The worst day of the week is Sunday. It’s for family and friends. Something that you are in short supply of after you lose your spouse. I don’t know how it is for people who lose their loved ones suddenly. I would imagine that the shock compells family and friends to hang around for a while but perhaps not. I know plenty of widows and widowers who lost their spouses tragically who can attest to the fact that very quickly the phone stops ringing, cards stop arriving, and people they thought they could count on disappear back into a life they are no longer a part of. It’s like losing your membership in a club. One day you are one of them and the next you are one of “them”. Sundays are the longest day of the week. Not that the rest of the weekend doesn’t carry its own special tortures but generally, you can shrug off Friday night without too much effort. You’re tired and by the time you’ve gotten children home and fed and maybe hit the gym for a workout, it’s easy to kick back and call it an early night. Saturday is for errands and housework and yardwork and kid’s birthday parties and playdates that can easily keep a person running into the early evening. But, Sunday is a blackhole that waits for you all week long and swallows you. A wormhole to hell. If you go to church, you are assailed by families, whole and happy. If you avoid it, as I do, you are left with that many more hours of the day to fill. Say what you like about mass, but it is a guaranteed time sucker. When I was a child, I never knew a priest who couldn’t conduct a service in less than 35 minutes. My father’s uncle, Father John, was the master of eclesiatical efficiency. Twenty minutes and this included the homily. My cousins and I used to time him. We never caught him going long. When my aunt’s husband died, I remember my father telling one of his brothers, who was worried we wouldn’t make it across town to the cemetary before the noon traffic began, that he shouldn’t worry because Father John never ran long. The marriage ceremony he performed for my parents was probably the longest mass he ever gave. It lasted about a half hour, but he was drunk. Today, if it weren’t for the consecration, you couldn’t tell a Catholic Mass from a Protestant service. Quanity over quality. Sunday is a day when you cannot call up friends and finagle an invite or a playdate. It is a day when you will run into couples and families wherever you go. It is a day when you remember most keenly that you are not like them anymore.