KRISTI: So Thin Is the Veil

by Peter Beaulieu

The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2006

399 pages, $16.95

To order: cpcbooks.com

1-800-707-0670

I wish I would live the way Kristi Beaulieu died. I wish I would treat my wife amidst our comfort and ease the way Peter Beaulieu treated his wife amidst their suffering and pain.

And I wish Register readers — especially married couples — would read Kristi: So Thin Is the Veil.

Knowing that the book recounted a life-snuffing battle with cancer, I expected a saccharine piece like so many of our eulogies these days — heavy on the canonization, light on reality. But I got more substance than I ever imagined.

The book is written by Kristi’s husband, Peter, a retired city planner who ought to make a second career writing books.

Beaulieu relates the love story that only deepened through his wife’s cancer-wracked existence beginning in 1989 until her death in the autumn of 2001. Through it all — the hospital stays, the “medication hell” resulting from Kristi’s intolerance to numerous treatments, the surgeries and other crosses — Beaulieu shows the making of a saint, a woman who patiently and humbly submitted all this, and eventually all of herself, to Christ.

Through her death, Beaulieu draws closer to an understanding of the communion of saints and to an understanding of “the veil.”

“In my more accepting moments, I was to learn that this gathering shines through so very thin a veil falling between those partially living ‘here’ and those fully living ‘there’ in eternity,” Beaulieu writes. “And so I have learned that in death the one lost is not to be found trailing behind in fading and shattered images. Kristi is now in front of me, and resplendently and solidly beyond the finite grasp of mere imagination.”

Though delving extensively into sickness, death and musings on the hereafter, Kristi is just as much a book about marriage, an inspiring illustration of what it is to live the vows of “good times and bad.” Kristi’s suffering is Peter’s, too, endured as he holds her pain-ravaged body for hours on end.

But it’s not just a simple recounting of Kristi’s death. Well-read and faithfully Catholic, Beaulieu often veers from his narrative for philosophical, theological, historical and other rifts.

These cover an unexpected array of topics: Church history, Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body, the European Union and much more. All of it with copious end notes (49 pages of them).

The shifts away from narrative are repeated numerous times throughout the book and are at once a strength and weakness. Beaulieu’s rifts provide reprieve — like when he breaks up the agony of Kristi’s hospital visits with recollections of a trip to Paris.

Yet Kristi’s narratives are what drive the book forward at a steady clip. The segues between them make sense and ring with truth — they’re just a bit disconcerting once you’re invested in Kristi’s tale and anticipating what comes next.

Throughout his book, Beaulieu connects dates of significance to the Church calendar, a reflection of how tied he and his wife were to their faith and to the communion of saints who assisted Kristi through her sickness and death.

Perhaps it was appropriate, then, that I finished Kristi on All Souls Day, that call for all of us to pray for our loved ones on the other side of the veil.

Anthony Flott is based in

Papillion, Nebraska.