Paula Celani is a life-long Montrealer, in fact, a life-long resident of the
neighbourhood of Notre-Dame de-Grace. The daughter of Italian immigrants who came to Canada after the war, she worked for years in the health and social service sector and retired 12 years ago as director of adult and family services. Widowed after 19 years of marriage, she is active in her local parish, has a loving and close relationship with her nieces, their spouses and children, and plays a pivotal role in the En Route Foundation that supports the Communion and Liberation movement in Canada.

It’s a brief biographical sketch of an already full life. It gives the pertinent details. But it does not tell the story of Celani’s remarkable vocation, devel- oped over nearly three decades, to the physical and spiritual accompaniment of people in the last months and days of life.
What Celani provides, along with a growing network of friends and allies around her, is a non-institutionalized, bureaucracy-free, Catholic palliative care service. Even calling it a service mischaracterizes it. The story behind her story reads as a collaboration of grace, an intricate piecing together of human lives and their eternal destiny by the hand of an attentive and loving God.

Six months before Celani was to be married, her fiancée, Rico, received a cancer diagnosis. Despite the news, they went ahead with the wedding. In the early years, when life was a combination of the normality of their jobs and life together, and the abnormality of a young man receiving aggressive cancer treatments, Celani focused on the nor- mal. She kept a vision of a happy mar- riage, a beautiful home and a growing family.
Reality hit when the couple received news they were unable to have children. Radiation therapy had rendered Rico infertile.
“I remember that weekend when he found out, oh my goodness, I think we cried for the weekend. This is where my crisis started. I was so angry with God.”

Though the inability to have children was a deep disappointment, Celani could see that her husband approached it with a different attitude.
“I could see him praying. I could see him saying, maybe God has a different plan for me and for us. When he would say that to me, I was like, what the hell does that mean? This is a beautiful plan. What’s wrong with this plan? He says, but maybe he has a much bigger and greater plan for us. And this, I couldn’t quite understand.”

Celani describes her faith at the time as immature. “My husband embraced his illness and its challenges with it with a complete trust in God. I embraced it with fear and terror, more like, ‘What the heck’s happening?’ ”
Her anger and distance from God grew as her husband’s health deteriorated. After 16 years, Rico’s heart and lungs were destroyed by intensive radiation treatments.
“Everything was more and more serious. I was taking care of him more and more. I remember saying to him,
‘I don’t understand. You love this God, but I hate Him. I really hate Him right now because He’s taken away all my dreams and I feel like I’m being royally punished.’ ”

Another moment of crisis followed on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25. The night before, Rico was struggling to breathe.
“I will always remember the date,” Celani says. “I really panicked, crying hysterically, shouting at God. I was very aggressive.”
After the crisis, Rico turned and told her, “You are going to be okay. I promise you.”
The next morning, Celani received an unexpected call from Fr. Markus Merz, a new priest at their parish. He wanted to visit.
With his oxygen in tow, Rico got out of bed and insisted Celani prepare tea and sweets for their visitor. She re members sitting in her living watching the exchange between her husband and the priest and questioning, “Who is this man? Why is he here?”
By the end of the visit, Rico had offered the use of his car to Fr. Markus. “Now he has given away our car,” Celani thought. But she also recalls that the offered prayer, the introduction to the Communion and Liberation frater nity and subsequent daily visits from Fr. Markus were pivotal. Celani describes her own conversion: moving from anger to a place of peace.
“It was Christ coming to visit me and accompanying me, literally taking me by the hand and saying, ‘You’re going to be okay. I love you and you’re going to be okay.’ And truly, from that experience, from that moment on, it changed.” In the last stages of illness, Rico couldn’t speak and communicated with his wife in writing. Towards the end of his life, he wrote, “We’ve had a very dramatic, intense marriage and life with all the circumstances, but I would relive the whole thing, every detail of what we experienced just to get to this day to be praying together and have the awareness and peace we have as a couple.”
Celani’s response shocked her. She replied without hesitation: “Me too.” She realized she loved Rico for his destiny.
“No matter the reality, the way he was in that circumstance, I loved him.” The arduous journey of accompany ing her husband in sickness and death transformed the path of her life. “From that moment, there has been someone in my life that has needed help, that has been sick, has terminal illness. God just keeps putting these people into my life.”

A turning point was Celani’s possibility for retirement. With her position and connections in the health sector, she was familiar with needs, grants and government subsidies for establishing a service so thought about a bigger organization. Instead, the work continued as intimate, personal accompaniment. A good friend, Paul, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He asked Celani to take the night shift in hospital after his wife left for the day. He wanted her to sit in his sight “so that when I open my eyes, I know someone is there.” He also asked that a Crucifix could be placed “just in front of his eyes” and told Celani to let her work at the readaptation centre go: “This is much greater.”
“After he said that to me,” Celani re counted, “it was all details.”
As Paul approached his death, anoth er mutual friend facing a cancer diag nosis asked her to accompany him the same way. “Saying ‘no’ never crossed my mind,” Celani says.

A community of care developed around what she was doing. Old high school friends, neighbours and friends from Communion and Liberation rallied when someone was ill and needed sup port. They began to discuss the bigger organization Celani had first contemplated. There was a recognized need for formal palliative care, which would re quire a building, and that meant raising money. Talk turned to a smaller operational unit within an existing institution.
“We had this desire, as a group of friends, to make personal accompaniment exceptional. We wanted people to be loved and accompanied the way God looks at us and loves us. I was on a mission. I was going to tap into my net work.”
Instead, the group hit an institutional brick wall. Still, the work continued and each experience teaches Celani something new about her unique vocation. Most recently, it was through the hard days, weeks and months of caring for her father. Salvatore Celani died in 2023, three days after the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. “Those last weeks of my dad were really difficult for me emotionally. He was just so, so sick. His discomfort and pain were so intense. It was difficult to watch.”
Celani recalls praying, “Dear God, please help him, please help me, that I can just stay in front of him.”
“That’s the other component. You’re human. There are moments where you realize there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing that can respond to what he needs. Sometimes even loving him, sitting, holding his hand, meals, making him comfortable in his bed, doing all that can be done on Earth is not enough.
“When you get to that point, when all these things we do are still not enough, ultimately what he needs is that relationship with God and that peace.”

Just a few months following her father’s death, a bishop close to the Communion and Liberation movement was diagnosed with cancer. Despite the fatigue she was still experiencing after intense caregiving for her father, Celani and her friends have once again rallied.
Visiting the bishop in hospital, Celani recalls looking across at the sick man and thinking, “It can’t get more concrete than this.”
“Christ, you are here in this. I don’t know what you want of me, but you have my ‘yes’ and whatever you’re asking him, and whatever you ask me in accompanying him and helping him in whatever way I can, you have my ‘yes.’ ”