From Known by Name, by Father Jim King, C.S.C., a book about being a Holy Cross priest. Jim was rector of Christie Hall and a fundraising guy at the University from 1992 to 1997.

I have been at times awed by the way Holy Cross men show up in droves for funerals. People were floored when fifteen concelebrating priests marched up the aisle at my dad’s funeral, for example. Some of those men drove hours through thunderstorms to stand with me. Sometimes standing with each other is all we can do — and the very best thing to do. To be there for one another. Presence is everything.

But there have been two funerals I missed that I wanted badly to attend. One was for Father John Gerber, the seminary rector I tussled with so much, but I was far away, and I missed it. He died on Easter Sunday, and the death toll, the deep heavy bell that rings every ten seconds when a Holy Cross man dies, went out in the midst of the joyous peal of the bells proclaiming the Resurrection.

The other took place in Oregon, two years after I left the University to work at Notre Dame. It was for a boy named Thad who had lived across from me in Christie Hall. Thad was a falling-away Catholic pretending as hard as he could to be an agnostic, but this disguise got hard to swallow once he started showing up to weekly Mass in the hall. The more frequently I saw him in the pews, the more he liked to prod me with random questions about religion and Catholicism; in fact it would be more appropriate to say that he just liked to harass me generally no matter what the subject.

At one point, Thad got on a roll, bounding into my room constantly to tell me the latest priest jokes he’d heard, not all of which I found amusing. This culminated when he popped in five times in one night to tell me yet another priest joke. I was getting a tad weary of his exuberance and at about one in the morning was getting ready for bed. I had closed my door, which should have been a hint that I was closed for the night, but he bounded in one more time without knocking, and I lost it.

“What now!?”

“You tell me one,” he said.

I am terrible at jokes, and remember maybe five total, three of which are about Cubs fans, so I racked my brains, but the only one I could remember was one I didn’t want to tell. I sure did want him out of my hair, though.

“Okay,” I said. “What did the proctologist say to the priest after his operation?’”

“What?” he asked.

“‘The ass is mended. Go in peace.’ Now get out of my room.”

He walked out smiling and I headed to bed. A minute later the door opened again and he bounded in yelling “tell it again!” I grabbed all sixty-five inches of him by his shirt collar, tossed him into the hallway, bolted the door, and went to bed.

I spent the next year in Salzburg, directing the University’s program there, so I didn’t see Thad, but I smiled when I heard he had been accepted as an RA — he’d be getting sophomores banging on his door at one in the morning!

But then I got a call from his roommate, JB. Thad was not going to be an RA or return to school at all. Doctors discovered a tumor in his brain. Chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, he lost his left eye, and the cancer was spreading.

I went to visit him in Corvallis. He was in bed, his girlfriend sitting next to him. He tried to crack jokes but was very weak and could hardly sit up. Six weeks later JB called again. Thad had died, only twenty-one years old.

But there was more, JB explained. Thad’s pastor, an auxiliary bishop, had come to celebrate the Sacrament of the Sick the previous day. Thad was in major pain and unable to say much, but near the end of the visit he turned to JB and said, “I want to hear him say it.”

“What?”

“The punch line.”

“What punch line?”

“You know, the priest joke.”

With some reluctance, JB went up to the bishop, gulped, and said, “Tell Thad that the ass is mended, go in peace.’”

“Pardon me?” asked the bishop.

“Please?”

The bishop was a kind man, and he leaned over to Thad and said “Thad, the ass is mended, go in peace.”

Thad looked at JB and said, “See, I got a bishop to say it.” He smiled, closed his eyes, lapsed into a coma, and died later that day. Those were his last words.

After JB finished this story, I was dumbstruck for a moment and then began to laugh, and so did he, a young man who had just lost his best friend. We laughed long and then we wept.

I didn’t get ordained to tell punch lines from proctologists to be repeated at deathbeds by bishops. But I know that where there is deep laughter there is God, and I know that when people go to heaven they become fuller versions of who they were on earth. So I know that Thad is bursting gleefully through unimaginable doors, and telling jokes, and probably being tossed down the golden stairs every seventh day. Whenever I think of Thad, I laugh for a long time, and that is a prayer.