The Communion Dress

Walter Bryne has buried one daughter and outlived everyone he ever loved. At eighty-four, with a missing leg, a worn-out walker, and a bedroom that still smells of someone else's past, he doesn't ask for much. Only one thing keeps reaching him through the dark.

Mary.

She was seven when she died. She never said a single word to Walter after she went. But for two years, since his son Gerald passed, she has been coming back?standing at the foot of his bed in the white eyelet dress they buried her in, holding, one at a time, the three things they placed in her coffin.

His granddaughter Arlene sees the fresh white roses appearing in a closed room. She sees his face?clear, certain, not confused?and she doesn't know what to do with what she's seeing. The doctor says brain damage. The medical chart says hallucinations. Walter says, "You don't have all the information."

When Father Ernie arrives, ready with the careful pastoral response, something happens that he can't put in any framework he has. He sits with Walter for an hour and leaves quieter than he came.

The Communion Dress is a novella about what we call grief and what we call mental illness and the slim, stubborn space between them where something else might live. It's a story about a man who isn't losing his mind?who may, in fact, be the only one in the room who is seeing clearly.

For readers who believe, for readers who doubt, and for everyone who has ever sat with someone at the edge of something they couldn't name. Loosely based on a true story.