Laura Kelly Fanucci

Ten years ago we started being married. It is the vow that started our vocation. But what does it mean when a vow becomes an everyday verb? When a calling is shared as a single story? When we think about a wedding, we often think about a beginning. A clean slate for a new couple. An…

After our twins died, mothers from all over wrote to me. They had lost babies before birth, after birth, in childhood, and beyond. They wrote to me with love and compassion, empathy’s impulse to reach out in shared suffering, even to a stranger. And to a person, they all said the same thing. God was with me…

And then from the backseat, you hear a fidgeting restlessness. He begins to speak, and from the second the sentence ends, you feel the air around you change. “In the last chapter of Narnia that we read, they killed Aslan.” You grip your hands tighter around the steering wheel. Your knuckles turn pink-white, hard. You…

We sleep eight hours straight. No one wakes us. I rise on my own to soft sunlight, hearing birdsong. No hungry cries. I drink a glass of wine with dinner. I eat whatever I want. I never throw up. Spicy food makes no baby fussy. We didn’t have to buy a new car. Or rearrange…

Let me tell you three things about the Sacred Heart. First, I never understood it.  As a kid I was creeped out by kitschy pictures of Jesus pointing to his bleeding, dripping heart. I shuddered and skittered away past looming statues in church basements as quick as I could. I stole only the quickest glance…

Maggie and Abby have been gone for three months. Some days it feels as if their deaths were three minutes ago. Sometimes it feels like three years. Every morning I wake up, turn to the greening trees outside our bedroom window, reorient myself back to the world in which my babies are dead, and then get out…

I wanted every day to be that perfect. I did. Who wouldn’t? The sky was impossibly blue, the cottony clouds perfectly plump. The sun was warm and sweet. The lilies in my mother’s garden were in full bloom. The church pews were lined with beaming friends and family, just as the laughing dance floor would be packed later that…

Let me try to tell you. There have been exactly two afternoons in the past two months and two weeks (because yes, I still count in months and weeks; this is what mothers of newborns do, remember – or should do in a world where nature does not betray and babies do not die) when my…

You are the hoping-to-be mother.  You are dreaming of a baby, maybe for years. Every month you wait and hope. You daydream about nurseries and names. You envy other women’s round bellies and glowing smiles. You chart days on the calendar and read up on ways to increase your odds. You promise yourself you will never take…

It is still Easter. Good God. It is a dragging long Easter this year. Two more weeks still to go before we can breathe back into ordinary time. How long do I have to try to rejoice? Our family has done officially zero of our usual Easter season practices. The beloved Tomie de Paola sticker calendar is shoved in…