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Captivating Warrior Princess † No one is hopeless who hopes in God †Stand up for what you believe in, even when you are standing alone
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Mystery in the Second Engine
It would have been impossible for anyone to escape from there alive.
For 42 years my father was a brakesman on the old Southern Railway. He was proud of his record. In all that time he was involved in only one derailment. But that derailment changed his life forever. This is how he first told me the story, which I’ve since heard many times.
It was a cold November evening in 1981 when Dad left our house and travelled 30 miles to the railway yard. He parted his truck by the diesel shop, where he met up with the engineer, the flagman and the conductor. Their four engines sat idling, having already been switched together, refuelled and supplied by the shop’s crew. The men climbed aboard and drove down the terminal track past the station where they coupled with 114 freight carriages.
While the carriage inspector checked the brakes, my father went to the second engine. He settled into his swivel chair by the window. From there, riding backwards, he kept an eye on the moving train, alerting the engineer to anything unusual.
The yard-master at the north tower signalled his clearance and the engineer slowly set the train in motion. ‘Caboose in motion,’ the conductor announced over the radio. The engine gradually picked up speed, and within minutes the freight train, which stretched more than a mile down the tracks, was crossing the river. Then it turned north through the valley, leaving the city lights behind.
Now, about that time two men further up the tracks were wedging a piece of steel across the tracks, to see if the train would cut it in two, they confessed later. They climbed up a hill and hid in the bushes to watch.
Travelling 35 miles an hour, the train climbed a small gradient and passed over a trestle. ‘I felt a jolt,’ my father said. ‘I swivelled around in my chair and looked up ahead. The lead engine was bouncing up and down. Derailed! It veered left, barrelling down the hill, and I braced myself to absorb the shock.’
The first impact threw him to the right side of the cabin, badly cutting his head and hand. Again he braced himself. When the third engine slammed from the rear, the second was pushed on its side and turned 90 degrees, balancing precariously across the stream trestle. Then the fourth engine and 24 derailed carriages ploughed into the pile of wreckage.
Fuel poured from the engines’ tanks, and fire broke out, shooting flames 100 feet upwards. People from the nearby community frantically called in rescue squads. Meanwhile the engineer and the flagman crawled from the front engine to safety. The conductor climbed from the carriage at the end of the train. But my father was at the bottom of the wreckage. His lung had collapsed, his ribs were broken, and his clothes were soaked with blood and the diesel fuel that was pouring into the cabin.
‘Fear shook me to my root,’ Dad told me. ‘There was no way out. Then I took hold of my senses and simply said, “God, if you don’t want me to burn up, you’d better help me.”
‘The response came instantly and was just as clear as my request. It came in the form of calm assurance. I fell a surge of confidence and peace. I knew I would find a way out.’
Every time Dad tells the story he stops there and picks up at the point where he found himself sitting on the tracks beside the engine. Fire was blazing all around him, so he jumped from the trestle to the stream below. He the crawled to a mobile home in the woods. He sat down on the porch just as the fuel tanks began exploding in the distance. The woman who lived in the mobile home called an ambulance and put towels on Dad’s head to stop the bleeding.
Invariable, when the story is finished, people ask, ‘But how did you get out of the engine?’ I asked him myself on the day immediately following the accident. Without hesitation, Dad answered, astonished, ‘Well, God just opened up a hole and I crawled out!’
A host of experts examined the second engine - the derrick foreman, the master mechanic, the train master, and the many men who cleaned up the wreckage. They all shook their heads, saying the same thing: it would have been impossible for anyone to escape from there alive.
I am inclined towards the original telling of the story. For although my father has always been a good and honest man, he was never - until that fateful night - a man of faith. Since then he has carried the strong, steady and sure faith born in that desperate moment when he reached out and God provided a means of escape.
Because there was no hole. I saw the second engine myself.
By Gincy May
Message In A Bottle
When I look back on how I came to America from Cuba, I can’t help but feel my steps were guided. Each piece of the journey has clicked into place as if part of a design, a larger plan. Still, some might be tempted to call this blind luck. Not I.
My homeland of Cuba is a beautiful island. By far the best thing about my country is its people. It took all of my will to decide to leave the land and the people I love, especially my family. Many times it seemed easier simply to remain in Cuba and hope that someday things would change, that the people would be given freedom to believe and say what they wish.
I grew up barely aware of who or what God is. He seemed as far away as the America I sometimes dreamed about, as remote as freedom itself. Then my friend Rebecca revealed something to me that changed my life … the first step of my journey.
My goal was to study medicine but I would have to pass a very tough university entrance exam. In the library with Rebecca one day, I was overwhelmed with anxiety. I confided in her how afraid I was that I’d fail. She looked at me for a long time as if trying to make up her mind about something; then she leaned over and whispered, ‘Eredis, if you do not know the answer to a question on the test, ask God to help you.’ Then she quickly turned back to her book.
Not many people in my country talked about God. I didn’t know what to think of what she’d said, but I kept turning it over in my mind. Then, while taking the gruelling test, I came to a maths problem that completely baffled me. I couldn’t even understand the question, let alone come up with an answer. The more I thought, the more panicked and confused I became. If you miss this question, you will never go to medical school, I warned myself. As I racked my brain for an answer, Rebecca’s words came back to me. Ask God to help you. I had never talked to God before. Now, desperate, I said a clumsy prayer for help, almost as if asking for a big favour: ‘God, whoever you are, I want to be a doctor. It is my dream. Please help.’
Rereading the question, I knew at once what was being asked. I wasn’t sure of the answer, but I understood the question and that was a start. When the test results were posted, I had passed, by just the margin of answering that one question.
I wanted to find our more about God. Rebecca gave me a pocket New Testament. Then I found an old Bible in a bookshop and began to study it. I learned that prayer is so much more than merely asking a favour of God, and that sometimes prayers are answered in ways that are mysterious to us. But God knows our desires at all times.
From then on my dreams no longer seemed so far-fetched. There was a lottery to choose some of the 20,000 Cubans who would be permitted to emigrate to the US that year. Along with thousands of Cubans, I applied and dreamed of being chosen. Now I could do more than dream. I could pray!
At Mariana Grajales University in Holguin City I studied medicine, and prayed, every day. I had little time for anything else. And while I was getting closer to becoming a doctor, I was getting no closer at all to America. One weekend in February 1997, my third year of studies, I decided I needed a break. I went to my grand-mother’s house near Playa Larga.
At dawn that Saturday, I stood on a patch of beach fishing in the churning surf. In the distance two freighters inched along, the smoke from their stacks smudging the rosy sky. Behind them, the rising sun rippled on the horizon. Somewhere beyond that was America. Lately I had begun to think that I was not meant to go to America, that God did not share my dram. ‘Lord, what is your will?’ I asked now, looking out at where the water met the sky. ‘Where do I belong?’
A burst of sea spray forced my gaze down at the sand. There, among the debris cast up by the Atlantic Ocean, was a bottle. Not an unusual sight on a beach. I was about to kick it back into the water when I noticed a piece of paper inside, with writing on it.
I dropped my fishing rod, picked up the bottle and sat down on a rock to examine it. A crack in the seal had allowed some water in, but the cork was intact. Holding the bottle up to the dawn sky, I tried to read what was written on the paper. From the little English I knew, I could make out the words ‘note’ and ‘open’. My heart raced. This bottle probably came from America!
I broke the bottle on the rock as gently as I could and took out the paper. I couldn’t wait to get back to the university, where I had my English - Spanish dictionary, so I could decipher the note’s message.
After my patient rounds on Monday, I began to translate the note from the bottle. A family by the name of Lieske from Minnesota had put the bottle into the ocean near a place called Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on 30 July 1993, during a family holiday. The Lieskes asked the person who found the bottle to write to them, stating where it had washed up, and telling a little bit about himself. They promised to write back.
I went to the library and checked an atlas. Henderson was almost as many miles from Cape Cod as Cape Cod was from Cuba. This bottle had come so far! It must be very cold in Minnesota, I decided, looking over the map. They probably get snow there. I’d always wanted to see snow. I traced the 1,6000-mile route from Cape Cod to Cuba. The bottle had taken three years, six months and 15 days to reach Playa Larga. Just the thought of such a journey brought butterflies to my stomach.
This bottle travelled all the way from America, I kept thinking, to land at my feet on a beach in Cuba. That night in my prayers I asked, Lord, is this a message?’ did it mean I was destined to go to America, that God shared my dream?
I wrote to the Lyses and we exchanged photographs. They said I should visit them if I ever came to America, and that they were praying for me. Just knowing about those prayers made my dream feel more within reach.
A year after finding the Lyses’ bottle I was walking home from school when a neighbour stopped me. ‘Eredis,’ she cried, ‘You’ve been chosen!’ She was so excited that I could hardly understand her. Then another neighbour rushed up and explained that my name had been drawn in the emigration lottery.
I had read about miracles in m Bible. This, I realized, was what a miracle felt like. I ran home. My mother was crying. I took her in my arms. She was torn between wanting what was best for me and not wanting me to leave. Someday, I told her, Cuban mothers would no longer have to face this choice.
I had to wait several months for my paperwork to be approved. I began to feel sad that I would be leaving all my friends and family. As long as the Castro government was in power, it would be nearly impossible for me to return to Cuba. Yes, I had wanted to go to America, but I didn’t realize that it would feel so lonely. Though I did not want to seem ungrateful, I told God all my fears and asked if He could help me. I believed this is why I met Naillyvis.
Again, it started with a neighbour’s announcement. The daughter of her cousin had also been chosen in the emigration lottery. That was certainly enough to catch my interest. When I heard that this young woman who was also a medical student at Mariana Grajales University, I couldn’t help but think of the Lyses’ bottle. Was God again leading the right people into my life at the right time?
‘What’s her name?’ I asked.
‘I can’t remember,’ my neighbour said, but she’d try to find out. I went to my classes thinking about how good it would be to have another student to travel and plan with, if only I could find her.
Then came the day of my formal interview with the emigration officials. Sitting in the waiting room was someone I recognized from class, a woman I’d known and liked for quite a while.
‘Naillyvis!’
‘Eredis!’
Naillyvis had been very quiet around the university about her good fortune, because it is not in her nature to brag. Now we could go to America together.
There is something about planning a journey that brings people closer. Naillyvis would probably say it is the romance of travel. It wasn’t long before we feel in love, and the stress of leaving Cuba was replaced by the sense that we were being guided to where we were meant to be.
The day of our departure I rode in the back of my uncle’s open truck with half a dozen relatives. At the airport I climbed down and gave a little speech thanking my family for all their love and support. I tried not to cry but it was no use. Taking my little sister Liset aside, I gave her my Bible. ‘Liset, read this book and trust in God. He has a dream for you too.’
Naillyvis and I held hands and closed our eyes as the plane rumbled, then roared down the runway. I thought about Rebecca teaching me to ask God for help, about the Lieskes in Minnesota and how their bottle gave me a message of hope when I need hope the most, about finding Naillyvis, about all the wonderful things that had happened. When I opened my eyes again, Cuba was falling away below, shrinking patch of green in a blue sea. America lay ahead. Once more I though, this is what a miracle feels like.
By Eredis Gutierrez Aguilera Eredis and Naillyvis made it to America safely and later got engaged. While they study English and apply to medical school there, Eredis works in a glass factory in Louisville, and Naillyvis is a hotel maid. In December 1998, the Lyses flew Eredis and Naillyvis to Minnesota, to spend the holidays with the,. Ad it’s there that Eredis finally saw snow.
Fragile Moments
Words are very powerful when used with love
My favourite love story is also a true one. Soon after he was married, Thomas Moore, the famous nineteenth century Irish poet, was called away on a business trip. Upon his return he was met at the door not by his beautiful bride, but by the family doctor.
‘Your wife is upstairs,’ said the doctor. ‘But she has asked that you do not come up.’ And then Moore learned the terrible truth: his wife had contracted smallpox. The disease had left her once flawless skin pocked and scarred. She had taken one look at her reflection in the mirror and commanded that the shutters be drawn and that her husband never see her again.
Moore would not listen. He ran upstairs and threw open the door of his wife’s room. It was black as night inside. Not a sound came from the darkness. Groping along the wall, Moore felt for the gas jets.
A startled cry came form a black corner of the room. ‘No! Don’t light the lamps!’
Moore hesitated, swayed by the pleading in the voice.
‘Go’ she begged ‘Please go! This is the greatest gift I can give you, now.’
Moore did go. He went down to his study where he sat up most the night writing. Not a poem this time, but a song. He had never written a song before, but now he found it more natural to his mood than simple poetry. He not only wrote the words, he wrote the music too. And the next morning as soon as the sun was up he returned to his wife’s room.
He felt his way to a chair and sat down. ‘Are you awake?’ he asked.
‘I am,’ came a voice from the far side of the room. ‘But you must not ask to see me. You must not press me, Thomas.’
‘I will sing to you, then,’ he answered. And so, for the first time, Thomas Moore sang to his wife the song that still lives today:
Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly today,
Were to changed by tomorrow,
And flee in my arms,
Like fairy gifts fading away,
Thou wouldst still be adored,
As this moment thou art
Let they loveliness fade as it will, More heard a movement from the dark corner where his wife lay in her loneliness, waiting. He continued: Let thy loveliness fade as it will, And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart Would entwine itself verdantly still… The song ended. As his voice trailed off on the last note, Moore heard his bride rise. She crossed the room to the window, reached up and slowly drew open the shutters.
By Galen Drake The Rock
This singer discovered a new song
Most entertainers spend thousands of hours on the road. It’s part of the job. The likelihood of accidents is a possibility that we live with on a daily basis. For me, that possibility became a reality one day in the mountains of Colorado.
I have been a singer nearly all my life. I entered my first talent show when I was five years old. Music was the rock that saw me through hard times and good times.
I wish I could say church was as important to me, but it wasn’t.
I was raised in St Louis, in a strictly religious home, with emphasis on the strict. It seemed to me that nobody ever talked about loving God, just about following the rules.
As I got older and my rebellion became more noticeable, the list of things I couldn’t do got longer. One night Mum insisted I make a choice: I could live my life right or plan on going to hell. At the time, my own desires seemed more real to me than hell did. I moved out and quit going to church.
To all appearances, things went well. I was able to make a living by singing. Often, driving to cub dates, I found myself thinking. I was on the road a lot. What if I had an accident? I was afraid of dying and I didn’t want to go o hell, so I vowed to be extra careful on the roads.
Soon the focus of my career moved to Nashville. Often when I was there stayed with a girlfriend of mine named Peggy, also a singer. She was one of those people who always smiled. Unless you knew her, you couldn’t tell how terrible her life was. But this time she was so happy that I finally said, ‘What on earth has happened to you? I’ve never seen you so happy.’
She said, ‘I got saved.’
Now in my old church we never talked about being saved, so I said, ‘Really, where? From what? So she started talking about God and how He had changed her life. She was going to church that night and she asked me to go along. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went. Before that week was out, Jesus invaded my life. I fell in love with Him and gave my life to Him.
My life changed. I quit singing and became totally immersed in church activates to the exclusion of everything else.
Finally one day my husband said, ‘I’m just going to tell you one thing. Then I’m not going to bring it up anymore. If you think that God saved you so you could sit here on your behind and say “Glory, hallelujah, I’m going to heaven when I die”, then you’d better think again. If every time a person becomes a Christian, he or she refuses to go where the people don’t know about God, who’s going to tell them?’
‘You know, Barbara, when I first met you, you were the sweetest person I’d ever known. But since you got religion you’re the most selfish wretch I’ve ever seen. Why don’t you start thinking about the people who need to hear what you sing?’
Well! That got me thinking, I’ll tell you. The upshot was that I went back to singing.
But that meant I had to start travelling again. Shortly thereafter, I recorded “The Teddy Bear Song’ - and watched, amazed, as it became a number one hit. Suddenly my concerts were in great demand, and our schedule necessitated that my band and I hit the road in a bus.
The bus was convenient, and even pleasant. We each had a bunk, and there was a television and a tape player to pass the time. I even brought along a mini-sewing machine. Things went well - until one fateful day.
It was late when we boarded the bus after the concert the night before. We had been doing a series of concerts thought Colorado. To reach our next destination in time to perform, we’d have to drive straight through without stopping. To do so, our professional driver had trained John, one of our band members, to drive the bus so the two of them could share the driving.
That night, I was bone tired and ready to sack out. As we started our ascent into the mountains, I managed to kick off my shoes before snuggling into the cocoon-warmth of my bunk in the back of the bus. Within moments I was asleep.
After several hours, the driver pulled over and woke John to replace him. The two of them went over the map and the route. Then we started off again.
Sometime later, John realised he must have missed the marked route. Rather than wake the driver, he looked at the map and found another road that looked possible. He didn’t know that in the mountains, roads can quickly become too narrow or too steep for a bus to negotiate. That’s what happened. As the climb became steeper and steeper, the bus slowed to a crawl. Finally it couldn’t go any farther. We came to a stop.
I awoke to the sudden stillness of the engine being shut off. It was overheated, and the driver decided to let it cool while finding the best way out of this predicament. Most of the band members woke up and got of the bus to study the problem. There was nothing I could do to help, so I drifted back off to sleep.
In a few minutes I felt the bus start to move backward. I looked out at my bunk, and there was no driver at the wheel. Keith, my piano player, stuck his head out of his bunk too. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
I’ll go see,’ he said, and he jumped up. The driver forgot that the bus’s air brakes were run by the engine. Once the air escaped, there was nothing holding us. The bus rolled backward, picking up more and more speed. We careened off the road. There were no trees on that slope, nothing to break our fall.
I was thrown from my bunk, tossed around like a rag doll. Keith came falling back my way. The pain was excruciating as I was slammed against the walls and bunks.
But then something incredible happened. In place of terror, I felt washed with a perfect peace. This is the day I’ll see heaven, I thought. From that moment I felt no pain.
The bus stopped. It was hanging onto a giant boulder by the front axle, tottering precariously. Keith and I stared at each other dumbly for a millisecond. Then we slowly and carefully started helping each other up the steep pitch of the bus aisle. When john reached the bus and climbed in to help us, his face told us we were still in danger.
When the three of us finally stood safe on solid ground, I saw how we had been stopped in the middle of nothingness. I patted that boulder, and exclaimed, ’Jesus is my Rock!’
To this day, people think it is incredible that my life was saved when the bus rolled off the mountain. But the real miracle wasn’t that my life was saved; it’s that God didn’t give up n the girl that gave up on Him years before. That day He even took away my fear of death. Today, though music is still an important part of me, I know that nothing can ever take the place of the true Rock of my life.
By Barbara Fairchild
Love Goes Further
A broken relationship is wonderfully restored.
This is the story of a woman’s love for her husband. Whether he deserved that love - and why he acted the way he did - are questions I can’t answer. I’m not going to write about Karl Taylor; this story is about his wife. The story begins early in 1950 in the Taylors’ small flat. Edith Taylor was sure that she was the ‘Happiest woman alive’. She and Karl had been married twenty-three years, and her heart still skipped a beat when he walked into the room. As for Karl, he gave every appearance of a man in love with his wife. Indeed, he seemed almost dependent on her, as if he didn’t want to be gone too long away from her. If his job as a government warehouse worker took him out of town he’d write Edith a long letter every night and drop her postcards several times during the day. He sent small gifts from every place he visited. Often at night they’d sit up late in their flat and talk about the house they’d own someday, ‘when we can make the down-payment’. In February, 1950, the government sent Karl to Okinawa for a few months to work in a new warehouse. It was a long time to be away - and so far! This time no little gifts came. Edith understood. He was putting every penny he saved into the bank for their home. Hadn’t she begged him for years not to spend so much on her, to save it for the house? The lonesome months dragged on, and it seemed to Edith that the job was taking longer and longer. Each time she expected him home he’d write that he must stay ‘another three weeks’, ‘another month’, ‘just two months longer’. He had been gone a year now - and suddenly Edith had an inspiration. Why not buy their home now, before Karl got back, as a surprise for him! She was working now and putting all her earnings in the bank. So she made a down-payment on a cosy cottage with lots of trees and a view. Karl’s letters were coming less and less often. No gifts she understood. But a few pennies for a postage stamp? Then, after weeks of silence, came a letter: ‘Dear Edith. I wish there were a kinder way to tell you that we are no longer married…’ Edith walked to the sofa and sat down. He had arranged a divorce. The woman lived on Okinawa. She was Japanese; Aiko, maid-of-all-work assigned to clean his room. She was nineteen. Edith was forty-eight. Now, if I were making up this story, the rejected wife would feel first shock, then fury. She would fight that quick paper-divorce; she would hate her husband and the woman. She would want vengeance for her own shattered life. But what I am describing here simply is not what happened… Edith Taylor did not hate Karl. Perhaps she had loved him so long she was unable to stop loving him. She could picture the situation so well. A penniless girl. A lonely man who- Edith knew it - sometimes drank more than he should. Constant closeness. But even so (here Edith made an heroic effort to be proud of her husband) - even so, Karl had not done the easy, shameful thing. He had chosen the hard way of divorce, rather than take advantage of a young servant-girl. The only thing Edith could not believe was that he had stopped loving her. That he loved Aiko; too, she made herself accept. But the difference in their ages, in their backgrounds - this couldn’t be the kind of love she and Karl had known! Someday they would both discover this - someday, somehow, Karl would come home. Edith now built her life around this thought. She wrote to Karl, asking him to keep her in touch with the small, day-to-day things in his life. She sold the little cottage with its view. Karl never knew about it. He wrote one day that he and Aiko were expecting a baby. Marie was born in 1951, then in 1953, Helen. Edith sent gifts to the little girls. She still wrote to Karl and he wrote back, the comfortable letters of two people who knew each other very well: Helen had a tooth, Aiko’s English was improving, Karl had lost weight. Edith’s life was lived now on Okinawa. She merely went through the motions of existence at her flat. Back and forth between factory and home, her mind was always on Karl. Someday he’ll come back… And then the terrible letter: Karl was dying of lung cancer. Karl’s last letters were filled with fear. Not for himself, but for Aiko, and especially for his two little girls. He had been saving to send them to school in America, but his hospital bills were taking everything. What would become of them? Then Edith knew that her last gift to Karl could be peace of mind for these final weeks. She wrote to him that, if Aiko were willing, she would take Marie and Helen and bring them up in her own home. For many months after Karl’s death, Aiko would not let her children go. They were all she had ever known. Yet what could she offer them except a life like hers had been? A life of poverty, servitude and despair. In November, 1956, she sent the girls to her ‘Dear Aunt Edith’. Edith had known it would be hard to be a mother at fifty-four to a three-year-old and a five-year-old. She hadn’t known that in the time since Karl’s death they would forget the little English they knew. But Marie and Helen learned fast. The fear left their eyes, their faces grew plump. And Edith- for the first time in six years - was hurrying home from work. Even getting meals was fun again! Sadder were the times when letters came from Aiko. ‘Aunt. Tell me now what they do. If Marie or Helen cry or not.’ in the broken English Edith read the loneliness, and she knew what loneliness was. Money was another problem. Edith hired a woman to care for the girls while she worked. Being both mother and age-earner left her thin and tired. In February she became ill, but she kept working because he was afraid to lose a day’s pay; at the factory one day she fainted. She was in the hospital two weeks with pneumonia. There in the hospital bed, she faced the fact that she would be old before the girls were grown. She thought she had done everything that love for Karl asked of her, but now she knew there was one thing more. She must bring the girls’ real mother here too. She had made the decision, but doing it was something else. Aiko was still a Japanese citizen, and that immigration quota had a waiting list many years long. It was then that Edith Taylor wrote to me, telling me her story and asking if I could help her. I described the situation in my newspaper column. Others did more. Petitions were started, a special bill speeded through and, in August, 1957, Aiko Taylor was permitted to enter the country. As the plane came in at the airport, Edith had a moment of fear. What if she should hate this woman who had taken Karl away from her? The last person off the plane was a girl so thin and small Edith thought at first it was a child. She did not come down the stairs, she only stood there, clutching the railing, and Edith knew that, if she had been afraid, Aiko was near panic. She called Aiko’s name and the girl rushed down the steps into Edith’s arms. In that brief moment, as they held each other, Edith had an extraordinary thought. ‘Help me to love this girl, as if she were a part of Karl, come home. I prayed for him to come back. Now he was in his two little daughters and in this gentle girl that he loved. Help me, God, to know that.’ Edith’s prayers have been answered. Today - seven years after this story took place, Edith and Aiko Taylor and the two growing girls live together in the flat. ‘Aunt Edith’ is the proud ‘other mother’ to Aiko’s children. Marie, who was confirmed recently, is doing really well at school. Helen has been found to have a talent for ballet and has been accepted by a ballet school. Aiko now speaks fluent English and plans to visit her family in Japan. Edith writes that though ‘God has taken one life I loved dearly; He has given me three others to love. I am so thankful.’
By Bob Considine
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