Saints Among Us

I have just come from the funeral of most likely a saint, and most certainly the spouse of a saint.
Yes, I truly believe that. (St. Chester)
Since I came to this parish I have been aware of this lovely couple.
When I became the MD I realized they were daily Mass goers, and I began to get the merest inkling of the extent of the care he gave her.
She wore the only glasses I have ever seen IRL that merit the joke description "coke bottles." She was clearly legally blind, and severely crippled by age, her gait was literally a shuffle, in which her feet never left the ground and moved forward an excruciating two or three inches at most at a time.
He led her everywhere with a devotion and tenderness that was very, very moving to behold.When the renovation was going on at the church and Mass was in the school building, he had negotiate steps, and awkward doors, and odd parking while guiding and assisting her with extraordinary delicacy and gentleness.
Eighth-grade girls, even heathers whose lack of empathy approaches the socio-pathic, would gaze at the two of them in wonder, with tears in their eyes, and pronounce the sight the "cutest" thing that they had ever seen, (higher approbation than it sounds to an adult…,) and wish aloud that someday someone would love them that way.
(Yes, even at the height of the delusional attitudes toward love and the cynicism about adults that most adolescents are prey to, these girls could not fail to recognize true romance when confronted with it.)
Eventually the wife was confined to a wheel chair, and tiny and frail himself, this man laboriously, faithfully brought her to Mass.
He is not Catholic, I just learned.
What a witness. Forty five years of love and devotion -- who wouldn't be proud to have inspired that?