After everyone has gone, I often stand at the grave with Ray, the cemetery sextant, at my side and the vault man busy in his efforts and we reminisce about the life that has finished - one lived to the extent that we all hope to have until our bodies are no longer capable of sustaining and we pass into eternity.  "A life well lived," we often surmise as we walk from the grave.

Today was not that sort of day for me.  Today was unlike any other, and I have to ask myself, "How do I do this?" ...but the answer is obvious...as it must be for all of us in this industry dealing with the uncertainties and frailties of life.

Jami Wilson is 25.  She got her master's degree in education and teaches in a local elementary school.  I've read about her in The Delaware Gazette - a gifted teacher full of energy for what she is doing, the type of teacher kids will remember long after they have moved on.  Her parents ran Wilson's C.J. of Course clothing store before the big mall moved in south of town and they had to close.  Our parents know each other from way back and even though I don't know her, I do know her.

Jami and I never met, but surely she knows me as I know her - a local girl who went off to college and came home to nest.  Both of us are divorced.  Both married young out of college and sadly it just didn't work out.  We both come from upper middle-class backgrounds and when we walk down the street, people know us.  Both of us want to give back to a community we care about.

There is one difference though - Jami is dying.  she was diagnosed with bone cancer less than a year ago.  Being a strong woman, she fought back.  She publicly documented her fight, she taught kids about cancer, and she chose not to wear a wig when all her hair fell out.  I read about her in the paper, as we all did, and hoped.  She received a bone marrow transplant a month ago, but it was not enough.  Today her father came in to make arrangements.  She is terminal and she is dying.

While talking about the arrangements, he said, "You know, we all hoped for a miracle."  I didn't know what to say.  We have all been in this situation, a dreaded impasse when we know that no matter what we say it will not be enough and if we say nothing then we seem uncaring.  But words seem not enough.  I said simply, "I know - we all hoped that for her."  It seemed empty and inadequate.

It was troubling to me.  With a background in therapy, I am rarely unable to feel that I give some sense of comfort.  But I realized that, yes, she deserves a miracle!  But miracles seem fleeting and too few and far between in this world, and certainly are not very present in the funeral business.  They are not something that I believe in, and it would have seemed disingenuous of me to say otherwise.  I couldn't remember any miracles that I had witnessed.  Not that I am hardened, but I simply consider myself logical about it.

During the course of our discussion, I found that Jami lived several houses away from mine.  I had walked countless times past her house; yet our paths had never crossed in life.  The path I took almost every day with my dogs when the weather was nice had led me past her doorstep countless times.  I could recall the home, but I could not recall her, and it seemed so odd to me that we were so close in life but had never met.

And now, I was never to meet her in life.  I was to care for her only in death.  How odd the way the world turns and we in it so unaware of what life will bring us and how we are to be a part of another's life and death.

Jami died soon after, and I had been plagued with my discussion with her father.  Why not a miracle, I had continued to ask.  Certainly if these sorts of things happened, there was no one more deserving than she.

Her memorial service was held in the local high school auditorium.  I stood there and watched as people filled the room, people whose lives she had touched - either as a teacher, friend or as a part of our small community.  I listened attentively as friends spoke of her life, her wonderful life filled with teaching children.  Not only educating them, but teaching them about illness, strength and courage and; finally, about death.

As I stood there looking over the auditorium and thinking of how she had touched so many people, the answer to the question I had sought came to me, so beautiful and clear.  After the service I met her Dad on the way out, and I finally had the words I had not been able to say.  I told him, "You know, we were all hoping for a miracle, but what we never realized all along was that she is the miracle."

Miracles happen, not perhaps in a biblical sense, but in a real life way - every day in people around us, just beyond the bend, in a smile on the street, in a life no matter how shortlived.  It is for us to see the miracle an to believe.