My father in law, John F. Collins, passed away at 2:30 this morning after a short bout with cancer that was diagnosed only the day after Father's Day.

Yesterday was his wedding anniversary. He was a romantic family man who had never ever taken off his wedding ring since his wedding day. The hospital asked the family to remove it this morning.

When I first met my husband, we went out for a friendly dinner that wasn't really supposed to be a date. I had no friends at the time and was very lonely and just wanted someone to eat Indian food with me. Steve had never had Indian food but said he was game. All I knew about him was that he was a drummer and a painter and from Long Island. I thought that he must be sort of a knucklehead. Over dinner, he told me about his family and about his father, who was an English professor and an expert in ecclesiastical Latin and Greek. I will always be grateful for the chink that this cut into my prejudices, allowing me to see Steve in a more truthful light.

Steve's family is creative with the English language, and his father was known to his nine children and their spouses as "Deed". He was brilliant with language and could tell you the etymology of any word, often offering up really juicy ones unsolicited. Puns were abundant and a huge part of his sense of humor. He was a singer and sang with a choir in New York at Carnegie Hall on a regular basis. He loved opera as well as world music and would play them both eccentricly loud in the living room. He was also interested in fonts and type, having had made a Greek font out of necessity. He spent a lot of time at his computer tweaking pixels on fonts.

I have often been confounded by what I saw in Deed as a contradiction between the intellectual life and the religous life. He was a devoted Catholic, but I came to learn that he was no sheep and had, what I think, are very sophisticated ideas about the church and spirituality and the Bible. I have learned that there are Catholics who don't necessarily agree with everything the church says or does, but still claim Catholicism as their own, identifying with its teachings in ways that make sense to them, and protesting against things that don't, much the way that I might identify as an American while still disagreeing with things that my country does. Forgive me if this seems obvious and rather dense on my part, but it is quite distant from my own experience of religion. I have tremendous respect for Deed's spiritual life and ideas, though I don't think that I will ever have the intellectual basis to understand them completely.

Deed was a tall, thin, handsome man with white hair and a white beard. I think that perhaps his hair was always white. I know that in the sixties and seventies it was longer and he looked like a wild man, or Ted Kaczynski. He had a gentle demeanor and although I can tell from his family's accounts that he could be fearsome when they were children, I have never known him to be that way. He had gorgeous hands with long fingers and in the past couple of weeks, when saying hello or goodbye, he would just raise his hand with two fingers raised in that gesture you see in Jesus paintings. It was the most loving thing he could do, as he could not be hugged or kissed.

He is already, and will continue to be, sorely missed.