Musings: Notes From My Daybook

When you are 82 years old, your hearing is fading and you can no longer walk, life is largely reduced to a wheel chair in a small room. Thankfully, for Lois, that room is in the building where her daughter and granddaughter works. Nevertheless, when meeting the preacher is the most important thing you can talk about and the noticable thing you want to talk about is how many people are dying around you, the preacher knows that rather than beating around the bush it is time to say some things about death and dying.

The irony is that all around life is moving forward. The rush of traffic, the buzz of business. The frenetic pace of life is pulsing and throbbing. Even inside the well-kept nursing home, nurses hustle efficiently and staff work competently along. But in this one room a lady sits with her two guests--immobilized by advanced age and declining health.

And though the talk is a walk through memory lane--people and places of the past--the real topic is about death. She recounts quietly the death of the woman across the hall and the one next door. One passed quietly and the other suffered horribly. What will it be like for me is the question in her eyes.

Whatever it will be death is not a portal that one passes through alone. I tell her that death is not the end; something greater lies beyond the shadow of death's door. And is God is real now, he will only be more real in the "greater" that exists.

The afternoon passes and we pray. I give her and hug and she smiles with peace in her eyes. I imagine that she will again the hear the sounds of death down her hallway. But perhaps she will remember that she does not wait for death alone.