the beauty of parenthood wrapped in the agony of loss. I couldn’t wait to share it with you, below.

Please visit this website to learn more about Rose and her cause for sainthood and download this weeks, PGS to share her with your children!

Francie, by Venerable Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

I loved a child as we should love
Each other everywhere;
I cared more for his happiness
Than I dreaded my own despair.

An angel asked me to give him
My whole life's dearest cost;
And in adding mine to his treasures
I knew they could never be lost.

To his heart I gave the gold,
Though little my own had known;
To his eyes what tenderness
From youth in mine had grown!

I gave him all my buoyant
Hope for my future years;
I gave him whatever melody
My voice had steeped in tears.

Upon the shore of darkness
His drifted body lies.
He is dead, and I stand beside him,
With his beauty in my eyes.

I am like those withered petals
We see on a winter day,
That gladly gave their color
In the happy summer away.

I am glad I lavished my worthiest
To fashion his greater worth;
Since he will live in heaven,
I shall lie content in the earth.

For more information about joyfully reawakening a culture of life within your domestic church, visit www.pelicanprojectministry.org.