By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
One of the strangest parts of aging is going back to the places of your youth.
Take, for example, my recent visit to my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. I was present with some 100,000 other people for a home football game weekend, but other than my wife, I did not know a soul there.
I had lived and learned on the lovely and wooded Northern Indiana campus with two lakes for four years, but that was over forty years ago. After graduating in 1983, I returned to my home state of Utah for law school and, it turns out, for life.
I’ve only returned to South Bend for a few visits, on average once every ten or so years. A lot can happen to a place in four decades.
The school has many new buildings—classrooms, offices, dorms, athletic facilities, and various institutes of one kind or another. The venerable Notre Dame stadium I knew has been renovated twice, once to include an upper ring of seats and another time to add three huge attached multi-use buildings that also provide game day suite seating.
Something else has been happening at ND since I left. Death.
I once knew many Holy Cross sisters who lived across the street from Notre Dame at Saint Mary’s College. All of them—including two of my high school teachers—are now dearly departed.
These were the sort of women the world could use today. They cared for children, tended to the sick and dying, ministered to underserved communities, and brought grace and comfort wherever they encountered pain and suffering.
There are almost 1,500 graves in Our Lady of Peace cemetery on the Saint Mary’s campus. The oldest burial dates back to 1847, just after the Holy Cross sisters arrived in Indiana in 1843.
Several markers note that some of the women resting below were U.S. Army nurses, including during the American Civil War. One of them—Mother Augusta Anderson—managed two Union army hospitals so well that General Ulysses S. Grant exclaimed, “What a wonderful woman she is! She can control the men better than I can.”
The day my wife Vicki and I visited the cemetery, a soft white morning mist floated up from the nearby St. Joseph River and lingered on the outskirts of the sacred site. It felt like the spirits of the good sisters were there, watching us, curious and thrilled to have a few living souls stroll by.
Just a short walk away, in verdant woods across a busy commercial thoroughfare (rather dully named State Road 933), we found the small and quiet cemetery of the Holy Cross fathers and brothers.
I knew many of them from my college days. Alas, they all are gone now too.
Like their female counterparts, the Holy Cross men have planted a lot of their members into the ground, over 1,100 at last count. The oldest burial at their community cemetery dates to 1844.
Some of the most familiar Notre Dame names rest in the multi-acre plot. Among others, there is Edward Sorin (founder of the University), William Corby (who comforted soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg), and Theodore Hesburgh (civil servant and University president for 35 years).
There also are markers for several of my priest-professors (John Dunne, Don McNeill, Claude Pomerleau, and David Burrell). Eugene Gorski, our Howard Hall dormitory rector, rests there too. He’s finally getting some peace after many tumultuous years of shepherding thousands of young men during their formative years.
The Catholic Church honors all these men and women, and many others, each year on All Souls Day. When I was young, I was indifferent about the November 2 commemoration.
I did not know many dead people back then. Now I get it. At some point in life, all that is left of so many of the people you knew best are their souls.
While I love and miss those old souls, one’s vital human contact can be quite limited if the only people you know are dead. Thus, during my recent visit to Notre Dame I tried to commune with the living too.
My wife and I met with the smart and engaging Sister Sharlet Ann Wagner, the new president of the Holy Cross Sisters. She seems more than ready for the demands of the job, having cut her teeth as an immigration lawyer in Salt Lake City and the District of Columbia.
I also introduced myself to fellow ND writer Josh Noem. Josh is now doing the good work of finding the best and brightest spiritual and religion writers for Ave Maria books to publish.
And I made brief contact with Professor Suzanne Shanahan (the Director of ND’s Center for Social Concerns) and Jason Kelly (the Editor of Notre Dame Magazine). I hope to talk to both of them more in the future.
I volunteered at the Center for Social Concerns when it first opened in 1982. And Notre Dame Magazine has helped me keep tabs on it—and the rest of the University—since then. They all seem to be in good hands now.
It’s completely possible that the Church-powers-that-be who established All Souls Day did it for people just like me.
We understand intellectually that the people and places we love cannot last forever, but that knowledge never fully vanquishes our fervent wish that they could. People like me need a reminder—to love and miss the legacy of those who came before, but notice those who came after and watch how they carry on and perhaps even improve things.
You don’t have to be dead to have lots of soul.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
