A gregarious, well-liked 42-year-old husband and father killed his wife, then their four children. It was hideous. Two baseball bats were retrieved from the home later by police, probable murder weapons. The father, after failing first to asphyxiate, then to drown himself, made calls saying his family was “in heaven now,” and he was sorry for what he had done. He then proceeded to drive the family van into an electric signpost on I-80. The van’s speed caused a fireball on impact, leaving police to identify the driver as the family’s father only by dental records.

The father was in trouble for embezzling some half-million dollars from the bank for which he had been a vice-president.

That’s really all we know. We don’t know precisely why he did this, what his thoughts were, if he was mentally ill or simply under tremendous situational mental and emotional pressure from public shame and financial worries. We are told by all in a position to know that he was a good person, a kind father, and that he loved his wife and children. They are certain of this. In fact, the entire extended family is certain of this. To the astonishing extent that the visitation and funeral were held with all six caskets lined up at the front of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Iowa City. After the funeral, they processed to St. Josephs’ Cemetery, where they buried their deceased loved ones together, rendering the horribly sundered family symbolically whole once again.

Many people want to judge this choice. They are scoffing at the religion of the family, stunned that the mother and father of the murdered wife of this man, as well as her brother, proclaimed today their love and forgiveness of the killer. I guess they expected to see their own repulsion and hatred reflected in the remaining family members instead of what has been an amazing wall of grief and love. Not sugar-coated love, but fiercely determined love. Gritty, determined, and beautiful love, love big enough to survive even this – the physical annihilation of five people by one who then annihilated himself. A love big enough to absorb sorrow and shock most of us cannot, thankfully, comprehend. I can’t explain their choice, nor can I fathom their love, but I am willing now to stand in awe of it.

Three days after Monday morning, the day the family was found dead and the father found immolated in his van on the highway, a thing happened to me that I cannot explain any way other than what you will read here.

A barred owl has made an occasional night-time home in some tree canopies overhanging the driveway we share with our neighbors. I’ve heard his call, the who-koo-who-koooo some know as ‘who cooks for you?’ It is a resonant and highly amplified call, coming from the inside of such a relatively small bird. It fills the neighborhood, and it is eerily full and mournful. I love the owl, and have missed him since a few nights in December when I last heard him.

Thursday morning before light came, I sat at my computer working on an e-mail, and I heard his call. I was thrilled. The week of these deaths has weighed heavily on my whole small city. I have been tired and weakened in a way I find hard to explain, but that has been very noticeable. I’ve seen it on the faces of the people who work in my office and throughout my building. I’ve seen it on the faces of strangers at the grocer’s. The wounding has been real and taken a toll. So to hear the owl was a deep relief. I took it as a sign of something, maybe of them, of their ongoing existence somehow, somewhere. I hurried into some slippers and outside to stand under the great trees in my pajamas. It was about 35 degrees out, but I didn’t mind the cold. I listened, moved and relieved somehow by the deep call.

Suddenly there was a shadow falling out of the high treetops, and I saw it – he spread his wings as he glided down the narrow shared driveway between our two houses and out onto Kirkwood Avenue. I followed down the driveway as another small owl call came from down the street. I stood, happy, feeling I had had an important experience. Already I felt some of the week’s tension and unspoken sorrow lift from me. But then something remarkable happened.

First one barred owl, then another, then a kind of wild hooting owl, followed by yet another, then responses from at least half a dozen owls – all calling in short and sharp calls, as well as the long, mellow and full calls – began a chorus that lasted fully two minutes. I was dazed. The air rang with both wild and beautiful sounds. I was cemented to my spot in the driveway, not really caring that I was standing out in the early morning darkness in pajamas and slippers for anyone to see.

I stayed for a bit after they stopped, just amazed by it. And yes – I thought of them. I thought of all six of them. I felt something in my heart, something that eventually became clear as I attended the visitation and hugged the father’s father after spending two hours in the cold waiting to get into the church for that hug: They are restored, somehow, beyond all that occurred that last morning. They are whole, and beautiful as nature itself, and they are a chorus somewhere, both wild and beautiful.

I don’t think you’ll find much approval for this interpretation of the owls’ serenade in any edition of the Catechism. But no matter. It was a sign, of sorts, notice given by a God who cares even when it’s easy to think He does not. I’ll carry it with me as I move forward beyond this painful week. I’ll never forget the love of this large, two-sided family, a love that wouldn’t be annihilated by annihilation, and I’ll never forget the sign that such love endures beyond all things known and unknowable. It’s as close to comfort as we’re likely to get anytime soon.