Brother Vincent F. Paletta, O.S.J.

Brother Vince Paletta was buried today. He was a wonder filled man. When the world would get dark when I was in College, he could shine a light on the darkness and make it go away. He was a happy man, yet he had a most unhappy life. He suffered from many pains in life, both physical and emotional. He was a devoted son, who loved and cared for his mother until her death. He suffered effects from a car crash he had been in from the late 50’s. He developed a liquid brain tumor that went undiagnosed for many years until it solidified. During the time while the tumor was undetected, he suffer extreme headaches and lost peripheral vision. He would have outburts that scared many, and an anger that would rage. Many thought he was going insane. When the tumor was at last found and removed, he suffered still from extreme headaches on occasions and his vision never returned to normal. Yet in all the time I knew Vince, he never complained about his ailments. He would laugh and say he had the vision of a hawk! (To which I would reply a dead hawk.) He laughed at his disabilities and learned to live with them.

Vince would go for a walk everyday down the hill at Mt. St. Joseph, a walk that lasted for 45 minutes to an hour. Everyday upon his return he would talk about all he saw, he did and what the dog did when he was walking. The walk seemed like a journey to a foreign country, when in actuality it was Vince being Vince. He enjoyed the simple pleasures of life. He would watch which flowers were blooming, which branch of a tree was falling, what tree the dog “watered” claiming at the end of a bad drought that all the trees on the Mount were “saved by the Zookalator watering each one”. (The Zookalator was a mutt named Joey who followed Vince everywhere.)

Vince named all of us with nicknames. One of us was Corazon, because he was hispanic and all hispanic songs have the word corazon in them. I was called Heinrich because of my always reading about the NAZIs and World War II. There was Chuck, stick, ganzo,Stevaroo and Chester. He found one unique aspect of us all and would give us names that we used to call each other by. It was an honor to be “named” by Vince. You had arrived and been called once he had a name for you.

As I said in the beginning, Vince was buried today. His body was ravaged by age and cancer and was laid to rest. I looked at him lying in his casket with his eyes closed and giggled. When we would walk in and find Vince sleeping in his chair in his “office” he would declare loudly that he was wide awake, he was “looking for holes in his eyelids!”. I smiled as I walked away from his grave today and wondered to myself, what nickname he is giving to God today?