As My Mother’s birthday approaches, I found it timely to have been given this card and to be able to share it with my Dad.

T HE great and sad mistake of many people, among them even pious persons, is to imagine that those whom death has taken leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! – Where are they? In darkness? Oh, no! It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radi- ant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes full of tears. Oh, infinite consolation! Though invisible to us, our dear dead are not absent.

I have often reflected upon the sur- est comfort for those who mourn. It is this: a firm faith in the real and continual presence of our loved ones; it is the clear and penetrating convic- tion that death has not destroyed them, nor carried them away. They are not even absent, but living near to us, transfigured: having lost in their glori- ous change no delicacy of their souls, no tenderness of their hearts, nor es- pecial preference in their affection; on the contrary, having in depth and fervor of devotion, grown larger a hundredfold. Death is for the good, a translation into light, into power, into love. Those who on earth were only ordinary Christians, become perfect; those who were beautiful become good; those who were good become sublime.