Prayers, love, support, not lost in father's death

Michael Vesey, a 10-year-old who loves baseball, wants to share the "book" he's written about his dad.

Handwritten, it fits on a sheet of lined notebook paper.

"On Oct. 13, 2004, I was born," he reads aloud. His mother, Kelly, and three teenage sisters are seated around the granite kitchen counter of their spacious Bucks County home.

"It was the best day of my life, and the first," he reads. His sisters giggle. Michael waits, unabashed.

"As the years passed, my dad was always there with me," he goes on. "He taught me the sport I love with a tee-ball set. He taught humility and love and passion, all things important in my life."

The devoutly Catholic Veseys live in Newtown, Bucks County, where they enjoy love and prosperity to a degree that many families can only imagine.

But God, it is said, sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

There is something these very fortunate "haves" don't have.

"On Aug. 28, 2009, my father died from brain cancer," Michael reads. "I was heartbroken. I could not get over it. . . . Whenever I see a dad playing with their child, that brings sadness to me."

"You're cuter than they are," his sister Shannon teases.

"But I know he's watching over me," Michael finishes, and lays the paper down.

On the reverse side he has penned the words: "Dedicated to All Familys Who Have Lost One."

When it convenes here in September, the World Meeting of Families will be a celebration of family life in its many variations.

It will also hold up loving, two-parent married couples - sticking together in good times and bad - as the ideal for raising children. Yet the best of families can be battered and reshaped by forces beyond their control.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a star varsity football player and earned degrees in accounting and finance, Mike Vesey had climbed the ranks at Orleans Home Builders of Bensalem to become company president.

"He was doing very well," Kelly Vesey recalled. "He was a great, great dad. We were so happy."

In 2005, the rain began to fall.

The Veseys were all set to go on a Christmas ski vacation in Colorado. "We had our three girls and our little boy," Kelly Vesey, 50, said. "Life could not have been better."

Then, "Mike noticed numbness in his right arm." He told her it was a pinched nerve from snow shoveling, but it lasted for days.

"And I'll never forget the day after Christmas," she said, taking a deep breath to compose herself. "He dropped a coffee mug."

The Veseys' serenity shattered with it.

"He looked at me and said, 'My leg is numb,' and went to lie down. He was someone who never lay down."

When the next day's brain scan revealed a "mass," surgeons at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital thought it looked benign. "But when they got in," she said, "they discovered a stage-four glioblastoma." One neurosurgeon they consulted told them that Mike, 46, had three months to live.

"We were in shock," Vesey recalled. "We kept saying, 'How could this be?' "

Their search for a cure would become a twin-track journey of medical science and religious faith. It included surgeries, special Masses, experimental treatments, a pilgrimage, a papal blessing, rosaries prayed on nearly every car ride, moments of triumph, plunging disappointments, and many tears.

It was a faith journey that brought the family even closer, they say. Yet it left the older children mystified about God's ways.

"We went on a pilgrimage to a third-world country," said 13-year-old Lauren as she sat with her siblings around the kitchen counter. "What's the point of doing that if it doesn't help?"

"We prayed for four years," Caitlyn, 15, recalled.

"I don't get it," she said. "Four years."

After her father died, she said, "for a year everything hurt. I don't know how to describe the feeling of coldness. Every step I took hurt. Nothing ever felt good. I thought I'd never be happy again."

The pain eased over time, she said, but she later burst into tears recalling how she and her sisters would wait at the top of the stairs for Dad to come home, and rush down to meet him. "We wouldn't go to bed until he came home," she said, sobbing.

In a moment, though, the joyful memories were back.

"He was so funny," Caitlyn said, laughing. "One time, he was driving me home from soccer practice and I really had to go the bathroom, so he kept bouncing over bumps."

"He was always present," said 17-year-old Shannon. "When he was home, it was about us and what we wanted to do. There was a lot of playing."

"He'd read to us at bedtime," Lauren remembered. "And we'd take out our hair stuff and try to make ponytails on him. But he didn't have long enough hair." That got all the girls laughing.

Throughout their nearly four-year ordeal, and in the nearly six years since their father died, the Vesey children have never doubted the existence of God or heaven.

"We know Dad is like a second guardian angel, watching over us," said Lauren. The family even donated a large painted statue of the Virgin Mary in Mike's memory outside their church, St. Andrew's in Newtown.

Still, Caitlyn now has little patience for the rosary - a recitation of 50 Hail Marys - after praying it for her father "every time we got in the car", she said.

Their mother laughed and conceded it was true - she still tries to squeeze a rosary out of her kids on any drive of more than 20 minutes.

Though their fervent prayers did not yield the miracle they hoped for, she said, "it helped us get through" the long ordeal of Mike's cancer and death.

But she also knows what it's like to be a teenager feeling baffled, even betrayed, by God. And she knows that closure comes in its own time.

She was 18, about to start college, when her father, Dennis Mehigan, dropped dead of a heart attack at age 42.

In addition to Kelly, he left three sons, ages 17, 15, and 9, and a widow who had not worked outside the home since they were married. "He was kind of old-fashioned," she recalled with a small sigh.

The loss was unfathomable.

"People kept talking about 'God's will' and 'God's plan,' and telling us, 'You'll understand someday.' Well, my youngest brother was 9, so I couldn't see the logic," she said. "What good could come from that? Why would he take away a loving father? That's where I really started questioning."

She stopped going to Mass and wanted little to do with the Catholic Church. "I lost my faith."

She entered Juniata College, studied nursing, and worked three summer jobs to help support her family and her studies. "All the while I felt we were being punished in some way," she said. "I still believed God was there, but I didn't see him as a loving, protective father."

But nine years after her father's death she met the man who would reconnect her to God and the church she had abandoned.

Mike Vesey would restore the faith she drew on as his own life slipped away.

She was sharing a house with other nurses in Sea Isle City, N.J. One night they went to Springfield's, a popular bar. "And there was this handsome, funny guy who made me laugh. A really good, good guy."

Mike Vesey asked Kelly Mehigan for her phone number, and wrote it down on a page torn from The Inquirer, next to the date: Aug. 1, 1992.

"The next day," she said, "I told my friends, 'I just met the man I'm going to marry.' "

As they began dating, Mike - a devout Catholic - urged her to work out her anger with God and the church.

She did, with the help of a priest from her mother's parish, St. Mary's in Cherry Hill.

"I remember him saying, 'God is not sitting up in heaven, pointing down and saying, "You lose a child; you, a husband; you, a father." ' "

"There's evil in the world," she recalled the Rev. David Grover telling her. "God cannot control everything. But he's there to love and support us. And he will put people in your life to help you get through."

Soon she was attending Mass "pretty regularly."

Four years later, Grover married the two at Mike's parish, St. Andrew's.

He was 37. She was 31. The scrap of newspaper with her scribbled phone number is framed today.

Shannon came first, then came a miscarriage, then Caitlyn, then Lauren, another miscarriage, and Michael.

A nurse-practitioner, she quit after Lauren's birth in 2002 to be an at-home mom. And when Shannon started at Catholic kindergarten the next year, Vesey decided to start praying the rosary for Lent.

She climbed into bed one night with a new rosary and Mike gave her a look.

"Don't tell me you're going to turn into one of those holy rollers," he said.

No worries, she assured him.

Neither could imagine that in two years, she would be his fiercest prayer warrior.

"I really think God was preparing me for what was going to come," she said, "so that this time I wouldn't turn away."

Believing he had just three months to live, she taught Mike to pray the rosary, and the two began attending Wednesday night prayer groups. His "mantra," she said, was, "Keep the Faith."

As the months turned to a year, and then two, the prayers seemed to be working. Surgery had shrunk the tumor; radiation and experimental drug treatments at Duke University Hospital kept it at bay.

The family was so grateful that they decided in summer of 2007 to give God thanks, Catholic-style.

They made a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, a small village in Bosnia-Herzegovina where six young teenagers reported in 1981 an apparition of Mary to the Rev. Jozo Zovko, the local parish priest. While not officially recognized by the Vatican, the village's shrine draws hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.

"It was incredible," Vesey recalled. The older children hiked the mountains with their father. Zovko laid his hands on him.

"Mike fell to the ground and was out for several minutes," Vesey recalled, marveling. "He said afterwards he felt this tremendous force come over him. It was the Holy Spirit."

On their return trip, they arranged for a front-row pew at a papal Mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Moments before the Mass began, Pope Benedict XVI not only stopped to bless them, but clasped Mike - who was wearing a rosary around his neck- on the shoulders.

"We thought Mike was being miraculously healed," Vesey recalled.

But weeks later, a new brain scan revealed that his tumor had begun to grow. "We were devastated," she said.

The children still did not know that their father had brain cancer - their parents said it was a "neck problem" - and treatment at Duke seemed to show promise. But the two years that followed would prove a long, slow heartache.

By year's end, Mike was losing strength on his right side and the ability to speak.

New experimental treatments failed to make a difference, and about Thanksgiving of 2008, Vesey decided it was time to break the grim news to the girls.

Lauren, then 6, recalls the moment vividly. "I started flipping out. I said, 'What do you mean? Is Daddy going to die?' "

Their mother nodded. "There's always hope," she told them, but later recalled it as "an awful moment, full of tears."

Toward the end, Mike began using a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair, and in his final weeks, moved to a spare bedroom, visited or tended round the clock by hospice workers, friends, siblings, his mother, in-laws, his pastor, and his wife and children.

The children baked cookies that read, "I love you, Dad," and made him ceramic plates and cups so fragile that nearly all broke.

Unable to speak in his final days, he nonetheless astonished everyone when, as his friend and pastor at St. Andrew's, Msgr. Michael Picard, prayed the rosary over him, he suddenly found the voice to recite one Hail Mary.

It was far from the miracle they had hoped for, but it left his widow feeling he was "being held by God and the Blessed Mother."

Mike Vesey died Aug. 28, 2009. He was 50.

Because he left them so well provided for, Kelly Vesey's life has proved far less grueling than those of most single mothers. "It took a huge strain off," she said.

Still, "I really feel his absence," she said. "Sometimes it's overwhelming. I feel I'm just not able to provide the same direction he would. So that's another area I'm struggling with."

It seems, however, that the God who sends rain on the righteous sends sunshine, too.

Two years ago, Vesey met another Mike.

Widowed, with children ages 23, 21, and 19, Mike Gregor belongs to St. Andrew's parish. The two are engaged to be married this year.

Seeing their mother with another man "was definitely hard at first," said Shannon.

Caitlyn agreed.

"When Dad died, I felt the way to honor him was to never forget him," she said. "I felt I had to be sad to show how much I loved him. So when they started dating, I felt we were moving on and forgetting him."

The new Mike's presence in their mom's life so upset the children that she and he broke up, said Vesey. "But then they wrote him a letter that said they didn't want us to break up."

"We realized," said Shannon, that a husband in their mother's life "could be a blessing. We looked at the alternatives and realized, Dad's not coming back."

But the new Mike "is not coming in trying to be our dad," said Caitlyn.

The others nodded.

"You know Dad's happy for her," said Lauren. "And happy for us."