How do you carve a lifetime into a piece of stone?

Fifteen years after his father’s death, Winston McDonagh arrives at a cemetery to finish the one thing he could never bring himself to complete: his father’s headstone. The problem is that Winston still doesn’t know what to put on it.

His father was a brilliant, complicated man who loved books, baseball and Winston’s mother—but the relationship between father and son was one in which the few words that passed between them were often angry ones. When an enigmatic young stone carver known only as C arrives to finish the job, her questions gradually force Winston back through a childhood of Bronx streets, baseball, White Castle, St. Lucy’s grotto, unanswered prayers and memories he has spent a lifetime trying to understand.

What begins as a simple inscription becomes an excavation of a father and son—and of the sacrifices, disappointments and love that can remain hidden inside a family for decades. As Winston finally confronts the memory of the man he thought he knew, he discovers that finding the right words for his father may require finding the truth about himself.

EPITAPH is a funny, poignant and deeply human play about fathers and sons, faith and doubt, memory and forgiveness—and the impossibility of reducing an entire life to a few words carved in stone. Awarded the Catholic Writer's Guild Seal of Approval!