Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something.

Pope Francis wrote those words in February.

A new beginning, he called it because he said,

we'll experience something that we've never fully experienced, eternity.

I've been thinking a lot about those words the last few days while I've been working here in

Rome. I hope he's right that death is a new beginning. I'm not sure what I believe about what happens to us after we die.

But I am certain that when someone we love dies, it is a new beginning for those of us left behind.

The good news which I've learned through doing this podcast is that the death of someone we love doesn't have to be the

end of our relationship with them we can still talk with them walk with them hold them close in our

hearts and in our lives i never believe that before i certainly never felt it but i do now i feel my dad

with me part of me and my understanding of him, my love for him

is deepened as I've become a father and am older now than he ever was. I still struggle to feel

my brother, my sadness and pain over his death and the distance that existed between us before

it is still so great,

but I hope to one day soon be able to turn toward that pain, turn toward him, and feel him in a new

way. As Andrew Garfield said in the last season of the podcast, the wound is the only root to the

gift. The death of someone you love is not the end of everything.

It can be the beginning of something new with the person you've lost. I think there's a sense of an

ongoing conversation. That's Father Patrick Mary Briscoe, a priest I met in Rome a few days ago.

What has ended here on this life isn't really the end of the story.

We say in the Catholic funeral liturgy that life has changed, not ended.

Life is changed, not ended.

...