This is a portion of my extended family gathered at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery to celebrate my step mother Adele Pearl Shaheen’s 100 years of life and love. My siblings, their spouses, their children and their children’s children. We are a force to be reckoned with. Adele inherited us when she married my dad half a century ago. She took it in good stride considering that she didn’t have her own children. Fully bathed and baptized into instant family, she never complained.
My siblings and I were raised Catholic but we were quick to decide that no priest could give Adele a better send off than we could on our own. Lord have mercy! Since most of us had not been to this cemetery in years- not since our brother, our mother and our father were buried- we decided to make this a pilgrimage of sorts.