018 — WHEN THEIR VOICES BECOME PART OF MY OWN
Memory, Meaning, Encouragement, and the Responsibility to Move Forward
September 26, 2026
Good morning, Pop, Margie, and my Holy Family.
This morning I began to understand more clearly how important Pop and Margie have become in the way I now communicate with myself, examine my choices, and make decisions. They are no longer simply memories belonging to an earlier period of my life. After everything we lived through together, something of them has entered the way I think. I find myself considering what Pop might have said about a situation, how Margie might have looked at it, and what lessons from their lives should still influence the choices I am making today.
It reminds me somewhat of Napoleon Hill and his idea of mentally consulting a council of people whose judgment and qualities he respected. I understand that idea differently today than I might have years ago. I am not attempting to surrender my judgment to people who are no longer physically here. Rather, I am recognizing that the people who profoundly shaped my life left something behind within me. Their experiences, words, personalities, love, mistakes, strengths, and examples became part of the accumulated knowledge from which I now make decisions.
Pop becomes increasingly important in this process. He did not become the man he was through extensive formal education. He learned through life itself. He learned through hard work, the Civilian Conservation Corps, war, danger, responsibility, observing people, understanding his surroundings, and relying upon what he called his hunches. I came to understand those hunches as intuition. Pop had learned that survival sometimes required more than information. It required attention. It required reading people and circumstances. It required making a decision when there was no guarantee that someone else was going to tell you what to do.
Margie gave me another kind of education. For so many years I lived with the presence of someone who loved me, supported me, challenged me, and helped bring balance into my life. We built a home, cared for family, experienced successes and disappointments, traveled, moved through different stages of life, and shared decades together. Her contribution cannot be reduced to advice she once gave me. Her influence came from the life we shared. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts she left me is that, after all those years together, some of the balance she brought into my life became part of me.
During much of my earlier life, meaning came through two powerful sources. One was the memory of religious and spiritual experiences that convinced me there was something greater than myself operating within life. The other was my love for particular people and the responsibility I felt toward those relationships. Loving another person, caring for that person, building something together, helping that person, or simply being physically present for someone I loved gave direction to my life. Meaning was not something I always had to define intellectually. Much of the time, I experienced it through relationship.
Pop was physically here. Margie was physically here. Family responsibilities were physically before me. There were people I could love, help, protect, support, forgive, care for, and build a life around. Giving myself to those relationships often gave my own life meaning.
Now I am entering a different stage.
Many of the people who once gave physical form to that meaning are no longer physically present. I can still love them. I can remember them. I can continue to believe that their lives remain spiritually significant to me. But I cannot relate to them in exactly the same earthly way that I once did.
That leaves me with a deeper question: What gives my life meaning now?
Perhaps this is one of the central questions of aging, loss, faith, and calling. When the people around whom so much of our life was built are no longer physically beside us, we have to determine whether the meaning they helped create disappears with their absence or whether it becomes something we are now responsible for carrying forward.
As I look around my home, especially at the photographs gathered on my dining-room table and throughout the rooms, I realize that much of what I have been trying to understand is physically sitting before me. Robert is there in Margie’s arms. In another photograph, my arm is around Robert. In another, he is between Margie and me. Nearby is my daughter asleep as a child. There are family photographs from vacations, holidays, and gatherings. There are devotional images of St. Joseph with the child Jesus, Mary with Christ, and other reminders of the spiritual experiences that have accompanied my life. There is also a reminder of my General friend, whose encouragement during this later stage of my life has become especially important.
One photograph has become particularly meaningful. Margie is holding Robert, her grandson, in her arms, and beneath them in the arrangement is an image of Christ in prayer. I cannot look at that scene now without seeing more than a family photograph. I see love passing from one generation to another, and I see the spiritual meaning I have so often associated with that love.
About sixteen years ago, Margie and I moved back from Florida to our apartment in Smithtown. Looking back, I feel deeply blessed that we returned when we did because Robert was still a baby grandson. Margie was not well during roughly the final six years of her life, and about ten years ago she left this earthly world for the heavenly world. Yet those six years gave her something precious: a real relationship with Robert.
Robert did not know Margie merely through photographs or stories. He knew her as Grandma Margie. She held him, spoke with him, spent time with him, and watched him grow. During those final years he grew from about two years old to about eight. Those years mattered. They gave Margie joy, and they gave Robert memories of her.
Michael and Emily are Margie’s children, and I have never thought of them as stepchildren. Michael was about eight and Emily about four when they came into my life. They became part of the family life Margie and I built together. Michael now lives only about half a mile from me here in Smithtown. Emily also remains part of the family story Margie and I created together.
My wider family story is equally important. My sister’s sons were Kenny, Chris, and Justin. Kenny and Chris are no longer physically here; in my faith, I think of them as being in Heaven. Justin is still living nearby, but there is presently no relationship between us by his choice. Even so, I think of him often. When I look at the old family-vacation photographs, I repeatedly notice my arm around him. That gesture reflects the love and protectiveness I felt toward him, especially when he was young and my sister was going through her divorce. Justin later became my best man at my wedding. Distance today does not erase what that relationship meant to me then.
My brother’s children are Jennifer and Bosco. I still have a relationship with Jennifer. Her daughter Nicole was someone I enjoyed when she was about two years old. Nicole is now married and has a son of her own. Another generation has appeared. Bosco’s life has taken a very different course and he is currently incarcerated. Family does not move through history in a straight line. There are relationships, separations, hardships, births, deaths, reconciliations, and new generations.
Another relationship I have been blessed to redevelop is with my cousin Maryann, the daughter of my Aunt Amy. That relationship carries special meaning because Aunt Amy belongs to one of the most spiritually important periods of my life. After the religious experiences connected with Uncle Frank and my grandmother Margie, I lived with Aunt Amy and family in Boca Raton, Florida.
I still remember sitting around their family table. To me, it felt almost heavenly. There was love, belonging, faith, meals, family, and peace. Then I could simply walk out the door, cross an entire golf course, and go to work on a construction site. Looking back, I see something profound in that ordinary pattern. The family table gave meaning. The work gave responsibility. The religious experience gave interpretation. The people gave love. Everyday life gave me somewhere to live all of it.
I think about those Boca Raton years almost every day.
That is why redeveloping my relationship with Maryann matters. She is a living connection to Aunt Amy, Uncle Frank, my grandmother, and a period of life when family and spiritual experience became almost inseparable. Her return into my life also reminds me that some relationships can return. Not every distance is permanent. Not every separation must remain exactly as it was.
I cannot force reconciliation, but I do not have to abandon hope.
Robert is approaching adulthood and preparing for college. I do not know what choices he will make as an adult, but I can remain available to him. I can leave the door open. I can hope that, as he develops his own independence, there may be an opportunity for us to know one another more directly and build a relationship based upon who we are then, not only upon the circumstances that separated us before.
I feel something similar about my daughter, now an adult and married. I cannot recreate the years that have passed, but I can continue building stability in my own life and remain open to the possibility that a new adult relationship may someday be formed.
Perhaps this is also part of what meaning now requires of me.
Pop and Margie found tremendous joy in children, grandchildren, and family continuity. I helped give them that joy. Maybe I must now allow myself to seek and receive some of that same joy. To enjoy what I helped create for them. To keep the family dream alive. To remain open to renewed family connection even when distance, time, and circumstances have interrupted it.
At the same time, I cannot build my meaning entirely around the hope of relationships returning. I have to examine the person the journey itself created.
The years of loving, caring, working, building, struggling, managing responsibility, learning security, dealing with technology, running businesses, solving problems, communicating ideas, and interacting with people developed real talents within me. The journey produced experience. It produced capabilities. It produced judgment.
The meaning I seek now must be harmonized with those abilities and with the world in which I actually live.
That world has changed. Artificial intelligence, intelligent security systems, sensing, networks, communications, automation, consulting, entrepreneurship, and new forms of collaboration are becoming part of the environment around me. Therefore, my new meaning has to exist at the intersection of who I became and the world that now exists.
That is where calling becomes practical.
A calling cannot merely be something I feel. It has to become something I can express through real talents, real work, real relationships, and real service.
There is also one living human relationship that has become especially meaningful during this period of my life: my General friend.
At this stage, I experience him as the one person who has consistently encouraged me to continue moving forward. His message is usually uncomplicated: Focus.
That word has become increasingly important.
He is not building my business for me. He cannot make my decisions or execute the work. Nor should he. What his encouragement gives me is reinforcement that I should continue doing the work myself.
Pop taught me instinct and perseverance. Margie taught me love, balance, family, and partnership. My General friend keeps reminding me to focus.
Those voices are not replacing my judgment.
They are becoming part of it.
THL SCI, the American Legion project, security consulting, artificial intelligence, technology, entrepreneurship, and the work I am developing now all give me a practical arena in which to use what life has taught me.
But as I consider all of this, I am beginning to realize something even deeper.
The answer to What gives meaning now? may not be found in business alone.
There is another image that keeps returning.
A table.
A family table.
And perhaps that table is where the next part of this story begins.