Putnam prayers

Responding to this note, I attended the 7:30 am mass yesterday in Putnam. They have a lovely chapel, and hearing the mass entirely in Lithuanian brought me back to the happy days in New Haven, when Vaiva and I were members of St. Casimir's parish, where we were married and our children baptized.

Links for Sisters of the Immaculate Conception: Wikipedia entry; home page; the grounds.

Here's a photo of the chapel, published on their web site:



The nuns and Fr. Arvydas Zygas, who said the mass, graciously invited me for breakfast after mass. Many of them remember Vaiva well, some remember her from the early days when Camp Neringa was on the convent grounds, rather than in Brattleboro. I ate with them, and talked with Fr. Zygas for more than an hour afterward. He wanted to help me with my grief, but there is no help for that.

Fr. Zygas met Vaiva at a Lithuanian summer culteral retreat in 1972, when he was 14 and she was 18. This would be the summer before her first trip to Lithuania, documented in the letters below. He still remembers his long talks with her, but their paths crossed only a few times after that. He did follow her public career.

I also spoke with Fr. Zygas for about an hour from Vaiva's hospital room last December, as she lay dying. He told me how to arrange for her to get Extreme Unction from an on-call priest, which I did. This was a great blessing, because many people later asked if we had been able to do that. I believed it's what Vaiva wanted. She was quite religious, though not fanatic or public about it. She had a bible at her bedside, and she turned to frequently.