Musings on death

My mother leaned into my arm as we wove through the turns upon turns that guided us out of the eighth floor of the hospital. We walked past where we had fetched cold water. We walked past the nurses’ station. We walked past the windows overlooking the capital and cathedral, that bank of leather chairs I had paced by, checking in with siblings, checking in on kids. We reached the elevator, a melancholy of a finish line.

I pressed the down button. She rested on the proffered chair, a small respite for folks waiting in this mammoth space, the ones waiting for a ride back to the life before the hospital. A ride to their cars, taking them back to a home, one emptier, one quieter. A life that wouldn't be the same because someone’s dead body was taking a different elevator, a different ride, not back but forward.

The disease that drove us home to a changed neighborhood, a changed house had struck quickly but quietly. That’s the question mark of cancer. How long had it been brewing? And when we heard about it, the quick part kicked in. Six weeks from diagnosis to death. Six weeks of grappling, hoping, suffering, accepting. Six weeks of the unknown.

+ + +

My prayer by the bedside in the hospital had been one for healing, but more deeply for one of presence. When her eyelids fluttered open during the Rosary, I thought, “Jesus, be here, be with her, be with us.” Whatever His mysterious will was, however it played out, I just wanted to invite and re-invite Him. I wanted her to hear His Precious Name uttered, so in my quiet afternoon with her, I sang every hymn I could remember even some of the lyrics to. An invocation of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Family, the Angels & Saints, those who had gone before us. Music can do that, invite in a way more intimate; singing feels like praying twice.

+ + +

If you’ve witnessed the slipping into the next life, a person you care about actively dying, then you may know what I mean by this: the threshold place, the liminal place, of death is both thick and thin. It is thick with that presence of the spiritual world. It is thin with the rawness of how the process of death prunes everything away.

+ We are never more completely in the presence of the next world than when we linger on the precipice.

+ We are never less attached to this world when, as it turns out, the undone laundry and unsorted piles of n’importe quoi and things that soaked up our time and anxiety are completely fallen away.

And in this liminal place, it doesn’t really matter if we hold regrets or grudges or insecurities. We meet God whether we tried hard every day to prove ourselves or we let Him do some of the heavy lifting. The cumulation of our lives before us, we humbly surrender to His mercy, His love, and His power. That’s where none of us can say we lived a fantastic life, the perfect life, the life worthy of being before the Holy Face. In the space of transition, we howl and submit (like the transitions of birthing).

We can only say: This is my story. This is where I went right and where I went wrong. These are the moments I am proud of and the secret shames I never wanted healed because of my embarrassment. Lord, take it all and transform me and conform me to You.

And the beauty of the sacraments is that they can do just that. We are forgiven in Confession. We are given the graces to try and not do it all again. We are fed in the Eucharist. We are nourished to come back to Him and receive the love He so desires to lavish on is. We are healed by Him in the Anointing of the Sick, wound-to-wound, and made whole. And if the anointing happens on our way out of the door of this life, we’re ready.

I’m no theologian, my friends. The nuances of free will, and true repentance of sin, and the death of our desire to be in the Holy Face of God, these factors are beyond my explanation. As a simply person, I know this: the mystery of death is that we all will die, and even if we’ve lived a life riddled with hiding from God’s healing, His healing is still available to us at the end.

You and I can practice for death, today, here and now. I turn the heart of my heart, my inner room only God has shown to me, open to His rich silence. I surrender my entire being to Him. I go and receive His Body in Holy Communion. I go and receive His healing in Confession. And I try, again, in this one moment, to be inexplicably close to Him so that where He ends and I begin are indiscernible. I ask, again, for my words, breath, and thoughts to be all His.

I want my death to be a holy laying down of my life, a life that I had given to Him. When I say this, I realized that what I want my life to be too. So let’s live as we hope to die: intimate and His.

love & hugs for all those mourning and grieving,

Nell