August 15 Again

I don't really miss my mother most of the time, but at certain moments something hits me. A couple of days ago, I was thinking about Thanksgiving and then I remembered that she always sat in the same chair (pictured), the chair I am sitting in now, and this year she won't be sitting there. It seems so strange. It reminds me of the day she died. There was a green chair with a footstool that she always sat in in her apartment and you may have read that she was sitting in the chair when she died. She had the leg with the broken hip up on the footstool. I wonder if she was getting ready to put the other one up too. My sister Lisa works next door to the apartment building, so she got there very fast, I guess she'd been alone with Mother, and the police were in the hallway, for about 45 minutes when I arrived.  We sat there for another hour or two before the funeral home people got there to take her away. And then other people came but no one would sit in the chair. Finally, I decided that we had to get it over with sooner or later, so I sat there. Now that chair is at Lisa's house. 

I have been wanting to write about what happened the day before Mother died and the morning she died, but I hesitated because I'm not sure what some members of my family might think about it, but I've decided to go ahead anyway. I had been pretty much talking to the Lord about how if she got sick a third time, I wished that He would just take her home. I felt a bit odd about it though. Of course, I would not have wanted her to die if she needed to be here for any reason that I didn't know, for some purpose of His, but I knew that she was ready to go--that she wanted it and was basically just waiting. She could occasionally if she wanted to get involved in a conversation, or be interested in what was going on around her, but she told me she felt like she was not really there. In some ways, she had already left. 

On Thursday the 14th, the brothers were having a vigil Mass for the Feast of the Assumption at Christian Brothers University, where my husband works, at 5:00 p.m., and since our parish Mass for the feast day was going to be at 8:00 p.m. on Friday night, we decided to attend the CBU Mass. The chaplain at CBU is very cerebral. I thought we would get a very intellectual explanation about the feast of the Assumption, and what we got was a very sentimental homily. I was amazed. I have never seen this priest show the slightest hint of sentiment before, although I don't know him well, so maybe he is different than he appears. He said that his mother was in her 90s and was fortunate enough to live in her own home, but what if she couldn't, and could only live in one room in a nursing home? And what if somehow he were elected pope and went to Rome to live in all that finery and left her in that one room. What would people think of him? And Jesus didn't want to leave His mother in that one room either, so He brought her to Heaven. Now, even I could knock some theological holes in that little story, but it didn't matter. I just thought, "Well, all right Lord, if that's the way it is, I'm going to pray for my mother to die."

So the next morning I prayed very specifically. I asked that she would die if she were ready spiritually and that it be very soon (Thy will be done, of course.) And, you know, it wasn't but 6 or 7 hours later that she did die. She died on the day Catholics celebrate the day that Jesus took his mother to Heaven.

I haven't told this story to many people. I worried about doing so, because if you are not at peace with the idea of your death, you might think this was awful, but it's not. It's the kind of death that we should all hope and pray for.

A few days at most before she died, I took Mother a statue of St. Martin de Porres and told her quite a bit about him. The next time I went to see her she said, "I just want you to know that St. Martin and I have been talking quite a bit." I asked her if he had been saying anything to her because you know I talk to him every day and he never has said anything to me yet. She said no, but that was okay. I'm pretty sure now that she was telling him she wanted to die--I've had more than one person tell me that she told them that--and I have an idea that he just came and got her.

I think I ought to add, since there might be someone reading this who doesn't know me well, that I would never do any physical thing to hasten anyone's death. I believe that that decision is up to God. I also would be very hesitant to pray in this way again. This time, though, I knew it was right.

I said at the beginning that I don't miss Mother very much. This isn't because I don't love her. I think it's because, as I said in an earlier post, I feel so close to the end of my own life, that it doesn't feel to me like she is far away. However long it will be before I see her again, even if I live to be as old as she did (which I doubt) it will seem like about a week.

AMDG