Where She Lives Now

When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, my mind drifted back to a memory I hadn’t thought about in years. It was the spring of 1980, and I was just four years old. That was the year my Aunt Loretta passed away—she was the first person I ever lost.

Loretta Cavallo was born on March 25, 1936. She married Peter Fleming Jr. and had three sons: Peter III (Petey), Michael (Mikey), and James (Jimbo). She was pregnant with Jimbo when she was diagnosed with MS. This was long before there were any treatments, and the disease slowly took her mobility, her voice, and ultimately her life on March 29, 1980.

Even as a kid, I remember loving her deeply. I didn’t care that she was in a wheelchair or that her speech was hard to understand. She was my aunt, and I knew she loved me back. At four years old, I couldn’t fully grasp what MS was or what death meant. But I remember the day I started to understand. It was the day Auntie took me to visit Aunt Loretta.

The following is an excerpt from The Dog Story: How Faith, Family, and a Puppy Helped Me Rediscover Hope by Matt Cavallo.

The drive was quiet, the hum of the tires lulling me into a daze. I watched the familiar houses and trees blur past, but something felt different. Auntie wasn’t talking like she usually did, filling the silence with stories or questions about my day. She just held the steering wheel, her face calm but distant, as though her thoughts were somewhere far away.

When we pulled into an unfamiliar parking lot, I frowned, trying to piece together where we were. The area was vast, the grass neatly trimmed, but it wasn’t a park or a playground. There were no swings or slides, no buildings I could see.

Auntie helped me out of the car and took my hand. “Come on, Matty. Let’s go say hello.”

“Who are we here to see, Auntie?” I asked, squinting against the sunlight.

“Aunt Loretta,” she said with a soft smile, her voice steady.

The name stopped me in my tracks. I looked up at her, confused, but she gently tugged my hand, leading me forward.

We walked through the quiet cemetery, the sound of birds chirping the only thing breaking the stillness. The warm breeze rustled the trees, but the air felt different here—heavier, as if the ground itself was holding a secret.

We stopped in front of a polished headstone, Aunt Loretta’s name etched into the smooth stone. My little fingers traced the carved letters, the coolness of the granite under my touch.

“This is where she lives now?” I asked, looking up at Auntie with wide eyes.

She knelt beside me, her hand brushing over my hair. “Her body is here, but her soul is in heaven with God.”

I stared at the headstone, the words tangling in my mind. “So… she’s not coming back?”

Auntie’s smile wavered, her eyes soft and sad. “No, sweetheart. But she’s always with us. Just in a different way.”

“Will we ever see her again?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

Auntie’s hand squeezed mine gently. “One day, sweetheart. When it’s our time to go to heaven, we’ll see her again.”

The breeze brushed against my cheeks, cool and steady. I didn’t have the words to explain it then, but in that moment, I felt something bigger than myself, bigger than the sadness in Auntie’s voice.

I didn’t say anything else. I just stood there, my small hand in hers, looking at the stone and trying to understand what it all meant.

For the first time, I began to learn what it meant to say goodbye—not just to someone you loved, but to the certainty that life would always make sense.

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That moment has stayed with me. It was my first lesson in faith, in grief, and in the invisible bond that connects us to those we’ve lost.

Now, decades later, I stood at the same gravesite with my sons, Mason and Colby—16 and 14 years old. They never met Aunt Loretta, or Pa, or Nana. But I tell them the stories. I show them where their ancestors rest. That day, Auntie was with us too, sharing memories of her own—like the time she and Loretta almost drowned in Fearing Pond, a story I’ll save for another blog. We laughed, we remembered, and we stood in the presence of something timeless. I reminded my boys that love doesn’t die. It echoes through generations.

It’s strange how a quiet moment from childhood can echo forward in time. Loretta’s life—and her loss—was my first introduction to MS. And now, in a twist I never could’ve imagined, MS became part of my story too.

But just like Auntie said that day, those we love are never truly gone. And maybe—just maybe—they’re the ones helping guide us home.