What happens next?
At a certain point, we know more people who have died than people who are alive.
Riding in the funeral home limo with the family, we were all watching the two matching black hearses driving ahead of us.
Marta and I looked at each other, and smiled.
Marta was the daughter-in-law who ended up caring for her husbands’ parents after he died young. Her husband had died of cancer years before, when her children were teenagers. By the end of his life, Al was gaunt, ravaged by illness. After his death, Marta stayed close to her in-laws, Bert and Janie. When they became ill, she cared for them, too.
Bert was dying a slow, peaceful death on hospice when Janie got pneumonia and went to the hospital. Marta went back and forth between the patient at home and the one in the hospital.
Waking her up one night, Bert asked, “Is Mama gone?”
“No,” she reassured him. “The hospital hasn’t called. Nothing has happened. Why?”
“I saw her,” he said. “She came to say goodbye. Al was with her. He’s filled out nicely.”
The hospital found Janie dead the next morning when they went into her room. “We’ll just wait,” Marta decided, “and have both funerals together.” She was imagining a few months. Bert died two days later.
What bridge exists between this life and the next one? How do people come to us?
On the night my father died, he outlasted me as I sat with him, and I went back to the hotel to sleep. Something woke me up at the time he died, a whisper-light touch, so I was already awake when the facility called.
I wonder all the time about the power of love to stretch beyond the life we know.
Image above via Pexels.
Thank you for sharing this precious story. I see this so much iny work, both the knowing when someone has died and the dying of a couple in quick succession of one another. I actually think there is something beautiful about it, although certainly hard for the family who remain.
April is the anniversary month of my dad’s death. On April 27 it will be 12 years and the grief is still so close to the surface. He has come to me over the years in vivid dreams (I rarely have vivid dreams so I cherish these appearances). I was given the gift of his written sermons and in recent years have started a project in conversation with him (which I am trying to build out and complete on Substack during my sabbatical).