Another farewell

Saying goodbye

Her head peeping out from under the bedcovers is like a bird’s, narrow and thin. The huge, dark rimmed glasses wider than her skull, a pair of giant eyes. She looks healthy, her skin the orange of a cheap fake tan. Hepatitis does that. It is shocking to see her so vulnerable, emaciated, she who once was so sturdy and strong. But she hasn’t lost her sense of humour.

I had not expected her to be completely bedridden yet. The hospital bed seems too big for her now small frame. She is happy to see me, and so are her husband and daughter, who look after her. Her daughters take shifts helping their father caring for her during the night. Even an emaciated body is a dead weight when helpless.

It was a long drive, and I am still very tired after long flights from another continent. But I am glad I came. We talk about former times, all the things she has always done for others, her years as a home help, a social worker, a surrogate mother replacing the sick and being in charge of strange and large families. About how I came into her family and how she accepted me without asking questions. About the time before I got to know her, when she offered a home to nieces and nephews in times of need, never complaining but enjoying the vast brood under her roof. How she taught my stepdaughter to knit, an art foreign to her own mother.

She is content, tells me that people have asked her if she is afraid of dying. She isn’t, she says. She has tried to live a useful life, and she doesn’t know what is awaiting her. A still practising catholic, she just doesn’t know, whatever the priest might tell her. ‘Nobody has ever come back, so how can anyone know for sure’, she repeats many times. I do not have any answers. Yes, she has always been helpful, caring, dominant but fair, and altruistic. Even now that she is dying, she is phoning family and friends that her time is up, so that they will be prepared and not be too shocked when they hear about her death. She tells me again and again that she is not afraid. I haven’t asked her that question. Should I have? Does it help? Would it ease her passage from this world into another? I just thank her for accepting me, for giving us her house when my husband, very sick, was in a wheelchair and we needed a break. Her bungalow was the perfect place. She and her husband took off in their caravan so that we could enjoy their home.

I feed her little pieces of a warm croissant, with a spoon, her always busy hands useless now on the bed sheets. In between bites she sips water from a straw. It is like feeding the tiny birds in my garden. Her daughter is very caring. ‘I changed her diapers, now she changes mine,’ my sister-in-law says with a wry smile. ‘It can’t be helped.’  I see my late husband, his hospital bed in our living room, his body, just skin and bones. They seem to merge into one another, the brother and the sister, a deathbed revisited.

Before the three of us sit down for supper, the daughter takes off her mother’s glasses and she closes her eyes, tired now after all the talking.

After supper I have to leave, for I have a two hour drive at best ahead of me on a dark, and wet night. I am glad I came and that we could talk. I kiss her goodbye. Will I see her again, except in another world, the New Jerusalem? I don’t know, and for her sake and her family’s sake I hope I won’t.

Two days later I get a phone call to tell me that the morning after my visit my sister-in-law has passed away very peacefully. I am sad for lives that end, friends and family leaving this world, but glad she is now released from a body which no longer served her.

In Paradisum deducant te Angeli.

The Gregorian chant

From Faure’s Requiem Mass