Who was priest who consoled her?

As her 21-year-old brother Michael lay dying in a Texas military hospital in 1975, all Cheryl Kawola could do was pray for the strength to accept the inevitable.

Having suffered severe burns to 75 percent of his body after his U.S. naval vessel collided with another ship in the Mediterranean, Michael had been stabilized in a German hospital and then flown to the Burn Trauma Unit at Brooks Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

Arriving there with her parents and grandparents, Cheryl heard the grim prognosis with her own ears and was trying to accept the fact that her only sibling would soon be leaving this world.

Comforting priest

"I was sitting on a chair saying the Rosary when a young clergyman, who I assumed was a minister or chaplain at the hospital, stopped and asked me what I was doing," recalled Cheryl, now a parishioner of St. Michael the Archangel Church in Troy.

"I told him I was trying to prepare myself for my brother's death. He just very kindly and compassionately told me that we are never truly prepared for those we love to die," recalled Cheryl.

She remembers the clergyman as being "quite handsome and wearing a [Roman] collar."

Words of consolation

The clergyman returned to comfort her shortly after her brother passed away.

"He said: `It's okay to cry,'" she recalled. "'Remember that Jesus cried when Lazarus died. It's okay to do feel the way you are feeling right now, even to question, and to ask God why.' Then he said that I would be all right, but that my parents really needed me and instructed me to watch out and care for my Mom and Dad.

"His words had a healing impact. I found them to be very consoling at the time."

Who was he?

When she returned to New York, Cheryl sent out thank you notes to the doctors, nurses and others who had supported the family while Michael was dying. Included on her list was the clergyman who had so profoundly touched her.

"He had given me his name and title and everything, so I knew I had properly addressed the envelope," she said. "But within a short time, the card I had mailed to him came back, stamped with a message indicating that there was no such person at that address. That was the first time it struck me that he might have been some kind of an angel sent by God. But I didn't tell anyone for fear they'd think I was crazy.

"Up until now, I've kept the story pretty much to myself, but since my father died last month, I've started feeling better about sharing it."

Saying goodbye

Because her father's death followed a prolonged illness, Cheryl had "an opportunity to say the kinds of things I never had a chance to tell my brother. With my father, there was a closure that I did not have when I lost Michael. I always regretted that I never said good-bye to my brother. When I found out my father was dying, he knew exactly how I felt."

In fact, Cheryl made one final request before he passed on.

"I reminded him that when he went on to Heaven, it would just be Mom and me alone down here," she explained. "I asked him to tell Michael that it would be greatly appreciated if the two of them could help Mom and me out once in a while on the days when things got really, really hard."

Meanwhile, Cheryl finds comfort in watching "Touched By An Angel," the popular CBS TV series about angels who change people's lives.

"I'll never know for sure if I was touched by an angel back in 1975," she said, "but I do believe very strongly in the existence of angels."

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