Bulletins from the Human Side

At Verdun in France, furrowing farmers still unearth the relics of World War I in the bone slivers of long-dead soldiers clinging to their plow blades as doomed passengers did to the uplifted hull of the sinking Titanic.

There are spaces, such as above the battlefields of Verdun or the sealed-over sea above the Titanic, where air has never been cleared of sorrow despite the thousand and more storms that have brooded and broken over them during the last century.

My wife and I only knew Aurelio Pangilinan from sitting near him, his wife and his children over the generation in which his two daughters and a son grew up and into lives of their own.

We felt that we knew them well, even though we were never in their home nor they in ours, and we never encountered each other around town. Yet we felt his loss as keenly as that of a lifelong friend when he died unexpectedly, fittingly enough on his way to a family reunion, a few weeks ago.

Aurelio, his former pastor, Msgr. Eugene Sears, told me, "was the kind of parishioner you wish you had more of," as he recalled his many good works, from the just and thoughtful ways he distributed parish tithes to those in real need in bad times to his making the annual parish picnic a treat for everyone in good times.