With the Father

My mother died today. She died at 12:45.

We arrived about 9:15 in her room (Sha, Dad, GC, and I) and she seemed to be taking very deliberate, almost gasping breaths. Her eyes would open wide with each inhale, and her exhales were raspy as if she were puhing her air out through water or moisture at the back of her throat. As she was struggling to breath, there was a nurse there who had attended her many times through her hospitalizations, and who knew her, and who was trying to make her comfortable. She would not or could not respond to any of our voices.

We were all pretty upset by what we were seeing, an hearing with her struggle - which apparently had begun not long before our arrival. Her body was stuggling to move with every breath she could grasp, and her face looked as if every move was painful. Dr. Wabash had told us that as her body shut down, that kind of reflexive breathing was normal, wasn't painful, and was just a sign that her life was nearly spent. Just the same, it was very difficult to see, and we all requested that they try to make her more comfortable, and ease her pain, with some morphine - which they did.

After a while, she seemed to be more calm. Her breath continued to be somwhat labored, but she did not seem to be in pain. From the moment we got there, her eyes never really registerred that we were there, and she couldn't seem to speak any words. It seemed she was sleeping, but her eyes were open.

After we could recognize that she seemed more calm, we all sat near her, holding her hands, and talking with eachother about her. About the way that she seemed to reach peaople, and about the way that she had touched the people who worked with her at the Hospital. We each had moments holding her hands, holding her feet, hugging her and kissing her head. As time passed, her breathing gradually slowed.

Looking around the room, we each would have climbed into her bed could have managed it, just to be able to hold her - it was on all of our faces. The look of people who love a person ehnough to not be able to imagine life and living without them, and knowing at the same time that they are drifing away. My Dad sat by her side mostly, and Sha on the other. GC and I circulating , and taking moments we found to be able to hold her hand, and hug her.

In a moment that Dad got up to walk over on to the window, I sat next to Mom, and held her hand, and kissed her cheek. Her beaths were coming now with long gaps in betwean them. I looked her in the eye, and it seemed like she reisterred me. I looked into her eyes for a moment, tears in my own and tried to love a lifetime in that look. The corner of her mouth curled up either in a smile or at the very begining of a Weber-sad moment, and I said outloud that we all loved her. Looking at me, she breathed a quick weakend breath - and then she did not breath again.

I looked over at Dad, and rose out of the chair, so he could sit with her. He bent at the waist with his eyes on her hand, and wept aloud for a time. He leaned over her, with tears heavy in his eyes, and kissed her on her cheek many times. We each of us, took a moment to hold her, to kiss her cheek, and to love on her one moment more.

I think the last moment where Mom looked at me was one of two things. In her last moment, she either glipsed the open arms of Jesus, pulling her on or she looked at me as was sad to the point of tears (weber tears are those accomponied with something, that if not for a red face and tears, would look like a strained smile) for having not been able to be here for her family. She loved her family. Perhaps in that last moment she considered everything in my life, in our lives, that she wouldn't be able to celebrate with us, or mourn with us, or guide us through the best she knew how. Or, perhaps, she smiled, seeing God - and his comfort, and joy, and the celebration of the angesls and saints, at knowing that one who had finished the race, was coming home. Perhaps it was both, in the same moment.

Courage has many faces. But at the heart of many faces of courage, is facing pain. Knowing that your heart may be broken, knowing that pain will come, and stepping forward when all logic and reason would tell you step away. Knowing the pain is coming, knowing that it may be something that changes you forever and not knowing who you will be on the other side, and deciding to stand where you are - next to someone you love who is dying, and by those who stand near you, suffering in ways and dimentions maybe greater than your own, so that the one who is dying will know - if they can - that you are there, and they are not alone; and so that the others, who carry the weight of the remainder of their lives without the presence of the passing one they love, know they need not carry it alone.

It is not a celebrated courage. There are no monuments, like those that honor conquered geography, or tyranny, or opression, or violence, or obsticles, or so many other things that are recorded for the world to see. But there it is. I may have been able to see my way through to that before, but now I know it. I have seen it in my sister, and my Father, and in mom's best friend, and in me.

Thank you, to those of you pray, and have prayed for me and my family - in moments here and there, and in earnest with passion. Thank you.

Mom-

I love you. I cannot tell you here, or there, how I will miss you. In every happy moment I will think on you, and know that you are with the Father, and with all the saints which have gone before you, laughing, and chearing, and smiling with us, as if to warm further already lauphing hearts. In every moment of sadness, I will think back to the courage you showed me to mourn, to feel pain pass into and through me, to rest on the Rock, and to know that you cannot both live and run from the wind. I miss you every day. I will love you always. I will try to live in a way that makes God and you proud of me. I will try to love my wife in a way that will make you smile.

I love you so much.