{"id":1012,"date":"2006-06-17T23:46:36","date_gmt":"2006-06-17T23:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/fathers-day.html"},"modified":"2006-06-17T23:46:36","modified_gmt":"2006-06-17T23:46:36","slug":"fathers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/fathers-day.html","title":{"rendered":"Father’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

A moving story about a father of eleven children whose wife suddenly passed away this past February:<\/a><\/p>\n

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When Dan McNeill walks into his home after work, he does a mental roll call to figure out who is where. He is greeted by the little ones with hugs and kisses. The older ones wave and grab a hug in between their chores or playtime.<\/p>\n

One recent day, 8-year-old Gerry walked in a short time after his father and said, “Look what I made for you, Dad.” It was a decorated cake. “It’s from me to you. Well, it’s really for everybody else, too, but I kind of scraped some of the icing a little bit with my finger.”<\/p>\n

He had spent the afternoon with two cousins and his aunt, who decorates cakes.<\/p>\n

Both his family and his wife’s family have been very supportive, making themselves available to take one or two children shopping or to drop someone off at a sports game. His sister-in-law took the baby to a photographer for baby pictures as a Father’s Day present.<\/p>\n

Church friends are also helping. Parishioners from St. Francis DeSales Catholic Church bring dinner to the family three times a week. “We tried to cut the program after June 1st, but people complained that they hadn’t had a turn yet and others wanted to continue,” McNeill said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A moving story about a father of eleven children whose wife suddenly passed away this past February: When Dan McNeill walks into his home after work, he does a mental roll call to figure out who is where. He is greeted by the little ones with hugs and kisses. The older ones wave and grab…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFather's Day - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/fathers-day.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Father's Day - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A moving story about a father of eleven children whose wife suddenly passed away this past February: When Dan McNeill walks into his home after work, he does a mental roll call to figure out who is where. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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