A Christmas Gift

Nine years ago, one week before Christmas, my beloved mother passed away.  Sunday morning,

December 18, 2016, at 4:00 of a cold, foggy morning, the Hospice nurse confirmed what my sister and I had just witnessed:  our precious mother was gone.  For eighteen sleepless hours, we had kept vigil at her side, reading Scripture, praying, and singing hymns.  At one point when we were quoting verses about heaven, I suddenly realized that my focus was misguided.  Thinking about heaven should have brought the Presence of Christ near to this saintly bed, I thought, but something was strangely missing.  I knew my mother was ready to die, but what was it?  

“The Cross!  It’s the Cross!” I cried out in a burst of conviction, as I sang one of her favorite hymns, “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross!”  Yes, immediately, the gloom lifted, and Christ’s Presence engulfed my spirit in waves of holy sweetness and contrite worship.  I knew in my spirit that my speechless mother’s sense was identical to mine; I could feel her spirit’s fellowship beyond her body’s ability to express.  I knew she was grateful for the sweet conviction that reminds us that heaven is heaven only because Jesus is there.  His Cross is the only doorway in!  How could I have overlooked this?  I had placed my attention on my mother’s coming reward and not on Christ Himself Who is her reward!  Oh, how precious was the Lord to show me this!      

Since my mother’s last rally two days before, she had not opened her eyes, but her mouth had fallen permanently open.  Deep into a current we could not follow, her thoughts drifted into the world to come.  We could sense it.  Her mind seemed to be in a whirlwind of activity and suppressed excitement.  Sometimes she raised her eyebrows as if peeking on tiptoe over a heavenly windowsill; sometimes her mouth moved vaguely as if trying to reply, “I love you.”  But to all appearances, her attention had already left this salty shoreline of earth to gaze upon heaven’s sea of glass.     

  And yet we knew she felt us there.  We caressed her graying brow, smoothed her moist hair, kissed her sinking cheeks, and poured our words of love and tenderness into her still-listening ears.  Ever since I was a tiny girl trying to heal others’ pain, I have imagined I could crawl inside their heads.  Wanting to know how my students think has driven me to see lessons from their point of view.  This I tried to do with my mother, but the sheer presumption of the task forbade me.  I had never seen anyone die.  Still, this was my mother.  What was she thinking?  I sensed that she wanted me to know, even as dying required of her a complete and final disregard for every duty she had ever borne.  I knew she was reckoning with this release, despite having said all her goodbyes two days before.  She knew her days on earth were done.  All that remained were these final hours—and for us who waited, this seemed a lifetime in itself.  What this passage holds for any of us we do not know—and can never tell, once we do.  

Hospice tried to provide a clue, saying that parents usually wanted one of two things:  either to die alone or to die with their children by their side.  One or the other, but which would it be?  If we misunderstood my mother’s mute and ever more fragile clues, we would get it wrong.  And yet her nurse told us simply, “You will know.”  This was like being handed a treasure map to a country I had never seen.  We had brought our coolers of food and our pajamas; we held onto our Bibles and hymnbooks and had picked out her favorite songs for her funeral service—knowing this would last over two hours if we sang them all.  And when we pulled aside the drapes sometimes to peek outside upon the soon-too-dark evening, we gazed in wonder upon the puffy flakes that drifted so fairylike from some far-off land above.  It was a perfect night to stay awake—and a perfect night to die.  

The silence that followed our almost ceaseless impromptu prefuneral service while our mother was still alive settled thickly into dumb ignorance.  We were tired, and there seemed nothing more to do but to wait.  Truly, nothing more could really be said above the ever-loudening rattle of my mother’s irregular breathing.  The shocking fact of her fight for air was a palpable horror we could not express.  It wasn’t that she was suffering; Hospice House had seen to that.  Her nurse came every hour, lifted the sheets gently off her legs, pointed out the dimpling of her flesh and the graying of her skin and predicted her time remaining like the incoming tide.   Still, what no one knew—except my mother—was whether she still wanted us there.  This gentle lady made of steel, radiant in her final rally, pointing with one finger upward emphatically her last wish for me: “And for YOU to find happiness!” (I could still see her smile now)—what did she want?     

But what was this smell in the room worsening with her death rattle?  Something ghoulish and foreign haunted us.  Was this my mother?  So strange the last enemy of death changed her to be before my watching eyes.  So, this was sin.  So, this was Eden’s loss—even for one that, it seemed, barely ever sinned.  I didn’t want to remember my mother this way—as a living corpse turning greenish in the dim midnight wall sconces.  Her breathing scared me.  It was impossible to sleep.  I couldn’t stand it.  But yet I stayed.  My sister had already taken refuge in the nearby sunroom, but the skylight kept her from dozing, and, anyway, it was cold.  I don’t know whether I could call it excitement or dread—it was like waiting for a canoe to tip over a waterfall—should I stay in the canoe, or should I let it go over by itself?  There was no way to know.  I felt helpless and in the way.  

Then the Hospice nurse came in again.  This was well past midnight into the small hours of morning.  “Your mother is in A-fib.”  She could barely find a pulse.  The reason my mother was allowed to come to Hospice House was because her doctor the Sunday before had found a massive blood clot in her aorta—the one she had had replaced just over two years before.  She was expected to have a severe stroke at any moment, and, rather than to endure one more intervention that solved nothing, my mother had firmly said, “Hospice.  I want Hospice.  I want to go home before Christmas.”  The Lord’s angels went before me, and I told the Hospice representative at High Point Regional Hospital what my mother had said.  “Why Hospice?” she had quizzed me.  This privilege is reserved for a very few.  

And Hospice it became, though the stroke never came.  My mother slept the entire first day.  The next day she awakened but became ashen and restless, wanting but not wanting to eat.  Orange Sherbet was her request.  I had stayed with her as long as I could, leaving my classes with other teachers who graciously administered my exams.  The next morning before I headed back, my mother told the nurse she was going Home to be with Jesus and that she wanted to say “Goodbye” to her family.  “Does she often talk like this?” the nurse gently quizzed me over the phone.  “Oh, no!”  I answered firmly.  “If she said that, she knows!” 

I already had my classes covered for the day, and my sister and I headed to Hospice House for what became my mother’s final rally.  This day is one of the funniest, most-endearing memories I have of her.  She kept raising her arms, “Why don’t I feel anything?  I want to feel ecstasy!”  She thought she was in her casket and kept telling us what to tell Cumby’s Funeral Home.  She picked out her burial costume.  She wanted to wear her chocolate brown suit.  “Put a scarf around my neck.  I want it to be modest,” she explained in girlish anticipation.  

Then she spoke with my father on the phone—he was in the hospital, too, with a urinary tract infection.  She kept raising her voice to her loudest pitch because he could not hear her.  “I’ll be looking for you!” she promised in a sense of almost competitive teasing.  That was her way—always plucky, always thoughtful, always a bit competitive, always just one step ahead—of everything.  Then she focused her shining eyes on my sister, giving her blessing to the grandchildren she would never see grow up, knowing Paula and Ron would raise them well and that they would always be remarkable.  Then she leveled her playful gaze at me, predicting or at least hinting that after her death a certain someone would ask for my hand in marriage.  This was what she meant, “And for YOU to find happiness!”  I would tell her honestly these nine years later that my happiness was ensured by not marrying him (not that he ever asked)!  

After these parting well-wishes, my mother settled into another phase in awaiting her second request—to be Home for Christmas.  She fell silent.  Before this, the day of her last rally—not that we knew it was, she was so energetic that I imagined her full healing; I dreamed of ways to keep her in a nursing home with my Parkinson’s-plagued father, her high school sweetheart of sixty-seven years.  But it was all a mist that melted away with the hours.  It was now early Sunday morning, and to hear the nurse say she was back in A-fib made her stroke seem suddenly imminent.  Was I to see my mother, after all, become smitten hideously before my very eyes as I waited to see her die?  Would this be my last memory of her, after all?  Something terrifying and monstrous—something called Death itself—the last enemy—filled the room like London fog at midnight.  

I left the room.  I tried to half-sit, half-lie down on the sunroom couch near my sister.  We chatted quiet fragments of profound amazement and indecision.  She was desperate for a bit of sleep before morning, knowing she would have to mother her three small children eight years old and under with a newfound grief bulging in her heart.  Unlike myself, she couldn’t pull all-nighters without becoming sick.  But I couldn’t rest.  There was no way to become comfortable, that is true, but it was something much deeper.  This was my mother—the best friend I had in the world, the audience of my poems, the sympathetic ear to my prayers, the wise heart to my problems, the bosom to my pain.  We were kindred spirits in a world that knows no seasons, no storms, only rainbows and roses—only heavenly dreams come true.  How can I ever dare to explain what she was to me?  She was my mother.  I was saved at her knee when I was less than four years old.  She rebuked me; she corrected me; she taught me; she challenged me; she forgave me; she listened to me; but most of all, she loved me.  I knew that I would never again on earth have a love like hers.  This I must lose. 

I went back to her room.  As if summoned, I walked right up to her bed.  The room didn’t smell so strange, and somehow, she seemed less, well, corpselike.  I knew I had to be with her.  Something electric hung in the air.  I could feel it.  It tingled my nerves with excitement.  Soon the nurse came back in for her hourly check.  “Your mother is one strong lady!  Her heart is back in normal rhythm!”  At that moment I knew—just as the Hospice nurse had said.  My mother knew I was there, and I knew she wanted me there.  She wanted me to know—to know what?  To know all was well; to know that she was once again my mother.  But what else?  I stretched out full-length on the daybed, trying to rest as I waited.  Her breathing by now was extremely loud; monumental; epic.  

I had no sooner stretched out than I sat up, as if someone had called my name.  I began singing, “Amazing Grace,” as if on cue of an unseen baton.  Exactly when I sang the words, “And grace will lead me home,” I felt it—A sense of movement swooping swifter than eagle’s wings above my head, from the wall behind me to the opposite wall where she lay—and at that exact moment I heard one final gasp and a long, drawn-out sigh.  Instantly, I knew—or thought I knew—this was different from every breath of hers I had heard for the past eighteen hours, excepting my brief sojourn in the sunroom.  This breath was her spirit. 

I ran for my sister, “Paula!  It’s time!  It’s time!”  She rushed into the room.  We resumed our post on each side of my mother’s bed, Paula on her right and I on her left, as we had been most of the day and almost all night.  My mother’s chest continued to rise and fall for a moment as gently as the receding tide.  And then it never moved again.  We stared across her body in a thrill of disbelief.  In numb confusion we buzzed the nurse.  Without a word, she listened to my mother’s heart.  She held her ear to her lips.  She held her wrist and waited.  No one broke the breathless silence.  

“All right.  Four a.m. we will put as the time,” she quietly confirmed.  “So, she’s gone???”  Paula and I gasped in unison, staring at one another with sleepless eyes.  Our gaze dropped to our mother’s marble form.  There is nothing on earth quite like the first frost of death.  The stillness is rebuking; the separation, raw; the silence, harsh yet also holy.  I have tucked my mother in bed many times, but I always knew—or hoped I did—that she would open her eyes in the morning.  And this she did.  Sunday morning, one week before Christmas, she opened her eyes in the arms of Jesus, Home at last.  She never had the stroke; she never contorted into a disfigured shell of the woman she once was.  She stayed my precious mother right to the end.  The angels swept her soul away before my very eyes, leaving her body here below as a little seed that will break through the cold ground one foggy winter morning—before anyone else is up—and I will be swept away with her by my Savior’s side to stay forever and a day.  

Christmas is different now.  The silence of that night turned into morning still rules the week before, yet bringing tears I couldn’t release then.  But my mother left behind a heavenly memory:  witnessing her death was truly a Christmas gift.