We spent the afternoon like that, the three of us. Vincent and I changed places at [my mother’s] bedside. We sponged her mouth. I watched her eyes. I held her hand. Her face was smooth. Her eyes were like the eyes of a child or a delicate bird. A creature. Curious, delighted. She was, we were, there is no other word for it, changed.
How is it that things fall away? The hours of that afternoon were like a wave set off by a stone dropping into a pool of water; the ripples reverberated backward through her life. The past is not what we think it is. It is not written in stone after all, but can be washed over and through by the present’s events.
I felt I understood a part of the resurrection. Jesus rode a wave backward into time and human history and redeemed events, that is, stole them back from chaos and destruction. He walked among the dead and woke them up with the power of the same thing that stood with us that afternoon. In the mind of God, there is no past or present and nothing ever dies.
That afternoon, whatever we had done together in our lives, or failed to do, the fragments of love in all three of us were gathered up so that they coalesced to the point of profound connection. We crossed over, my mother leading the way. It was as if a door had opened into heaven, allowing heaven in. In my Father’s house are many mansions. It matters that it was only a fraction of a long life, a few hours at the end of eighty-eight years, but it was, for then, and for now, enough.
From “Her Last Hours” by Nora Gallagher, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org