'Humble people from Cleveland' invited Pope Francis to their wedding. They received a thoughtful response.

Francis touched a lot of people's lives.

While many people around the world continue to mourn the passing of Pope Francis, some have also recounted their memories of him on social media. Among them was Reverend Ian Anderson, a Unitarian Universalist Minister-in-training in Cleveland, Ohio, who shared to Reddit. When Ian and his now-wife Ash were sending out their wedding invitations in 2023, they had a few extras. They decided to send them to some of their favorite celebrities, among them Jack Black, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Judge Judy, and Pope Francis, Newsweek shares.

Ian told Newsweek, "It was really just for fun." As "two humble people from Cleveland," they didn’t expect a response from anyone, but they did write a nice letter to the Pope in particular. "The invite we sent him was slightly more formal than the others," Ian noted. "We included much more formal language, referred to him as 'His Holiness,' and said we wanted to extend this invite because he is someone we admired. We also asked him to please pray for us.” Their response came the following month, in June 2023.

Rush's Neil Peart, after suffering two tragic losses, grieved during a profound motorcycle trip

The drummer told his bandmates, "Consider me retired."

Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for iconic prog-rock band Rush, suffered two monumental losses in the late '90s, with his daughter and common-law wife dying less than a year apart. Overcome with grief, he gradually found some form of peace on the open road, traveling 55,000 miles on his motorcycle—and documenting the experience in his poignant 2002 memoir, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road.

This turbulent period began in August 1997, when his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, was killed in a car accident. In his book, Peart referred to the subsequent months as a "waking nightmare," with he and his wife, Jacqueline Taylor, battling through immense despair. "It soon became apparent that Jackie’s world was completely shattered forever," the musician wrote. "She had fallen to pieces, and she never came back together again…If she couldn’t have Selena, she no longer wanted anything—she just wanted to die." Tragically, Taylor was diagnosed with terminal cancer ("of course it was a broken heart," Peart wrote) and passed away the following June, leaving a "second nightmare" to process.

1985 Carl Sagan interview on finding alien life is a perfect metaphor for friendship on Earth

You never know what you may find if you just take a risk chatting with someone on a park bench.

Carl Sagan is widely considered the top expert when it comes to space exploration and study. Among several other accolades and accomplishments, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Dragons of Eden, Emmy and Peabody Awards for his television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal twice. Yet while his specialty was outer space, his thoughts can apply to people and their relationships.

In a 1985 interview with BBC broadcaster Terry Wogan, Sagan touched on a variety of topics, but the conversation shifted focus primarily on space exploration and making contact with life outside of Earth. Much of what he said about finding and looking for life on other planets can be applied to finding other people on our own planet. Advice and advocacy for investing in outer space are also words to live by for those who feel alone.