At the Hour of Our Death

I am a Hospice Nurse. I work with the dying and their families on their turf. I am a guest in their homes, in their lives and at the hour of their deaths.

As we walk Life's path together for whatever time we are together, I am called upon by the dying and their families and friends to help them understand the unfamiliar, frightening, sometimes even seemingly hostile landscape we sojourn together - where altogether too soon (always too soon) we, the family and friends, have to allow the dying to continue on that path without us, alone.

We, all of us on this earth, are here, together on that path. The dying are just some steps ahead of the rest of us - we each will follow the well-worn, well known path one day. We just won't know it till we get there.

I tell a story at times when the pulling ahead of the dying, the 'leaving us behind' is just too hard to bear for the living. The reality of our loved one’s eminent leaving us mirrors in some small way the reality known by the Apostles when Christ was eminently leaving them at His Ascension.

I imagine how we each felt at the "moments before our births" - imagine with me, if you will.. The baby is in the only environment he has ever known, warm, dark, soft, close to the heart of his mother - her heartbeat ever and always the syncopating rhythm providing the background music to all that he hears. He can imagine no other way to be, no other life, no other existence.

His home is suddenly spasming, he senses the fear, pain and anticipation of his mother. As he is pushed and pulled through the impossibly tiny birth canal, as his skull is squeezed into an elongated shape and his shoulder is twisted downward, he has to experience fear and very probably, pain.

He is welcomed into a huge, bright, cold, loud and utterly foreign world of the delivery room - be it hospital, clinic or home - it isn't the warm and dark space of his former existence and he is afraid.

He is placed on his mother's tummy, whisked away and roughly caressed, wound tightly in swaddling clothes and handed to his mother - to gaze up into the face of love, to see for the first time, the face who knew him first, who will love him forever. He finally experiences something familiar; he hears his mother's voice.

Remember, mothers, remember when you gave birth to your children.

Remember that love.

Think now, of the wonderful world we birthed those babies into - the family, the world, the love.

I imagine 'the hour of death' to be something similar. As comfortable as the baby is inside his mother, the dying are comfortable in life. In leaving the "womb of Life." the Dying are born into something different than life. Bigger, better, brighter, more 'real' than life as we have on earth now. As Christians, we believe the Dying are born into the arms of Christ.

That's an amazing promise we claim, and the fear can fall away and we can run to His arms as our children ran to ours when they first learned to walk.

We are born into the glorious world of God.

Knowing this, I offer this as solace to those who have lost a loved one to death.