A few weeks before All Souls’ Day, I found myself at Sunday Mass with my daughter. Earlier that week, I had been told that our retired but still beloved parish priest, Father Boleslaw Zadora—the man who gave my daughter her first Communion and once led our family and other parishioners on a mission to the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle—had died.
Known to his parishioners as Father Bill, he was small in stature, large in joy and full of zeal for life. I can still picture him leading our little group through the outdoor Stations of the Cross at that basilica in Texas, where we live. His harmonica sounded its plaintive notes as we walked slowly from station to station. We had traveled there during Lent, making the nearly four-hour pilgrimage south from our parish in St. Hedwig, an old Polish community on the outskirts of San Antonio.
When we finished, he gestured toward the statue of the Virgin of San Juan—the one rescued from a fire at the church, the one that, centuries ago, was said to have been instrumental in Our Lady bringing an apparently mortally wounded child back to life. He reminded us that Our Lady has a habit of showing up for ordinary people in impossible moments, a message conveyed in his distinctive, rather grumbly voice, the kind you had to lean in to hear, and with a certain wry smile that made you want to.
My then-8-year-old daughter loved that trip, and Father Bill especially. I am smiling even now thinking of his presence—infectiously glad but never overwhelming. A Salvatorian priest from Poland, he served our country parish for nearly 40 years, and our little family of four had been present for five of them. By the time he took that trip with us, I suspect he already knew he had been sick for some time. But Father Bill kept showing up for his parishioners, especially the children. His homilies were often addressed directly to them—“My dear children,” he would begin, with a sweeping up-and-down gesture of his hand.
My daughter knew Father Bill was ill, but he was so good at downplaying it. Parish life in St. Hedwig meant that even after he retired, we would still see Father Bill—at Wigilia, our Polish Christmas festival, playing carols on his harmonica, or at the parish trunk-or-treat, handing out candy and complimenting my daughter on her St. Lucy costume. Sure, we Catholics are a memento mori people, but maybe, I thought, we could wait until tomorrow for a harder talk. Today, we would focus on the joy of being in the moment together—the harmonica, the saints, the chocolate—and pretend, just for a little while, that the dying part was not really happening.
And if I’m honest, refusing to face the harder truth of Father Bill’s decline was not just to shield my daughter from the pain. It was to shield myself. Suffering is hard—not only to talk about with children but also to face as adults. And to face it as adults with children who love their priest so deeply is that much harder.
Last fall, Father Bill returned to Poland. Not long after, he was gone.
Grieving on God’s Time
Cut back to Sunday Mass. My husband was away, and I took my daughter alone. For the first time, she was not doing well in school. I had already grounded her from extracurriculars—no dance, no YouTube, no seeing friends, no video games, no Taylor Swift (the horror!). No exceptions. Then I heard that Father Bill had passed away and our parish was hosting a rosary for him.
Cue my most grievous fault. Not the kind that only sounds low but turns out to be a humblebrag in disguise. A real mistake: I didn’t tell her.
Indeed, I barely was able to hear the news myself. Sure, I knew about his death. But I couldn’t process it.
I decided we were “too busy” to deal with it right then: She needed to focus on homework; I had work deadlines to meet. The rosary felt, in a sense, “extracurricular” for us both. I pushed grief away for later, the way you might hide a stack of papers in a drawer so your desk appears clean. But that won’t get you closer to actually doing the work.
This is no new sin of mine. Those who know me know I have had my fair share of suffering, and that I have learned to move sorrow aside, to box it in neatly. To a fault. During graduate school, my parents died within a year of each other—my father of Crohn’s disease, my mother of Parkinson’s (and, I’m convinced, of a heart broken by the loss of my dad). I took no time off from work. I didn’t ask for extensions. I finished a major paper before driving home to see my father in the hospital, arguing it would allow me to be fully present when I arrived. I grieved like an efficient academic: competently, with a checklist, and in the order I had designated.
It was only as my mother was dying that I realized how much I needed the church, because my checklists were no longer working. My grief was bursting at the seams; I could not order it in a way that made any sense. The liturgical year, on the other hand, forced me to stop, to kneel, to confess that I was not in control, and it was during her illness that a kind of conversion happened. It took me longer than it should have to realize what Scripture had already said in two words: “Jesus wept” (Jn 11:35). I needed a faith that let me weep too. Not on my time, but on God’s—and with him, as well.
And yet here I was, a decade later, a mother rather than a single graduate student, making the same mistake—prioritizing productivity over lament. But this time I was not doing it to myself only; I was passing down my mistakes to my daughter.
When my daughter and I walked into Mass that Sunday after the rosary, there was my sin in black and white, on display: a photo of Father Bill at the entrance. I felt the guilt immediately. But I said nothing. Mass began. We stared at our Lord suffering on the cross.
After Communion, my daughter whispered, “Why is there a picture of Father Bill at the front of the church?” Then she paused. “Is it…his birthday?”
She had never been to a funeral before. She didn’t understand what the picture meant, but I think she knew—and phrased it this way, hopeful, glossing over the reality of what it probably was.
I told her we would talk in the car before her religious-education class that followed Mass. At first, my dear child thought she was in trouble for asking a question during Mass. But I confessed in the car. And there we sat, crying together, just the two of us. Grieving.
Later, when I called my husband to tell him what had happened, he said exactly what you are probably thinking: “You should’ve gone to the rosary. We’ve gotten our priorities all wrong on this for a while.”
He was right.
We missed that chance to grieve in communion with our parish—the community Father Bill had shepherded through the pandemic and through the early years of our daughter’s life. We missed it because I was afraid to confront grief—my own and hers.
But this is the mercy of our faith: God keeps giving us seasons for second chances. And the Catholic Church, in her wisdom, gives us three particular days: All Hallows’ Eve (better known as Halloween), All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Known together as the Triduum of the Hallows, or Allhallowtide, these days help us to remember that death and life are always intertwined. We face the dark, we celebrate the light, and we rest in the mercy that holds them both. We cannot rush past sorrow on the way to glory, however we might wish it were so.
Upon his golden jubilee, before his retirement, Father Bill told our parish, “I thank God for this wonderful opportunity to walk with you in faith and grow in love of Jesus.”
When I think of his words, I once more picture him walking with us through the Stations at San Juan, showing us how to walk with sorrow and not around it. I missed the point that day. But now I imagine him still walking beside us—one of those souls the church asks us to hold close, not in memory alone, but in prayer.
Now we place his photograph on our family ofrenda, alongside my mother and father—the three of them keeping one another company in our prayers. And I am resolved to no longer hide from grief. I will kneel with it, name it and teach my daughter to do the same. Because in the mystery of Allhallowtide—the saints above us, the souls before us, the living beside us—we are all, somehow, walking each other home, the faint sound of a harmonica helping us keep time.
This article appears in November 2026.
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