A sign from above via the phone

The Boston Herald

He never believed in signs. When I told him about my mother and the bird, he just smiled. "It was more than coincidence," I would argue. And he would give me a look that may as well have been a pat on the head.

My friend, Father Coen, had no trouble believing in the Resurrection, the Transfiguration, the Ascension, transubstantiation and eternal life. But he couldn't buy the simple fact that a lone bird flying in a barely open window on a cold November day was a sign that my mother was safe and that she had found a way to tell me.

I guess he didn't need signs. His faith was that strong. He buried his father, mother, brothers, all but one sister and his best friend. And he never doubted where they went.

But I doubted.

After my mother died, after I told her it was OK for her to leave, I was terrified that it wasn't. What if the world she had gone to was worse than the one she left? What if she were still in pain, only afraid and alone now, too? I remembered being a child and coming home from a horror movie, certain that the monster was stalking me. I wanted to wake my mother. I wanted her arms around me. Instead I went to my room. But it was only later, when I crept downstairs and lay in the bed beside her, that the monster disappeared.

Now I was the adult and my mother was the one alone somewhere. What if she were scared? And worse - what if she couldn't come to me?

The bird had always been a joke with us. "So when you're dead, Mom, are you going to fly in my window?" "If I can," she said.

Five days after she died, she did. She flew in. She flew out. And she flew away. But the bird was just a bird to Father Coen.

Faith is believing in the unseen. He had faith. He didn't need proof. But I did. I was certain that after he died, I would hear from him, that he would come to me in some way, because he knew I needed this. And because we talked every Tuesday night I was sure he would come on a Tuesday.

I waited. I hoped. But he didn't come. Then last Tuesday I was talking to someone from Watertown and St. Patrick's. And because Father Coen was from Watertown and St. Patrick's, the story spilled out. "I called him every Tuesday night no matter where he was and no matter where I was. And every Tuesday still, I think I'll hear from him. It's ridiculous but I keep waiting for a sign."

Less than an hour later, I got one. He would shake his head and say I didn't. But I know better. His friend called out of the blue to tell me about someone who was looking for a column I wrote months ago. "He said it had something to do with a woman making regular phone calls to a priest. He asked me to ask you for it."

That column begins like this: "I called him every Tuesday night no matter where he was and no matter where I was." A phone call about THIS column on a Tuesday? Chance? Coincidence? Or something more? It wasn't a choir of angels or an apparition or even a dream. It was, instead, just what it always was when he was here - a simple phone call, an ordinary hello.

Father Coen would raise his eyebrows and brush off this story. And I would chide him and say that for a man of faith he was a real skeptic.

He never believed in signs, but I do. And for me this was one.