Journeys

From the basement I heard the phone ring but was unable to retrieve it before the machine launched my droning voice. The voice on the other end was my mother, calling to relate what had transpired during her doctor's appointment that afternoon. Nonchalantly, I climbed the stairs and headed for the kitchen. I pushed the button to the answering machine and began to process her words, "stress test was abnormal. Call me and I will tell you what that means." Almost a week had passed since my mother's upper body was suddenly seized with an intense, furious pain, which hindered her ability to lay down and rest. The results of two previous heart tests had returned negative. We assumed the third would likewise bear such results. Rather than immediately grab the receiver and dial the only phone number I have ever known for my parents' home, I deliberately waited. As the children peacefully slept, I rinsed and loaded dishes into the dishwasher, wiped down the counters, poured myself my afternoon cup of coffee, and finally picked up the phone, bracing myself for what my mother was about to disclose.

Death has not been a stranger in my life. Before I was born, when my mother was just a girl of twelve, her father, who had worked in the coal mines, died of cancer. At a very young age, I lost my paternal grandfather, George Swanson. All that remains of him in my mind is a vague memory of Grandpa sitting on a couch in the two-storey home of my father's childhood, a plastic, green visor encircling his head due to his poor eye sight. His wife, Anna, my grandmother who despite her diabetes consistently kept hard candies of red, green and yellow colors that dazzled my young eyes upon our frequent visits, departed this life a few years later. I remember the phone ringing in the early evening, my father picking it up, and my mother placing her head in her hands and crying once the news was delivered. I was seven and deemed too young to attend the funeral. A few days after the new year of 1986 on a Sunday evening, our family received another phone call relating another death of a loved one. I believed my twenty-three-year-old cousin Sheri, who had been battling a brain tumor for a couple years, had died. I was ill prepared for my father's words, "Grandma Perry is dead. It seems she died in her sleep." A week later my beautiful, vivacious cousin Sheri, in the presence of her mother and my mother and the angels she claimed to see in her final moments on this earth, yielded to the disease which had ravaged her body and stolen her youth. I was fourteen.

When I accepted the position as a Medicare discharge planner/social worker at a Catholic nursing home in Des Plaines, Illinois, I was thrilled. Good-bye to answering phone calls as a customer service representative at a tiny Christian publishing house in Wheaton. Armed with Christ's words concerning the "least of these" as fleshed out by one of my favorite authors and people, Mother Teresa, I was ready to embark into what I believed to be my true vocation, encountering Christ in the "distressing disguise of the poor." Death would not be an issue, I reasoned, since I would be working on a floor specifically designed for men and women receiving therapy and getting better. 

A wiry, white-haired woman named Mae was the first person that died soon after I assumed my new position. Mae always wore pearls, and at her funeral, as an homage to her memory, her daughters, granddaughters, and nieces donned their pearl necklaces. Quickly I discovered that my former thinking had been an illusion. Some men and women did return home after a stay on the third floor, but others, whose bodies and minds had been so decimated by disease and illness needed assistance, my assistance, to determine what would come next. Many others, too numerous for me to even remember, died on that third floor. As I went about my work, I would see family members straggle in and begin the death vigil with their loved one. Together, nurses, therapists, and I would offer meager assistance in order to provide physical and spiritual comfort during these times when death was near–a quiet room, hot coffee, water, words of condolence, silent prayers, gentle touches.

Recently I picked up a book by Henri Nouwen entitled Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation On Dying and Caring which I had purchased and read during this time in my life. Not to be morose, but death, my death and the death of my loved ones, is never too far from my thoughts. Ideally, I would experience a peaceful death; this is what I pray. But I also realize that I might, in the words of a speaker who once deeply impressed me, "die screaming because so did our Lord." Mainly, I want to befriend my death and die well, not with bitterness and anger but with acceptance, hope and trust that I am God's beloved child and that through Christ's resurrection, death has been overthrown and defeated and that life reigns. But will I, in Nouwen's words, "be willing to make that journey" in which "my body will lose its strength, my mind its flexibility;" in which "I will lose family and friends;" in which "I will become less relevant to society and be forgotten by most;" in which "I will have to depend increasingly on the help of others; and, in the end, I will have to let go of everything and be carried into the completely unknown"?  

Today Orthodox Christians celebrate the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. For years, the aged prophet Simeon had waited and trusted that God would fulfill the prophecy that he would not taste death before seeing the Messiah. As the holy Theotokos and St. Joseph presented their forty-day-year-old son Jesus in accordance to Mosaic law, Simeon took up this infant in his arms and addressed Him saying:

Lord, lettest now Thy servant depart in peace,

According to Thy word;

For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation

Which Thou hast prepared before the

face of all peoples,

A light to enlighten the Gentiles

And the glory of Thy people Israel.

Just a bit more than ten months earlier, an angel had appeared to the infant's mother-to-be, betrothed at that time but not yet married, and communicated that she would conceive in her womb and bear the Son of God. Dismayed and a bit confused as to how this would happen, Mary, like the prophet Simeon, demonstrated her trust in the Almighty, saying, "Behold, the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word." Each week in Holy Communion, God extends a similar invitation to the Church community–to trust Him anew and receive the salvation He has prepared for all people, not because we are worthy, for indeed we are not, but rather because He is a merciful, compassionate God, and we are His beloved children. 

Last Saturday evening as Thomas and I snuggled into my bed together, ate chocolate chip cookies, and read books, I described to him how when I was little girl, I also loved to have my mother sleep with me. I related how I would hold her hand, naively thinking that if I held her tight enough, she could not slip away once I fell asleep. "Her presence made me feel safe," I told my four-year-old son. My presence makes him "feel comfortable," he told me. My mother will have a procedure called an angiogram on the 11th of this month, on the day my father celebrates his 82nd birthday. It is possible that a stent will need to be placed in her arteries. I think we are all a little scared. I know I am. So, am I willing to put my faith and trust once again in God and believe that "neither death nor life, nor angel or principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord"?  I don't know. I pray that with God's help, I will be able.