EAST PROVIDENCE — Alexander Veiga wanted nothing more than to help people.
“That was his passion,” Alexander's mother, Dina Veiga, said on the morning of this year's Good Friday Walk for Hunger.
Alexander, who suffered from Type 1 diabetes and a rare form of epilepsy, died at age 18 from illness in November 2011. Beginning in the third grade, Alexander battled his health difficulties and participated in the Good Friday Walk every year, raising money to help the poor and homeless.
Alexander would redeem bottles and cans and use the proceeds for the walk. He began to save spare change he would find on the streets in a jar he labeled "Ground Pickings since 11-11-11." During the next two weeks, until he died, he managed to collect $5.70.
Last Friday, members of St. Francis Xavier Church's youth group participated in the walk, showing their solidarity with Alexander and his family by wearing personalized purple “Team Alex” T-shirts, and raising more than $1,000 to help the less fortunate.
For Veiga, it was just the latest example of how many lives her son touched in his short life. After his death, several of his friends, classmates and neighbors began telling her stories of how he had helped them.
For one elderly neighbor on a fixed income, Alexander shoveled snow from her driveway and raked leaves from her yard without ever accepting money. When another neighbor told him she did not have enough money to pay him for his efforts, Alexander would reply, "That's okay."
“He would just do things like that. He just loved to help people,” Veiga said, as she set out with the group on this sunny Good Friday morning.
She reflected on her son’s life as they set out from Haven Methodist Church, winding their way through East Providence and over the Henderson Bridge enroute to the Statehouse, which served as the terminus for several other Good Friday Walks as well.
When his late maternal grandfather developed Alzheimer's disease, Alexander, at age 15, helped to bathe her, and often kept his grandmother company by staying overnight.
“Alex had a way with older people, and they loved him," said Alexander’s great aunt, Virginia Gonsalves, a parishioner at Our Lady of Loreto Parish who completed the Good Friday walk with “Team Alex.”
Alexander also had a way with the youth. When he was in the hospital, he would comfort younger, scared children by putting them on his lap and assuring them that their treatment would not hurt and that they would be okay.
Alexander, a parishioner at St. Francis Xavier Church in East Providence, was devoted to his Catholic faith. He decided on his own to get confirmed, and had been discerning the priesthood before he got sick.
“He loved the youth group. He loved St. Francis Xavier Church and I'm sure he's smiling in heaven,” said Veiga, who serves as the director of religious education for St. Elizabeth Church in Bristol.
A former attorney, Veiga left the legal profession to take care of Alexander when he got sick. She said her son continued participating in the walk after his health took a turn for the worse, and that his example brought her back to practicing the Catholic faith.
“Alex just loved to go to Mass and pray," she said. "I think he was finding his road to discipleship.”
Her own Catholic faith is helping Veiga, a mother of three other children, to cope and make sense of losing her second-youngest child.
“My faith is helping me understand why Alex was a part of my life,” she said. “Everyone needs to know deep in their hearts how important it is to have the Lord in their life.”
“My faith is the most important part of my life now," she said. "To know that Alex is at the table of the Lord is comforting.”
