Category: Death

Seize Life!

For a while now I’ve reflected on beginnings and endings, unaware of how much more personal endings would soon become. I’ve missed a week here, because I missed a week in my life – and almost the rest of it.

After a “simple” hand surgery Tuesday last, disoriented with too much pain medication in my system for my slow metabolism, terrible nausea woke me in the middle of the night. After staggering to the bathroom, I accidentally took too much of an anti-nausea medicine which is very sedating. In the morning, I only responded with groggy words and my husband was concerned, but knew a friend was coming by in an hour to pick me up for church, so he left my cell phone by my ear and went on to work, calling me regularly. After I hadn’t answered more than twenty calls, he left a full schedule of patients and rushed home. When it was clear that I was deteriorating, he called EMS, and followed the ambulance to the Emergency Room.

I awoke in the ER, thinking I’d just had the hand surgery, with no memories of the preceding 24 hours. I couldn’t get my words out to answer their questions and couldn’t move my hands to follow their instructions — the middle of a nightmare.

After an afternoon of CAT scans and other tests, copious amounts of IV fluids, a huge amount of confusion and a great deal of humiliation on my part, they ruled out a stroke. Towards evening, I was improving, so they released me to my husband’s care. We arrived home to find my precious youngest daughter with dinner ready, and my sweet, declining mother with her arms open wide.

It was days before I really understood what had happened, and even more days before I began to feel like myself, as I was weak, had little balance and huge amounts of brain fog. But even in the midst of the splitting headache and waves of nausea, I felt a deep sense of gratitude for the people in my life – my husband and his love and intuition, my family and their loving care, my dear friends from church who called and prayed – one who came and took over when my daughter had to return to her family the next day, and prepared food to last us several days.

As a child, I was always told to wait until I was older to do what I wanted and learned early on to postpone enjoyment. Life was scary and harsh, so I engaged reality as little as possible. That helped me to survive a rough childhood, but that is no way to live. How many of our early-acquired defense mechanisms now keep us imprisoned?

In the days that followed The Big Scare, the fog lifted, colors seemed brighter, everything around me more beautiful, and the people in my life even more important. I moved in a deep current of the joy of living and the desire to make every moment count.

And gratitude, in huge waves and gulps, filling me, washing me and releasing me.

As Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 9:7-10 in The Message

Seize life! Eat bread with gusto,
Drink wine with a robust heart.
Oh yes—God takes pleasure in your pleasure!
Dress festively every morning.
Don’t skimp on colors and scarves.
Relish life with the spouse you love
Each and every day of your precarious life.
Each day is God’s gift. It’s all you get in exchange
For the hard work of staying alive.
Make the most of each one!
Whatever turns up, grab it and do it. And heartily!
This is your last and only chance at it,
For there’s neither work to do nor thoughts to think
In the company of the dead, where you’re most certainly headed.

With a fresh sense of the value of each moment, for living now, valuing my priorities, I’m relishing each task, learning to make the most of all of my life, not waiting for high moments or perfect circumstances.

Letting my Lord’s love pierce me through and through, I am choosing to gift that freedom to everything I set my hand to do, whether loading the dishwasher, walking the dog, playing the guitar or singing in church, hugging a hurting friend, dancing with my youngest grandchild turning one, walking with my husband in the cool of the evening . . . the full range is exciting to embrace, and it’s all a wonder.

As she lay dying

His sister called, and early the next morning my husband flew west to be at his mother’s bedside. He and his sisters kept vigil. At the hospice nurse’s urging, they spoke to her as if she could hear them, even though she didn’t respond.

old hands

Back home, I waited and prayed. For three days, I prayed that the Lord would minister to them even as they ministered to her. Prayed that whatever remained for her spirit to transact with Jesus would take place.

After hours of thunderstorms, late in the afternoon the rain stopped. I grabbed my dog’s leash and pulled on my walking shoes. Outside, leaves dripped, shinning in the soft light of twilight. The grass and trees seemed greener, more vibrant.

When I stepped out from under our oak trees onto the street, I looked up and gasped. On my right, pink and purple clouds tumbled upward from a sunset of scarlet and tangerine.

As I turned to the east, peace poured over me. Pink cotton candy clouds billowed with reflected sunset colors, and two complete rainbows, one over the other, arched across the horizon. The outer bands of color fluxed in and out of the clouds as if someone were mixing watercolors.

A holy moment. A gateway to heaven. I couldn’t move.

double rainbow for blog

Finally, Lily tugged, anxious for her long-awaited walk. I set out, often turning to witness the rainbows. I tried to snap their exquisite beauty with my cell phone, frustrated that the purples and greens wouldn’t come through. I was too close to capture the complete arcs and hoped I could move far enough west to get them. But when I came around the circle and out from under more oak trees, the rainbows had vanished.

But the deep peace abided, an other-world kind of peace that has no basis in circumstances or status.

Pure gift.

sunset

Not long after I returned home, my husband called, his voice hoarse with emotion.

“Mom’s gone. She’s gone to be with Dad.”

They had been telling stories and laughing about their hard-headed father, who’d died only months before. The sister who’d been caring for their mother so long was holding her hand when she slipped away.

I loved her very much, and I knew that somehow, the Lord had included me in her home-going, 1,300 miles away.

These tiny glimpses of heaven are promises of what is to come, encouragement when the sky is dark and life is brutal. When progress seems so long in coming. When we lose a loved one.

Have you recently experienced a great loss?

Or do you face the gradual seeping away of hope?

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (NIV)