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| Mom and I |
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| Mom, My sister Tammy, and I |
As
I walked in my neighborhood last night, the distinctive fragrance of tea olives
floated in the air and reminded me of a long-ago time. When my daughter was young,
I would drop her off in the evening for gymnastics practice at a gym in a
county park near our home. Then when my mom had a fall and came to a rehab
facility here in our town, I would walk through the tea olive filled park to
the facility to see my mother. After she had been here a few months, and could not recover, we
discovered the reason for the fall was terminal cancer. I visited her several times a day, but each evening , I’d move
from the intoxicating smell of the tea olives to that of the facility, which
was not necessarily bad, but simply different.
My
mother didn’t want to be there. She wanted to be home. Who wouldn’t feel that
way? But home hadn’t been a possibility for her in quite a while with so many
difficult health issues. I felt helpless in the face of a cruel disease that
was slowly stealing her life. I’d just sit by her bedside praying, her moments
of lucidness becoming fewer and fewer.
On
a Saturday night in early October, as I was preparing to go to bed, I dropped
to my knees and prayed. My mother’s pain seemed excruciating, her quality of
life diminished. I put her in His hands and asked the Lord to heal her or send
his angels to take her to be with him. I
then slid into an empty bed, because Jerry was out of state for a few days
preaching at a family camp.
I
went in to see Mom early the next morning and found her unusually alert. I
asked if she wanted applesauce and was surprised when she nodded her head.
She’d eaten so little lately. I fed her the sauce and then sat beside her.
Then
she did something so bizarre. She stared at the ceiling around the perimeter of
the room. I couldn’t understand what she was seeing. I got up to check if there
was a spider or bug crawling along the top of the wall. I kept saying, “Mom,
what is it? What are you looking at?” Unable to speak because of a stroke, she
just continued the wide-eyed staring at what I couldn’t understand. A friend
came in; we visited a little longer, and then my friend and I prepared to leave
for church.
“I’ll
see you a little later,” I told Mom. Mom briefly acknowledged me with her eyes and
then resumed her intense study of the room’s periphery. What in this world was
she looking at? I thought as I walked to my car.
A pastor friend was filling in for my husband
that morning and concluded his sermon by saying, “There are some things you
can’t fix, but when God fixes them, they stay fixed.”
As
his words lingered in my brain, I left with my children after church to have
lunch, and we’d just finished when my cell phone rang. It was the hospice
representative calling to say my mother had died.
There
were things about my mother most people didn’t know--difficult private battles
which she fought with great courage. Now all those terrible battles were over.
I knew the last time I’d been in her room, she hadn’t been looking at anything
in this world. She’d been staring at angels--a room full of them that’d been
sent to accompany her into the presence of the Living God.
Paul wrote in II Timothy 4:18 of his confidence that the Lord “…will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom.” My experience with my mother on the day she died cemented my confidence in God’s promise of heaven in an even greater way than ever before.
It’s
been many years since my mom made that trip to heaven. I may go walking again
tonight and catch the scent of the tea olives, but I’m just wondering if for
me, they are the smell of heaven itself. And our friend was right, I couldn’t
fix my mother’s situation, but God has fixed it for all eternity.
Edited Repost