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Just remembered my great-grandfather’s sister was named Agnes Pearl, which I think is the most beautiful name. His other sister was Annie Florence, which is sort of where my name comes from (or at least everyone let him think that) https://twitter.com/anne_theriault/status/1308227417593524224
(He had a very traumatic childhood where his sisters, mother and grandmother all died of TB within a few years of each other and then his house was destroyed in the Halifax explosion; one of his proudest moments as an adult was getting a gravestone for his sisters)
He made up for it with a very happy marriage. He met my great-grandmother when he was working construction on the Victoria Hospital and my great-grandmother was working as a dishwasher in the kitchen. He would see her through the window and was smitten with her.
She had just moved to Halifax from Cape Breton to escape a very abusive family situation. She was probably 18? 19? Spoke almost no English. He spoke no French. He would always say “we had other ways of communicating” and wiggle his eyebrows
My great-grandmother was the “go to mass every day and keep glow in the dark crucifixes around the house” type of catholic. He was a lapsed Anglican. It’s still a bit astonishing to me that she married him! “At the back of the church,” she always said.
After my great-grandfather’s death, my great-grandmother’s parish got a new priest, who for some reason told her that her husband wouldn’t be in heaven because he hadn’t ~really~ been Catholic (he’d officially converted but was a mass at Christmas and Easter type)
After that my great-grandmother just ... stopped going to church for a while? Which was very shocking because, again, she’d gone to daily mass and was very devout. But i think she hit a point where if her Billy wasn’t waiting for her in heaven, well, why bother?
Anyway, the parish later got a NEW new priest who was like wtf of course Billy is in heaven waiting for you, why would anyone tell you differently? And she went back to the church, and it was a consolation in her last days, etc
But I’ve always thought that was such a potent example of what it means to love somebody
