A mother waits

I am sitting in an easy chair, keeping mum company as she rests, the afternoon air thick with unreleased rain. 

She is in her one hundred-and-first year on earth and is preparing for her new life to come. I don't know what that is or even IF it is, yet she is preparing herself because she believes, she hopes and she sighs towards it.

A large fan twirls above us, a sort of 'wheel of fortune', dispensing the cooling air around us like the soft breath of God.

I don't believe there is a God with a capital 'G' but I believe there are universal arms that enfold us if we let them, or reach out to us if we don't, and mum is slowly moving towards those arms. She is travelling through a land for which she has no map, no companion and few instructions, only a forerunner: her husband who passed through his own new door almost forty-two years ago. Yet she invokes the Spirit within, firmly believing that this will give her peace.

It does. I see it transform her face.

I gently pass a small chip of ice into her mouth with a teaspoon and she sighs with gratitude, rests her head on the pillow and sucks rhythmically at its coolness.

Impossible to imagine, thoughts and images pass before her mind as she watches re-runs of her awesome life (although she would never call it awesome. There is only one Being for whom she reserves that descriptor). Like the hexagons on a quilt that has taken over one hundred years to create, each memory finds its way into that patchwork of a life, creating a view that must be beautiful to behold, but one that only she can see.

Artist: Mary-Rose Riley (Rijs)

The television voices come to us from down the wide passageway. The firm footsteps of the carers leave their resonance in the air around us. What paths has mum bravely followed? It seems to me that they would have criss-crossed the entire universe.

One of the personal carers comes in after knocking tentatively at the almost-closed door. She carries a bundle of fresh towels which she places on the chair with the spare pillow, clean, white, ready. She doesn't speak but her gentle silence is a palpable sign of her respect and attention to the woman lying at rest, and for me.
I mouth a silent 'thank you' and she nods, her eyes smiling over her mask.
The door swings, but it nowhere near closes. 

Not yet.

No, not quite yet.