Is it any easier when you have time to say goodbye? Lately, I have been at the bedside of my sweetheart's mother, a woman I have known only a short time; yet, she opened her heart to me and I to her. As I sit there holding her hand, it often takes me back unwillingly to the last several weeks I spent with my father as he succumbed to Parkinson's Disease. Bearing witness to his gaunt features and labored breathing day after day was like a knife twisting in my stomach. I began reading to him just to have something to focus on other than his condition and marveled at how my sister and others, mostly women, could talk to him as if he was actively taking part in their conversation.
When my wife passed suddenly and I sat at her bedside holding her hand, she was simply asleep. I never had the chance to say anything. And my mind was already racing ahead to what had to be done for our daughters.
My sweetheart also dotes over her mother. She cleans her, holds her, and carries on a conversation with her as if they were at the kitchen table having coffee. And then she comes over and comforts me because she knows of the grief I still carry. How foolish I feel for not being able to master my own emotions, but I know my strengths and being a caregiver to a dying person is not one of them.
Lord, give me the strength, then, that I do not have, to hold a hand and see the soul, not the decayed body it lingers in, and to be open and willing to absorb the grief of others even though I still carry my own. For those who mourn, let me be the comfort you send them. Amen.
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