The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth

An open, relentlessly honest life of seeking and suffering led Kyle Berceau ’12 to the best place of all.

By John Nagy ’00M.A. Published: Spring 2025
Re-published with permission from:  https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/the-luckiest-man-on-the-face-of-the-earth/

 

Of all the days and nights in Kyle Berceau’s short and remarkable life, the most difficult to explain may yet explain the most. It happened in the winter of his 30th year, the evening he left his parents’ comfortable home in Chicago’s suburbs and set out on foot for the city 16 miles away. No cellphone, no planned route, no heads-up to say what he was doing, no warm bed reserved for the night. It was snowing.

The memory is like something from a life of St. Francis of Assisi. Beyond idealistic, beyond impractical. Every movement flowing from a heart burning with inarticulate love. All thought devoted to an emerging clarity in his own mind — something about perfect humility, perfect joy, percolating in that shared human desire for true connection — but in the moment inexpressible to anyone else.

If one thing was clear to Kyle’s family, his disappearance was no suicide mission. Whatever else he’d find out there in the December winds, Kyle Berceau ’12 was looking for God.

In retrospect, his mother, Marilyn, knows it was important to Kyle to understand the life of the homeless. “He wanted to be on the street,” says his father, Steven ’78M.A., ’80Ph.D.

“That stuff weighed on us sometimes,” admits his older brother Brett ’09. “He would always follow his heart, but that meant doing weird, spontaneous stuff like that, that we just had to get on board with.”

Often that entailed serious worry. Kyle’s health was better that winter of 2019-20 than it had been through most of his adulthood, but that didn’t mean it was good.

Early in this urban trek, something prodded him to call home, so he had entered a grocery store to borrow a phone. He didn’t say where he was. Back out in the night, the minutes and miles passed. Steve and Marilyn went looking for their son. And Marilyn spotted him from the road, turning into a Starbucks to rest and warm up. Disappointed but conciliatory, he agreed to get in the car.

A few miles from their house, though, he asked to be let out so he could walk the rest of the way.

 

Who was Kyle Berceau? Listen to his parents, his four siblings, his friends from New Trier High School and Notre Dame, his mentors and correspondents and, not least of all, the men among whom he eventually found his place. Listen to his own words, too, and a portrait takes form.

He was a spiritual seeker whose dream job in professional baseball operations was lifted right out of Moneyball; an athletic young man hampered by a treacherous body. He had a mind both systematic and contemplative; he was a Trappist postulant who financed his own blood tests and acupuncture from money he’d made investing in Bitcoin. He was a poet who mumbled and talked too fast. As a kid, he’d been a straight-A perfectionist and talented ballplayer who was bullied, who wrestled with anxiety and a lack of self-confidence. As a man, handsome and gifted with a sincere smile, he remained a child at heart who could befriend and inspire teams of 9-year-old boys as readily as men more than twice his age.

By then he’d become a methodical thinker and writer who above all craved silence and belonging as means to finding God. In short, Kyle Berceau was a very modern person who found home in a monastic tradition nearly 1,500 years old.

 

Visit Thornwood Park in Wilmette, Illinois, and you can imagine the family picnics, the pickup games, the tree climbing that made up Kyle’s youth. See him strap on winter gloves with younger brother Cory back home to turn a hallway into a boxing ring, the smaller boys ganging up on Brett without success.

At school, Kyle was orderly, and as he grew older he sidestepped the cynicism and guile that creep into the lives of so many adolescents. He was pure-hearted. Earnest. But not perfect. He could trip over his own brain; as he phrased it years later, “I really struggle to put my thoughts into words and often lose my train of thought completely when I try to speak up due to the combination of my brain fog and the self-fulfilling fear of this very thing happening.”

He could be irritable. He could swear. And because of the resentments and cruelty that cramp kids’ hearts and shape pecking orders, he was never popular. “Underappreciated,” says one lifelong friend, who was there and remembers. “Picked on.”

Marilyn Berceau also recalls those at-times painful days and the lesson her son drew from them: Never treat anyone with disrespect.

Gordon Voit liked Kyle from the start. He’d played football for Kyle’s father in Wilmette’s youth leagues and met Kyle on the basketball team in junior high, sitting in the cafeteria and waiting for practice to start, the boys and girls showing off and flirting and Kyle down the table huddled over his homework amid “this frenzy of hormones.” They stuck together through high school — the guys who’d shoot hoops on a Friday night instead of partying. And whatever discouragement Kyle then felt on the inside, the kid Voit knew was well-adjusted. Ready with a joke, a spot-on impression. Kramer from Seinfeld was a favorite — the jittery pop-in, the “Giddy up!” to every oddball idea Voit floated for something to do.

He wasn’t especially religious. The Berceaus attended St. Joseph in Wilmette, and Kyle would say prayers when he remembered, but most of the time at Mass, he “pretty much just zoned out.” Jesus was history. The priesthood never entered his mind.

His passion was baseball. He had a solid bat, a good arm, quick hands, game smarts, intensity, heart. He would grow into these qualities, but as an eighth grader he was short and, Voit says, “underdeveloped,” and at a talent-laden high school like New Trier, you needed every edge you could get. After freshman year, Kyle didn’t make any teams. He was 15, and his formal playing days were over.

True to character, he didn’t complain. “He just sort of invested himself where he was able to. And that was school,” Voit says. “He probably cared too much about school.”

He turned also to coaching, the one constant besides family and friendship that would accompany Kyle Berceau from these relatively carefree days through all the troubles to come. That spring, Kyle, blessed with his father’s heart for kids, followed his father’s example and started coaching for a neighbor, Chris Beacom, who was launching a youth training program called the Illinois Baseball Academy.

The ethos was perfect: Teach skills, yes; but do it while modeling character, sportsmanship, teamwork, respect. Drill hard and have fun. This wasn’t about fashioning future Major Leaguers but about making lifelong fans, Beacom says, and Kyle “took those terms and that challenge to heart” while coaching his kids to championships.

At some point during those high school years, the Berceaus noticed Kyle’s lightheartedness fading. He had moments of darker, sharper emotions. His appetite was down. He was growing pale and thin, Marilyn says, and they didn’t know what to do.

The diagnosis came the spring of Kyle’s junior year. He needed a physical for a summer volunteer program in South America. The blood results came back “significantly out of range,” Marilyn recalls.

Before long, physicians put names on what Kyle had been suffering stoically: autoimmune hepatitis and primary sclerosing cholangitis. His immune system was attacking his liver and bile ducts. The scarring on the liver can inhibit the organ’s function. Doctors said Kyle would likely need a new one around age 30. They put him on prednisone, a steroid, and azathioprine, an immunosuppressant that would protect his liver but leave him prone to other infections. The side effects could be so severe that Kyle came to believe his medicines were poisoning him. Still, Marilyn says, the outlook “brought us all closer together, because we saw how strong he was.”

Kyle was private about it all, but friends began to suspect something. At Miller Park for a Milwaukee Brewers game with Voit and other pals, he ate a footlong hot dog and became violently ill. He kept up with sports and workouts, but in his senior portrait, Voit says, Kyle’s cheeks were “really puffy.”

At the time of the diagnosis, the family was coping with another loss. Steven’s father, Roman Paul Berceau, was in failing health at a nursing home near Milwaukee. The day the older man died, two weeks before Kyle’s 17th birthday in March 2007, Steven was holding his hand, speaking gently, trying one last time to connect. “Dad,” he said, “we’re going to need your help watching over Kyle.” Tears, the first sure sign of recognition he’d received from his father in years, indicated that Kyle’s grandfather, a World War II veteran, had heard.

 

Friendship came more easily at Notre Dame. In the fall of 2008, Kyle moved into Duncan Hall and found a group that took life at a similar speed: basketball at the Rock, golf, dodgeball games in the lounges that sent Highlanders like Kyle and his classmates Nick Schappler and Nathan Feldpausch flying over the furniture. Hall culture made it easy to be Catholic, which was fine by Kyle, and in late-night conversations he established himself as principled and caring. “An old soul,” Schappler says. “Easy to be around because he had a strong foundation.”

And yet Kyle was miserable. The medicines and the perfectionism triggered depression. He loved writing, depended on it, Marilyn says, and yet “it was probably his biggest pain point.” He took whole days to organize his thoughts. Steven was there for him by phone, casting lanterns of hope into his son’s darkness.

All again remained hidden to friends, though patterns emerged, certainly by sophomore year: Kyle shunned alcohol. He knew everything about the food in the dining hall, scrupulously avoiding gluten. “He had this one weird quirk,” Schappler remembers. “He was obsessed with kiwis. Every meal he would have four kiwis.”

Junior year brought another awful but clarifying diagnosis — ulcerative colitis. The pain was so bad that Kyle withdrew from school that spring, the beginning of what he would call “five years of utter hell.”

“He never played the victim,” Feldpausch says. “He was always optimistic. He never wanted anyone to have any sympathy for him in any regard. And you would see that in sports. That’s what we bonded over, because of his competitiveness.”

Kyle graduated magna cum laude with a degree in finance, packing his senior year with a massive course load so he could finish on time. And one of the courses he took that final spring would — clichés aside — change his life, giving him a vocabulary to parse dormant questions and to feel his way toward yearnings he couldn’t yet perceive. It created a space in his soul where he might begin to make sense of his suffering.

The course was Christianity and World Religions, taught by Professor Bradley Malkovsky, and it was like God catching Kyle Berceau on his way out the door.

 

“Kyle was a real seeker, very bright,” Malkovsky says, reflecting on correspondence he maintained off and on with Kyle for nearly nine years. “He’s a really good writer. It makes you wonder whether . . . he might’ve become a well-known spiritual writer.”

Retired now, Malkovsky describes the course Kyle took as a focus on Catholicism’s doctrinal and spiritual relationship with Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. One core text, Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on non-Christian religions, made an impression on Kyle — especially the idea that the Church finds holiness in them.

By popular demand, Malkovsky included basic meditation techniques he had learned in India. Mindfulness, he points out, is an overused word of late. But learned in full and practiced properly, the Buddhist vipassana meditation he told his students about purifies the mind of ego and darkness to make the practitioner more self-aware and compassionate. It doesn’t compete with prayer, he cautions, but it can augment prayer, by helping you — to paraphrase Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who would become a hero to Kyle — put yourself in front of God and stop lying.

What it did for Kyle in that white-knuckled spring of 2012 was calm him down, often for hours at a stretch. Ten minutes was enough to give his mind and heart a “breather,” he said, to renew his peace and productivity. He later told Malkovsky that the pared-down technique he had shared was “the most valuable thing I learned at Notre Dame.”

 

“Kyle always thought that God was going to heal him,” Marilyn says, and that hope helps explain both the seeds of religious faith that began to germinate in his 20s and the acuity with which he approached everything to do with his body. If God was going to heal him, Kyle was ready to help.

He was a statistics junkie. Studying finance sharpened his analytical tools. “He applied that same intensity to getting a job in baseball,” Gordon Voit says. Kyle attended MLB’s Winter Meetings armed with “massive statistical reports” he was going to use to impress executives. And if data could get him a job, maybe it would help him achieve optimal health outcomes. He kept an Excel spreadsheet, Brett notes, “that meticulously tracks all of his diet and medication every single day for years.” Eat this rice, that vegetable, what happens? Kyle and Voit joked about it: “It was basically Moneyball for his body.”

God didn’t really enter the picture until after graduation. Raised Christian, Voit had started to take more interest in his own faith and wanted to discuss it with his friend. Kyle wasn’t ready. “He told me, very politely, ‘Don’t bring up God anymore,’” Voit recalls.

A year out of school, Kyle was working in videography and data analysis for the South Bend Silver Hawks, then part of the Arizona Diamondbacks organization. The work was seasonal, no guarantee of a job come spring, and when that threshold passed, he started applying to financial firms. Then in May 2014 he was invited to interview for a video job with the Diamondbacks’ rookie league affiliate in Scottsdale.

The night before the trip, the pain in Kyle’s abdomen was so severe that he feared he’d miss his flight. Lying on the floor of his parent’s basement “practically helpless,” a paraphrase of John 15:5 popped into his head. I am the vine, you are the branches; without me you can do nothing. “I realized I wasn’t in control of my life,” he later reflected, “so I became more serious in seeking out the question of what I believe.”

Now whenever Voit invited him to attend Protestant services and faith-sharing groups, Kyle went. Sitting in those circles, he could speak complex thoughts with clarity. When he moved to Scottsdale, he located a congregation and a Bible study.

Arizona offered Kyle the perfect lifestyle: warmth, sunshine, myriad health-food stores and restaurants, a Mayo Clinic for standard medicine and options he liked for Chinese medicine and other alternatives. He hustled, determined to find long-term work, but the strain took its toll and his health started to give out.

Eventually he hit upon fasting. His plan to try it for one day turned into an unplanned 33: a revelation. He lost strength, but he believed the experience healed his body and allowed him to get off his prescriptions with minimal side effects. All three primary markers of his liver health improved. Two were completely normal.

Meanwhile he kept in touch with friends through texts and fantasy sports, and with mentors via long emails. He was talking to Chris Beacom about life and the struggle and the possibility of returning to Illinois to help him grow his company. “And it was stunning, because at the time,” Beacom recalls, “I’m in my mid-40s, raising kids, and I’m like, I’m being educated by a 20-something on what really matters.”

Internally, Kyle’s own sense of what mattered was tenuous. He wrestled with self-hatred and “an unhealthy, people-pleasing anxiety” he regarded as incompatible with faith.

Then came the summer of 2016. In and out of emergency rooms, he threw up every day for five months. The pain prevented sleep. Marilyn arrived in June to take care of her son and found him emaciated and exhausted. As his condition worsened, she stayed through November, when an assessment of Kyle’s colon revealed that if it were not removed immediately, he would die.

 

The Berceaus regard the colectomy as a miracle. Kyle took it as a failure. He had “poured his heart and soul into curing himself and was struggling to understand why he was enduring so much pain,” his sister Bri, now an acute care physical therapist, recalls.

“But they took it out,” Brett says, matter-of-fact. “And then he had one of the best three-to-five-year periods of his life. I thought that was the miracle. I thought he was cured.”

Brett quit his job in Michigan to live with his brother in Arizona, a moment of “bizarre spiritual awakening” from his own depression. “I’m like, something weird is happening here. I need to go there,” he recalls.

Now he was Sam to his brother’s Frodo. They laughed about it, sending each other Lord of the Rings memes. The following May, Kyle was well enough to fly home for a 10-day vipassana retreat he’d been thinking about for years.

A month later, Kyle wrote Malkovsky to share his experience. One day he had an initial flood of joy, only to feel troubled by contradictions between his Christian beliefs and what he had learned. The conflict led him back to the Bible and renewed consolation, but also to an insight from his Chinese doctor about sending his qi to strengthen weak areas of his body. He thought about Jesus’ command to heal people and raise the dead, which had always seemed unfathomable. Maybe some synthesis of these ideas made faith healing possible? “I think I’ve had the best day of my life today spiritually,” he wrote. “I feel I had a lot of knowing going on today.”

The meditation was also helping Kyle shed anxiety and discover a “pure center of loving awareness” within him that he “could choose at every moment.” That, he believed, was the presence of God. That was Christ.

In the months before they moved back to Chicago, the brothers were reading books about religion. Kyle began seeing God in everything. Looking back, he would recognize both epiphanies and pitfalls in this explosion of interior movement, yet for six months he felt like “the happiest person alive.” Eastern spirituality was putting him increasingly at odds with his evangelical ties, a tension that — thanks to Malkovsky’s class and an acquaintance with mystics like St. John of the Cross — he did not perceive with Catholicism. Teachings from childhood acquired new meaning as he contemplated the image of God imprinted within him — that identity of Love that Christians profess all humans to share. He was seeing the Eucharist, sanctification and other tenets in a new light.

Still, he was angry with the Church. He wrote: “How could I have grown up in the Church and gone to Mass so many years and never learned this, the very nature of who I am?” Christ was no longer the distant historical figure he once imagined, but a mystery living in his heart.

He couldn’t shake free of Catholicism, and after a while he stopped trying. Yet he saw possibilities for unity between East and West. Back in Chicago, he explored Krishna Consciousness and the Baha’i faith at temples around the city. He attended Mass at St. Joseph, where he met daily communicants and began to see other possibilities in his life. Coaching remained an active interest. The religious life became one. And the pain came, and the pain went.

At St. Joseph, he became especially close to the sacristan who coordinated Saturday morning Masses, a mother of four named Ana Alda-Falcon. “He was such a pure soul,” she says. “You could feel it. Everybody loved him in the parish. Everybody.”

Over the years, whenever Kyle’s liver flared, Alda-Falcon became one of the few people in whom he would confide doubts and weakness. She could reassure him. “He really wanted to find out what life was about. Why are we here? Who is God?” she says.

In 2018, Googling monasteries, he discovered Mepkin Abbey, a community of Trappist monks in South Carolina, and its Monastic Institute, a month for young men to pray, live, work and study with the monks themselves.

He loved Mepkin, enough to return every year. He said he felt a freshness there, an “energy of love” that replaced a deadness he felt elsewhere. Out composting, he might feel a desire for transcendence that would resolve into a peace of grounded presence. I’m just here.

One afternoon, he walked past the church, where a monk was tidying up. They spoke quietly. Father Gerard Jonas Palmares, OCSO, asked Kyle about his experience and what might keep him from joining. He never forgot Kyle’s answer.

“Baseball.”

 

That was the dilemma: a life of silence or a life of service? Over the next four years, from 2018 to 2022, the question followed him around the world. He visited other monasteries. The Benedictines were hospitable but “too chatty.” He traveled to India looking, ironically, for Jesus. He organized an interfaith prayer service in Wilmette for Baha’i, Hindu and Catholic friends. He flew to Italy, to Medjugorje, to Mexico City to pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Meanwhile, he coached his 9-year-old Little Green Men to a 2019 summer championship. And after visiting St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota at Malkovsky’s suggestion, he decided that “traditional Catholic prayer has just become very dull for me.” Plumbing for mystical depth, he preferred Hindu chant and Baha’i writings. He wanted “the profound humility and sincerity” he found in the East; virtues all but lost in the post-Christian West. Yet he remained an outsider. Turning it over in his mind with the same obsessive determination he devoted to statistics, he found the key that would unlock his conviction: his own experience of suffering.

Long incidental to Hinduism in particular, Malkovsky notes, suffering is central to Christianity. “Hindu scholars have pointed out in recent times — they’re not quite sure why it is — that certain Hindus now are attracted to Christ on the cross,” he says. He chokes up remembering the Hindu woman he saw visiting a Catholic shrine in Pune, India, putting her hands on the wounds on Christ’s feet and praying for half an hour.

Such reverence for redemptive suffering led Kyle Berceau to the deeper place in the faith of his childhood that he’d been looking for. He turned to the Blessed Mother; to sickly St. Therese of Lisieux for her “little way”; to St. Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr of Auschwitz whose American shrine is a half-hour drive from Wilmette; to St. Charles de Foucauld, the “universal brother” who shared his faith by neighborly exchange and accompaniment.

Then, not long after his winter walking tour of Chicago, Kyle faced the question of the priesthood. He met a new spiritual director, Father Tom Hickey, and he embarked on a discernment year, a spiritual prerequisite to theological studies.

One year in the seminary was enough to know that path was not for him. He gave his car to a fellow seminarian who had worried aloud how he’d ever see his family on Chicago’s South Side without one.

He wrote to Palmares at Mepkin to tell him he was coming.

“God,” says Father Joe Tedesco, OCSO, the superior of Mepkin, “is a surprise.”

 

Mepkin Abbey sits on 3,000 verdant acres in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. A former rice plantation, the land once belonged to Henry Laurens, an 18th-century merchant who made his fortune as a partner in the largest slave-trading house in British North America. It changed owners several times, then was donated to the Trappists of Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey. Part of their mission, the monks say, is to help redeem the land.

The monastic vocation is the call to contemplation, the desire “to go deep,” says Father Guerric Heckel, OCSO, the director of Mepkin’s retreat center. For Father Palmares, “the monastic life is being home.” And that, he says, is how Kyle felt from the moment he arrived.

The Trappists, founded in France in 1664, are relatively new at this. They are Cistercians of the “strict observance” of the rule of life written by St. Benedict in the 6th century. The core of their common life is the singing of all 150 Psalms over a two-week cycle. They gather to do this seven times a day, beginning with vigils at 4 a.m. Everything else happens in between: Masses, personal prayer, meals, silence, work, rest. “You’re nourished in the Word all the time. That’s the gift,” Tedesco says. “You go in with frustration and you leave with joy.”

What once was “dull” to Kyle had become the thing he loved the most, because the door had opened beyond rote prayer to something deep, vast, transcendent. It had taken him 10 years to walk the road from “don’t bring up God anymore” to a life in dialogue with God all the time.

 

Trappists take vows of stability — which means living in one place — obedience and conversatio morum, “ongoing conversion.” The monk is always turning to God. Father Kevin Walsh, OCSO, Mepkin’s formation director, unpacks this last vow as a bundle of poverty and chastity: freely chosen limitations and relinquishments that enable the turning. A professed Trappist owns two white robes, two black scapulars, a belt and sandals. The habit marks the monk as special to God.

Bri Berceau admits that at first she didn’t understand her brother’s attraction to this life. “Kyle was such a gifted athlete and coach and so strongly valued connection,” she says. Why would he choose a life of rules and restrictions, which disconnected him from family? “It was hard for us to accept,” Marilyn affirms.

But as much as Kyle loved Mepkin, Mepkin loved him back. A year later, writing a widely read Thanksgiving Day reflection, “The Power of a Simple Fruit Basket,” Kyle pondered what it meant to be “valued above all merely for the person I am” — beyond anything he might contribute.

He had already given much. What he brought from the start, Tedesco says, was “a deepening of our life together.”

Postulant formation involves one-on-one meetings, weekly reflections, lectio divina — reading, meditation and prayer with Scripture — and the rhythms of the Rule. Kyle’s tasks reflected his limits. One assignment — refectorian — was ironic. He served food, cleaned after meals, managed the pantry. As Palmares’ assistant in the sacristy, he washed and ironed vestments and sacred linens and came up with a contraption to score the 5-inch hosts the community used at Mass. He took on video and computer duties and set up the spreadsheet the monks still use to administer the abbey’s columbarium. He wrote a spiritual booklet for the Truth and Reconciliation garden where the Mepkin community honors the sufferings of the enslaved.

Kyle’s liver doctors in Chicago had referred him to Dr. Heather Simpson, a hepatologist at the university hospital near Charleston. She was briefed about Kyle’s holistic approach, his antipathy to conventional medicine. At their first meeting, she recognized that Kyle was no ordinary patient. He’d done his homework; he had detailed opinions. She didn’t want to offend him, and she committed to his care, but she knew holism wasn’t going to work. Without proper management, she thought then, this disease is going to progress.

In January 2023, Father Walsh drove Kyle to Charleston for a Mohs procedure — the outpatient removal of a squamous cell carcinoma from the left side of Kyle’s lower lip, a serious but treatable side effect of the powerful immunosuppressant protecting his liver. After the surgery, Kyle was quiet. Walsh took him for a smoothie. Kyle almost never cried, the priest says, but that day he did.

Weeks later he shared a post-op photo on social media. It showed two raised scars running like seams down the bend of his swollen jaw. He joked, “I now not only love baseball, I also wear one on my chin.”

The following September, Kyle boarded a plane to Tuscany for his brother Cory’s wedding — a dispensation the abbey gladly extended. Wearing a Blues Brothers black suit, he danced the salsa at the reception. “It was very out of his comfort zone,” Marilyn says, but the family couldn’t have been happier.

Back at Mepkin, he discussed with a new postulant and fast friend, Father Francis Dankoski, how to improve the community’s approach to faith sharing. And each day after lunch and cleaning up, they invited their brothers to join them for a rosary walk to the statue of Our Lady of Mepkin. Dankoski says the rosary took Kyle’s mind off his afternoon discomfort.

One day, praying along the bank of the Cooper River, they saw dolphins surfacing, a sight Dankoski hasn’t seen since. Mepkin stands 15 miles upriver from the sea.

Kyle Berceau became a Trappist novice on November 1, 2023. A snapshot shows him smiling with his arm around the superior’s shoulder. He looks reasonably healthy.

Two weeks later, off his medication, he was back in the hospital. He’d broken out on his face. The puffiness and jaundice had returned. Simpson, now as much friend as physician after Kyle’s expressive correspondence and innumerable consulations, told Kyle with great care that if he didn’t get back on his medicines and prepare for a liver transplant, he had about three months to live. “I have to tell you the truth,” Walsh recalls her saying. “You have to face the truth.” Kyle revisited his arguments, speaking respectfully and with great assurance about what the post-operative drugs would do to him.

Walsh, sitting beside Kyle, thought, Jesus is in this room. Jesus is the truth in the way these two are speaking to each other. “I was floored,” he says.

The monks prayed for a miracle. Kyle conceded to the operation — and the drugs that came with it.

Brett and Marilyn flew in for Thanksgiving. Kyle returned to the abbey to rest for the surgery and found in his room a basket with three bottles of water, some oranges, an apple and an overripe banana. The humble welcome called to his mind the farewell speech that one of his heroes, Lou Gehrig, had given fans at Yankee Stadium before confronting the disease that bears his name. Gehrig had said he considered himself “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth” for the life he’d been able to live. Kyle said he felt that way because among his brothers at Mepkin Abbey he’d found home.

The rest of the family arrived in time for the surgery on December 6 and stayed through the first days of Kyle’s recovery. Ana Alda-Falcon drove from Chicago and gave him a blanket that became Kyle’s constant companion from then on. Soon Kyle’s youngest sister, Brooke, made an announcement: She was expecting a baby — Steve and Marilyn’s first grandchild.

Kyle was elated, Brooke recalls. And as Christmas approached, he was up and “skipping,” Dankoski says. For maybe four good weeks, “he had his life back.”

 

Midway through January 2024, Kyle was back in the hospital with shortness of breath and pressure in his chest. He was coughing blood.

Scans revealed a massive tumor in his lungs. The diagnosis was severe: Stage 4 lung cancer spreading into Kyle’s bones. Simpson remembers the sound he made at receiving this news — almost a giggle. Like, of course it’s cancer. Here we go again.

But Simpson had never seen anything like this. “It’s crazy, but when you receive medicines after a transplant, it suppresses your immune system. And so, if there’s a cancer there, it can spread like wildfire.” Skin cancer, like the carcinoma surgeons had removed the year before, they could deal with, she had explained beforehand, but this was a shock.

It was the last thing Kyle wanted to be right about. The meds had poisoned him. At age 33, he had run out of options. “It was cruel,” Simpson says. “The worst part was, Kyle felt guilty,” like he’d let the liver donor’s family down.

He received five treatments of high-dose radiation, but the tumor growth accelerated. He declined chemotherapy.

Kyle still thought God would heal him, but he understood that differently now. He contemplated Jesus’ words about Lazarus in the Gospel of John: “This illness is not to end in death.” Sharing that with Dankoski, he asked his brother monk to paint one of his watercolors to go with it. The idea was, you heal, or you move on to life with God.

One last time, the Berceaus gathered. When Kyle entered hospice care on February 17, the family took the days and the monks split the nights. The abbey’s lay infirmarian, David George, kept constant vigil. “Kyle chose to die in public,” Father Heckel says.

On February 18, with a dispensation from the order and with his birth and religious families present, Kyle professed solemn vows, bypassing the years customary to the discernment of the vocation. He had resisted the idea just as he had resisted the transplant, but in the end his brother monks prevailed. Tedesco had found plenty of precedent in the Cistercian annals, and Kyle’s vocation, they agreed, was certain. Again, Kyle relented. Giddy up.

He honored his grandfather with his religious name: Brother Roman Paul.

“We all got ministered to by him,” Tedesco says of those last days, of Kyle’s notable grace and patience as he made requests for water, the bathroom, to be dressed in his habit for prayer or Mass — where he’d appear with his oxygen and tubes.

Kyle gave Brooke a stuffed animal he’d received — a gift for the baby. She named it Kyola the Koala, and he touched it to his forehead, she says, like a transmission of soul.

One night in the refectory, Heckel proposed a living wake so the brothers could have a chance to let Kyle know what he meant to them.

Mostly the hours passed in prayer as Kyle napped. Then, after compline on the night of March 5, 2024, they gathered in his room to sing the Salve Regina. Palmares arrived at 8:15 to pray a rosary and found Steve and Cory at Kyle’s side and Marilyn in a rocking chair. Kyle’s breaths were nearly a full minute apart. At 8:36 p.m., Palmares whispered, “I think that’s the last.”

 

Brother Roman Paul Berceau, OSCO, died a Cistercian monk. He was wearing a Miraculous Medal, no crucifix. Dankoski says in his last hours, his brother was living the Crucifixion in union with Jesus.

Keeping vigil over the body, Ana Alda-Falcon noticed it was warm, like Kyle was sleeping. The air smelled of perfume, as it had at her grandmother’s vigil in Spain. Marilyn recalls three moments at the funeral on March 7 when bright sunshine streamed into the chapel. Everyone — the Berceaus, the monks, friends of the abbey — sang “Called By Name,” a hymn Kyle wrote. They each deposited a scoop of dirt on the body. “It was all of us becoming one,” Tedesco says.

Nine days later, a memorial Mass in Wilmette on Kyle’s 34th birthday gathered the parish community, Kyle’s Chicago friends, his baseball family. Gordon Voit posted a photo to Instagram: “A day I’ll never forget: celebrating Kyle Berceau. Packed house. The best friend I could ever ask for — finally getting the recognition he never wanted, but deserved.”

 

“Kyle had absolute confidence that this is not all that God has in mind for us,” Father Walsh says.

Father Tedesco gave Kyle a posthumous assignment: You need to intercede for us — for vocations. “Yeah,” he says now, explaining his tears. “I miss him so bad. He just had a spirit that you wanted to share in.”

Father Heckel told his young brother Trappist that he’d be in touch after Kyle crossed over. Fridays, he walks down to the river and writes Kyle a letter.

On July 29, 2024, Brooke Berceau gave birth to a little girl named Sloane Kyla, in honor of the uncle who in his last days had expressed such joy at the promise of her life.

Walsh gives Kyle the last word. “He reminded us . . . you have to become who God is allowing you to be. ‘My journey is, I need a liver transplant. What’s your journey? And it may not include any illness, but how do you take hold of the life God has offered you and then live it as deeply as you can?’”