Mr. Pasadena was lowered into the earth in the corner of the Maryland he loved, a hard old shot-and-beer town wedged between Annapolis, Baltimore, and one of the Chesapeake Bay’s least glamorous inlets. Bruce Springsteen built platinum albums off of towns like Pasadena.
He could have cut a triple album off the back of Lawrence Wilbert Stephens Jr., 57, who was laid to rest Friday beneath a pleasant summer sky.
Larry’s many mourners still haven’t made peace with his sudden death. For some, he had brightened their day only hours before. They heard rheumatoid arthritis was knifing each day into his joints, but he never mentioned it. And when they caught him gritting his teeth, he would smile through his pain-reddened, full-moon-sized face.
He grew up thick-muscled and hard-working in the heavy winter snows of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. After earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Indiana University of Pennsylvania—when the last of the steel companies began to die—Larry and a college friend drove through the Allegheny Mountains to find a new life in Maryland.
He met Tiffany at a Pasadena ice cream stand. They fell in love, married, and raised a humble baseball player, Nate, and Rachel, the daughter who became the apple of his eye.
Larry could bench press a medium-sized car and hit a softball as far as Paul Bunyan. He wore a Steelers jersey on game days. Beneath all that strength and toughness was a selfless heart. He coached a few thousand Pasadena boys in baseball. Larry would be the one to cover the grenade.
As the leader of the Maryland Primary Care Physicians Central Laboratory, he treated his employees like an extension of his family. He was fiercely loyal and protective, a boss his employees saw more like a father.
“I wish I told you more how special and amazing you were,” someone said. “You would take your shirt off your back for anyone. If we called you, you were right there.”
[Larry and his son Nate at the laboratory, where Nate worked after college]
Larry’s Last Day
He had just put in a full day’s work and kissed Tiffany good night before an ordinary day gave way to the unthinkable break of dawn.
There were some health concerns. But there was no warning of the heart attack.
Morning starlight covered the countryside of Emmitsburg, Maryland, when Tiffany called Nate’s cell on May 28. Her 24-year-old son was an early riser; he had been getting in last-minute studying for an exam he would take later that day at Mount St. Mary’s University’s Physician Assistant school.
He put his cell to his ear. Morning, Mom. When he heard her voice break, life would never be the same. As the shock wave covered him, his insides crumpled when he thought of June 13.
My best friend’s dead. And he’ll never see Gabby walk down the aisle.
At 5:02 a.m., Nate called me, Gabby’s father.
“Mr. Wells…my dad died last night,” Nate said. “Will you pray [voice cracking] for my dad’s soul…and can you wake up Gabby? Will you let her know?”
The day before dying, Larry had been rehearsing his father-of-the-groom speech for next weekend’s rehearsal dinner in Annapolis. His best suit had already been cleaned and pressed. Never before had he been a happier man.
Nate was Dad’s best friend. Dad was Nate’s best friend.
On his last day, Larry told Tiffany and some employees how excited he was to attend an Orioles game with Nate and his friends that weekend—the opening act of a bachelor-party weekend in the Maryland mountains. I, too, had rarely been happier. And I was looking forward to sitting beside Larry that night to talk about the Orioles recent run of good play, about our families, and about our plan to take trips together to visit our kids after they moved into their new home outside of Emmitsburg. We had spoken recently about finding ourselves frequently thanking God that Gabby and Nate had found each other.
[Gabby and Nate on their first date]
Permanence of Matrimony, Death
So here we are, a few days before Gabby’s wedding veil becomes entwined with Nate’s mourning veil, where tears of joy and tears of sorrow will fall from the same eyes. It feels to me like the ending of an old Western, where the town is saved but the hero has to die.
How do you pass over and disregard Saturday’s empty chair? And how do you sing Catholic wedding songs with a funeral built into it? I imagine there’s a Bruce Springsteen song somewhere that gets into this, but I don’t know it.
But more importantly, when the DJ plays his final song and the wedding crowd thins, how does Nate look at my daughter and convince himself that she is all that matters now, when for most of the past two decades the person who mattered most was Dad, when grieving has scarcely begun?
How does Nate look at my daughter and convince himself that she is all that matters now, when for most of the past two decades the person who mattered most was Dad, when grieving has scarcely begun?Tweet This
[Gabby and Nate last week at the courthouse, after getting their marriage certificate (edited for privacy purposes)]
There’s an answer here; and Larry’s humble obit revealed it: “He knew Jesus Christ as His Lord and Savior.” For Nate and Gabby to have a shot at getting through the next several months, they know they must enter as one into the mystery of the Cross. Gabby simply must practice persistent patience when her husband seems lost in thought; and Nate must fight through the jungle of his pain to love Gabby in the same fashion as Christ in the garden, when He gave all when He didn’t want to.
A Boy and His Best Friend
The bachelor party got cancelled. No one went to the baseball game.
But Nate wanted Gabby to go through with the bridal shower. So as forty or so women drove out to my house last week, I drove out to the home where Nate was raised. I parked my car on his narrow street and saw him looking at me from a wood deck.
He spoke outside his door: “I trust in God’s mercy,” he said. “I trust in His providence…It is very hard, but I know God’s plans are bigger than anything I can know.”
We left the quiet house and drove out to a neighborhood bar. The flat-screen above the bar showed Orioles ace Kyle Bradish carving through the Blue Jays’ lineup, but Nate turned his back to it, the first time I had seen that happen.
His father had coached him since boyhood. He taught Nate how to become a crafty left-handed curveball pitcher in high school and baseball player at Mount St. Mary’s University. Before a shoulder injury, Nate did what his father did so well: he drove baseballs into different zip codes.
A Guinness and Miller Light sat on our table. In the fifth inning, an announcer was talking about the Orioles’ recent good run of play when Nate began telling stories about the remarkable relationship he shared with his dad.
“I wanted him to be my Best Man, but that might have been too much,” he said. “So I went with friends instead.”
“His only vocation was his family; he told me that once. He gave us all he had,” he said. “He was the toughest and hardest-working man I knew.”
When Nate and Rachel were young, their dad worked as many as 80 hours a week to provide. He’d come home from work as a lab technician, eat dinner and help with the homework at the same kitchen table, tuck them into bed, and wait until their eyes closed before slipping out of the front door of their split-foyer for another shift. Then he’d reappear at the breakfast table, awaiting them before the start of school, quietly sipping his coffee, as if he’d just slept the night through.
Orioles left fielder Colton Cowser hit a three-run home run to give Baltimore a 6-0 lead when I asked my future son-in-law how his dad had become his best friend. He lowered his eyes and fell silent. It seemed as though he was listening to a voice only he could hear.
He raised his eyes and mentioned the kitchen table, that rectangular block of wood crammed into a kitchen the size of your childhood bedroom. He had spent thousands of hours with his dad there.
“Some mornings, we sat across from one another and didn’t talk; we just enjoyed each other’s presence,” Nate said.
He had his cup of coffee. The silence was never awkward; the time felt warm, comfortable.
Dad listened to me. When he did talk, he rarely spoke about himself. He thought about his words carefully. Sometimes, he was so careful with his words that his silence could become unnerving for me. But I began to see that it wasn’t that he didn’t care about me; it was that he cared too deeply. He never wanted to say something wrong to me, or something that wasn’t in his heart.
I’ll miss those mornings at the kitchen table the most…that’s where we became best friends.
The time seemed right to raise a glass to Larry. But I found myself wanting to toast the young man sitting across from me—the boy Larry had raised, the son trying to navigate the unimaginable: he wanted to give my daughter all he had for the wedding from a broken heart.
Nate is the first man my daughter loved.
Gabby’s St. Joseph
My wife, Krista, took Gabby on a pilgrimage to Italy the summer of ‘24, where Krista prayed each day in chapels and cathedrals for God to bring a strong and holy man to her 23-year-old daughter. She chose St. Joseph as her intercessor, hoping a man like him might come along.
A few months later, on October 31, they met each other in Halloween costumes at a party at the base of the Emmitsburg hills. Nate was strong and smart and wanted to be a doctor or PA.
Months into their courtship, they began attending OCIA classes, not because Nate desired to become Catholic—he was the only one in the room with no intention to convert to the Faith—he just loved Jesus and Scripture, and he was beginning to love Gabby. And he really liked the priest teaching the class, Fr. Larry Swink. He was a long-time friend of mine who played college baseball, just like Nate.
One evening, Fr. Swink explained the Eucharist through the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel in a way Nate had never heard before. An unseen seed began to grow. Thereafter, Nate, Gabby, and Fr. Swink began to walk down the street after class for ice cream.
Nate then began asking me for books on prayer, the Eucharist, and St. Joseph. Before long, we found ourselves discussing contemplative prayer, the Gospels, magisterial teachings, Mary, and the saints.
On a frigid December night, Nate approached me outside of Loyola Retreat House in southern Maryland, a sacred place clinging to a cliffside overlooking a wide expanse of the Potomac River. He was spending the weekend on his first-ever men’s silent retreat.
He had just completed his first Rosary walk, stumbling his way through his first Rosary alongside 90 men processing beneath the stars toward a distant statue of Our Lady standing alone in a field.
As for me, I wanted to escape the cold and settle into my favorite rocking chair by the fireplace—the same place I had spent this weekend for the better part of the last 30 years.
Woodsmoke hung in the frigid sky when Nate met my eyes and motioned for me on the red-brick porch. At the time, he had been attending a non-denominational church, where pastors there rightly saw a God-fearing man who had the makings of a future pastor. They asked if he would be interested in a “pastor’s program” that might one day lead to him pastoring his own church.
They soon began assigning Nate short, videotaped practice sermons, and he shared a few with me. As I watched him reflect on one of Jesus’ miracles from my laptop, I saw a sincerity and warmth that wasn’t manufactured; Nate was speaking about someone he knew and loved.
It was that same look I saw in the cold that night. Breath vapor floated into the sky when he spoke in a voice that seemed to have harnessed all in his heart, mind, and soul.
“Gabby told me after we began to date of her love for the Faith and that she would one day raise her future children as Catholics,” he said. “And I respected and appreciated that.
Mr. Wells, I love Jesus in the same way Gabby does…and I love the thought of one day preaching to a congregation as their pastor…but I want to tell you something: I love your daughter more than that.
What I want to say is this: Your daughter means more to me than becoming a pastor…And through a lot of prayer and study, I am beginning to love the Catholic faith.
Happily Ever After
It was a few months later when Nate proposed on the side of an Emmitsburg mountain.
Shortly after that, he asked if I would be his Confirmation sponsor for when he came into the Church at an Easter Vigil Mass in ‘25. God had listened to Krista’s prayers from Italy; Nate chose St. Joseph for his Confirmation name—and of all the saints I know, it is St. Joseph that Nate most resembles.
In a few days, Gabrielle Maria Wells and Nathan Michael Stephens will become husband and wife. Larry, of course, won’t be there, but Gabby and Nate believe he will make his presence felt in some way.
And Nate knows best friends show up when it matters, because that’s what Dad always did.
That said, the father-son friendship reversed a few weeks ago.
Larry had run into an issue at work, one of those once-a-year problems that can’t be fixed right away. He had been carrying around a silent strain for most of the week when Nate drove home from PA school to spend the weekend with his family.
So of course, father and son found themselves again sitting across from one another at the kitchen table—where, in the darkness of the early morning, Dad shared some about the work issue.
Nate listened and didn’t speak much, even when his dad stopped talking. He thought to himself that Dad’s issue should be brought to prayer before offering a thought or some perspective.
So Larry sipped his coffee, understanding in the silence—for perhaps the first time—that his boy was becoming just like him.
“The day after my dad died, I read a text he had sent to a friend,” Nate said. “It said, ‘Everything’s okay now. Nate came home.’”
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