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I have this disorder, you see.  It’s a very unfortunate affliction whereas whenever I am sitting at the school mass on Wednesdays, I start to cry.  Not all out bawling, mind you, but that uncomfortable sort where I am moving around in strange contortions, blinking rapidly, praying to either keep the tears back or come up with some reason to put on sun glasses in the dim church.  This is the fourth week, and it’s the fourth time it has happened.  Sadly, I don’t see this changing.  I’m a sap.  So be it.

But today my eyes started to sting for a different reason.

I didn’t realize what the date was until I got in the car this morning and looked at my phone.  Usually I see it coming.  I prepare myself.  But this year it just snuck up on me.

All throughout mass, you could hear echoes of that day.  The priest never mentioned it specifically (too sensitive of a subject for a church full of kids, most of whom weren’t even born in 2001, and many of whom are too young for all of the details,) but he alluded to it.  During the petitions, they prayed for peace and for firefighters and for those left behind.  The echoes were there for those of us who knew to listen.

And then before Communion, the organist started to play, “Let there be peace on Earth,” and sappy me… you guessed it.  I started blinking rapidly.

It brought me back to that day, twelve years ago, sitting on the couch in an apartment I had just moved into, in a town I was just getting used to, at a school I would soon know very well.  I was out of sorts at the time.  Displaced.

And I think that’s how many of us spend most of our twenties — searching, aspiring, working towards a place that we can’t exactly find or even really define.

For me, I spent most of that decade pursuing knowledge and a career and children.  I was always searching.  Always moving forward.  Never really knowing where I was going or where or even how I would land.

And then sitting in that pew, surrounded by my babies, a few rows behind my oldest baby, I realized that somehow it had happened.  I had landed.  I had one of those glorious, only a few times in a lifetime moments when I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be.  I was surrounded by my little loves, enveloped in a community that really felt right.  It felt like home.  Like me.  Like I had traveled way back in time to those days when I was sitting in the pews in a jumper, my sisters and brother sitting with different classes, in different pews, and my mom in the back watching us all.

I had come full circle.  I had come home.

There is a line in TJ’s and my wedding song, “Feels like I’m all the way back where I belong.”  I couldn’t say it better myself.

So to all those who lost family and friends and dear ones all those years ago, my prayer for you is that you have been able to find peace.  That you have found yourself back where you belong.

That you have found home.

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