Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope is the story of Amy Welborn’s trip to the island of Sicily with three of her children five months after her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack. Her journey through city and countryside, small town and ancient ruins, opens unexpected doors of memory and reflection, a pilgrimage of the heart and an exploration of the soul. It is an observant and wry memoir and travelogue, intensely personal yet speaking to universal experiences of love and loss. Along the narrow roads and hairpin turns, the narrative reveals the beauty of the ordinary and the commonplace and asks stark questions about how we fill the empty places that a loved one leaves behind. It is a meditation on the possibility of faith, one that is unflinching, uncompromising, and altogether unsentimental when confronted by the ultimate test of belief. This book is not only a well-told memoir, but a testimony to the truth that love is stronger than death. "Amy Welborn's latest book is a must-read spiritual treasure. It reveals not only the heart-wrenching dynamics of grief but also the odd and wonderful way grace illumines even the thickest darkness. Funny, engagingly written, spiritually profound, Wish You Were Here is a gem." --Fr. Robert Barron, author of Catholicism. Wish You Were Here is the story of Amy Welborn's trip to Sicily ...in the aftermath of her husband's sudden death. Her pitch-perfect prose moves seamlessly from the winding, unknown roads of Italy to the winding, unknown roads of grief. -- Mary DeTurris Post, author of Walking Together: Discovering the Catholic Tradition of Spiritual Friendship. "Far from a dry theological treatise, Welborn masterfully blends individual struggle, faith pondering, a what-happened-on-summer-vacation travelogue, and the wry insights of a mother traveling with 4-, 8- and 17-year-olds into a very personal yet very universal meditation on death." -- John M. Grondelski, National Catholic Register. AMY WELBORN has written for Our Sunday Visitor, Catholic News Service, Beliefnet, the New York Times, and Commonweal. She has five children and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Introduction I raced into the backyard just after midnight.   Barefoot, in pajamas, I raised an empty brown pill bottle  into the frigid Kansas darkness, swept it through the air, snapped the white disc of a lid on top, and then rushed back into the silent house, through the hall into my room, wrote on a slip of paper, and taped it to the bottle.   Air— the label said— from 1970.   The bottle still rattles around in a drawer in my father’s house, I think. I wouldn’t throw it away if I ran across it. I wouldn’t open it either. I don’t know why. After all, it’s only air. *** Here’s what I remember from the first days of a February years later.   Sunday morning, we arrived at Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows parish so late that the only seats left were in the balcony. The first scripture reading was already happening by the time the fi ve of us squeezed into the pew: me; my husband, Mike; our two little boys, Joseph and Michael; and Katie, my teenaged daughter from my first marriage.   The elderly pastor—elfin in appearance, but resonant and dramatic in tone, always ending his sentences with a forceful, downward emphasis as if his words were screws he was forcing into a particularly tough board—began to preach from the sanc­tuary below us. In the Gospel that morning, Jesus had exorcised demons, but this would not be Monsignor’s subject. That would be death, of course.   Mike and I glanced at each other, amused. For in the fi ve months we had attended Mass in the parish in our new city of Birmingham, Alabama, we’d noticed this about the pastor: he liked to talk about death. No matter what the Gospel or the feast, it seemed, he’d find his way to it: we are all going to die and there is no more important task than preparing for the certainty. No surprise, really. The man had spent his adult life ministering to the dying and the grieving, and he was in his late seventies him­self. Death might be on his mind.   *** So that morning, nodding only briefly to Jesus and the demons, Monsignor moved on to a book he’d been given about life- after-death experiences, and here we were again at death’s door, where he would talk to us about death and—always his most repeated point—being prepared for it.   So yes, I remember glancing at Mike and him glancing back and I remember sharing knowing, slight smiles at death’s intro­duction. And we settled back to listen, to pray, to think about work tomorrow, about the next book or article deadline, all of us up there in the balcony, an enormous bas-relief of that Lady of Sorrows cradling her dead son on the sanctuary wall behind the altar straight ahead of us, in plain view.   I remember Mike kneeling beside me after Communion. I remember because his posture was just a little different than nor­mal. He usually looked ahe