"Dinkie had grown up and had spent her whole life in rural Kentucky, and she was country. Dinkie was not her given name, but she had hated the name "Ada" as a child, and so one day she had announced that her name was now "Dinkie," and so it was. "Dinkie" was the name on her Social Security card and on her two marriage licenses. She had been married twice, and, according to Brenda, had run both of her husbands off. One of them she tried to kill by sawing through the boards on the stairs in the hopes that he would fall and break his neck, but when he was merely injured and did not die, she eventually settled for letting him escape with his life."

— From "On Holy Ground", a remarkable entry by Roman Catholic seminarian Dennis Schenkel about the woman whose death he attended last week at a Louisville, Ky., hospital.