I park the car behind the house, on the grass on the far side of the driveway. I come in through the back door. I’m expected. The back door leads directly to the kitchen, and nothing’s cooking. It’s only 11:15, so nothing would be.
No one greets me. The long walk from the door through the kitchen takes years. I remember last week. I remember how frail she looked, how much frailer than the week before, and the week before that, and the month before that. My foot hits the threshold of the living room. It touches carpet. My shoes are so loud, they’ve been crashing into the linoleum, but she knew I was here the moment I pulled into the driveway. Her bed looks out onto the street, and she saw my car.
I met Grace my first Sunday. She’d just come back to church. She had small tufts of hair that sprouted like clusters of weeds. She wasn’t ashamed. She wasn’t self-conscious. Those bouquets were a badge of honor. Cancer had ravaged her body. Cancer had laid her down—a strong woman she’d come to tell me—but it couldn’t keep her down. The other women came to her like young boys flock to one who’s beaten the town’s bully. They asked questions about doctors and about chemo and about the bake sale.
I remember, before my head turns to see her, how she looked last week. Did she still have color in her cheeks? Could she say my name without coughing? Did she say my name right? She always called me another name. She couldn’t have said my name right. And she coughed. Just a little cough, though, like when you haven’t expected to carry a sentence as long as you have, and suddenly you’re robbed of breath just at the end. And, no. No, she was pale. Her eyes, still blue, still darting, still searching around my face and scouring my own eyes. But she was thin. Remember that she was thin. It was the thinness that shocked you.
I turn. “Good morning, Grace. I brought you strawberry shortcake.”
“Oh thank you, Chris. It’s so good to see you. I’ll have my daughter put it in the fridge.”
“I can do it.”
The shortcake was a fiction. I knew when I’d taken it from the tray at coffee hour she wouldn’t be able to eat it. I thought, perhaps, she might take a fingertip of whipped cream, but Grace was not going to eat strawberry shortcake. But the ladies had been so insistent. Dealing with the dying as a pastor, visiting with the terminally ill, is never so much about you and the person, but acting as an agent of the community. It’s re-assuring them that everything will be fine as you and the dying person share in the terrible secret that, no, it won’t, but yes, it very much will.
Grace became a member of the church I lead 40 years before I was born. “There are stones in the foundation older than me,” she said that first Sunday to me. “There are light-bulbs here older than you.” Then she winked, and her eyelid fell with a solidity that betrayed her trials. It was playful, but it held every moment she’d ever lived. Children. Grandchildren. Great-grandchildren. Wars and rumors of wars. Depressions and booms. Lives longer than mine had come and gone twice over since she first sat in these pews. She pointed, up. “That one. What was it, Jane? 1984 we put that light in?” Jane nodded up at an emergency light.
“I was born in 1980.”
“Bulb was in a closet before we put it in, probably bought it from the Hatchett fund in ’78. That was the year we had the blizzard.”
She laughed. It was loud.
I bring a chair in from the kitchen and sit down. I take her hand in mine and squeeze it. She tries to squeeze back, to match my welcome, but her hand simply shivers instead. She lay in a bare metal frame on a thin mattress. Her head barely propped above her chest, she strains to turn far enough to see me. She coughs—without having spoken, without having breathed deeply. She coughs, weakly, as a matter of course. Spittle comes to the corner of her mouth. Grace doesn’t wipe it away.
“So,” a shallow breath to gather her strength, “tell me. What’s going on?”
“How are you feeling?”
Another deep breath, raspy now. Her hand stops quivering for a moment and its life leaves it, transferred to her voice. “Lousy.”
“Can’t blame you for that.” Her arms are a dull blue, like pure ice from a glacier. Suddenly I feel the cold in her hand. I look in her eyes. They still search and scour, but slower and without their previous resoluteness. “You watch the parade?”
“I had to go to Cambridge for jury duty. … Our town is the last town in Middlesex County. I drove the first day. Then I taught myself the train and the subway. I took cabs everywhere. … It was a murder. … Not guilty. … He might’ve been. … We didn’t think so.” A beat goes past. The air conditioner clicks into service. “Of course I watched the parade. Everyone left so soon after they went by! It was empty in minutes! … I have another great grandchild.” She gestures vaguely in some direction, and I look for something, anything. It is a collection of photos. A small child, in one of those tiny hospital bassinets, wearing a Stanley Cup Champions onesie, in the arms of several men and women. None of them are Grace.
“He came to visit, and they put him up here, so I held him.” She points to her emaciated stomach and tries not to sound anything but proud that she had another generation in her arms. I hope that they’d taken a picture of that moment. It might appear tragic now, a new life just begun and an old life so near to ending, but someday, he’ll want to know when he met her. After he hears about her.
Grace ran all the trusts. The trusts were all set up for certain things: Christian Education, Flowers, Capital Improvements, Missions. Grace found ways around everything, ways to put that money into the general fund. The Easter Lilies were bought from the Flower Trust but proceeds from their sale went back to the church to pay down the debt from the previous winter’s heat. I didn’t bat a lash and she called me a good boy. She told stories about moving money from one place to another. She said, “We can’t have children’s sermons without a pastor,” and a pastor, long before that light-bulb, long before that blizzard, got paid that week.
Her hand gains strength. It clenches mine. She looks hard into my eyes. She tells me stories about years gone by, when people filled the sanctuary to the rafters. She tells me about her husband—both of them, mixing them into one story of a life of love. She tells me about long dead preachers who’d filled the pulpit I had just stood in an hour before. She tells me who she’d liked, and why. Tells me who she didn’t like, but still tells me why she liked them too. She doesn’t tell me about me. Her hand goes limp. Her voice loses its breath. She coughs. She blinks hard, and the total weight of both of her eyelids crashes onto her face.
I tell her about my sermon. I talk to her about love. I talk to her about God’s love for us, about God’s care for us, so much that we can feel it in our hearts in even our most solitary and lonely moments. I talk about relationship, and family, and love. I had titled my sermon “Blah, Blah, Blah … Love” and I was living it now. I speak about love and how feeling loved makes us want to love others, to love everyone and everything. She nods and wheezes out a “yes” that has more power behind it than its volume.
And now I have nothing to say. We sit in silence. The air conditioner, maybe the refrigerator, grinds back into existence. The TV bounces color off the wood paneled walls, but makes no noise. We look at one another. I am not afraid to look at her, because she is not afraid to be looked at. She knows what she looks like, what the cancer was again doing to her.
She’d only told me and her daughter, but she’d found another lump on her chest two weeks earlier. She was going to refuse radiation. She was going to refuse IVs. The cancer had already shot through her liver and pancreas, she tells me. She wants to be home. She wants to be in her town, with her friends. She wants them to come to see her in a place they know her, as they knew her. She wants to keep talking about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. But now we aren’t talking at all. We let the silence fill the space between us, to bring us closer to one another.
“Would you like to take communion?”
“I would. Thank you.”
I take out a small bottle of grape juice and a few squares cut from a slice of bread. For the first time in my life, I also take out a small cup, no bigger than a thimble, part of a portable communion set, like you’d bring in a briefcase. I brought it in a plastic bag. I put them on the nurse’s table, where the shortcake had been. The words of the rite come out of my mouth. They are quiet. “This is my body.” I break the bread. Her mouth seems too weak to chew, and I break it again. I give it to her. I put it in her hand, and she brings it to her face.
We sit in silence for a minute. I pour the juice into the cup. It fills quickly, too quickly. Her hands cannot bring that glass, overflowing, to her lips without it spilling over her. I take the cap from the bottle and pour in the excess. I will drink from that. “This is the new covenant between God and us in Christ.” I give her the cup. It quavers and shakes and winds its way to her thin lips. She drinks. I drink. “Lord, bless this meal, and we who partake and share in it, knowing that we have given ourselves to you, in love for one another. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Her hand reaches for mine.
“Shall we pray?”
“Not yet. Let’s sit. Maybe we’ll talk.”
We sit, with her hand in mine and the early innings of a ballgame in the background, the green of the field and walls giving her face a more sickly glow than she deserved. The caravans full of conquering heroes came around, and we smile at them. They throw baseballs and we laugh at them. “They might be amazing hockey players, but they’re obviously not baseball players,” Grace says, as baseballs sail this way and that. She coughs. We sit and hold hands, my hand holding hers up and her hand holding mine close.
“Shall we pray?”
“Yes. I’m tired.”
I pray. We pray. I say the words, but I say them for her. I say them for me too. I pray fervently and earnestly for her health and comfort, for the courage and strength of her family, for the wisdom and steadiness of her doctors. I pray for minutes on end, not wanting the prayer to end because then I have to say goodbye. I pray for the world as it is and the world yet to be written before the eyes of Grace’s great grandchildren. I pray for the congregation and the church. I pray for myself and for my friends and family. I pray for peace and justice, for love and mercy.
“Amen.”
“Thank you.”
And she coughs.
After the service that first Sunday, Grace came up to me in line. She had a hard look on her face and I was terrified of this woman. Her hand shot out from her hip like a pistol on an outlaw in the old west, and it reached for mine. I took it. “You’ll do. We’ll teach you what you don’t know … which is a lot. But you’ll do.” She winked again and her sunglasses shook on her nose. She laughed. “You’ll do, though.” And she walked out the door and into the scalding July sun.
I get up from beside her bed and heft my chair under my arm. I gather the bottle, bread and cup under the other. I put them in the plastic bag. “I’ll see you next week, Grace. Have a good one.” It’s what I say to all my parishioners as they leave the building. And I am leaving. I look in her eyes, heavy and clouded, and she nods. Her chest heaves. She coughs. She closes her eyes and listens to the muted sound of baseball as it plays out on the TV in front of her, playing on the inside of her eyelids in better detail than it did on that TV. “You too, Chris. Drive safe.”
There will be no new stories with me and Grace. I won’t hear her call me Chris and I won’t get to hold her brittle fingers in my hand again. I’ll never see the light in her eyes and she’ll never tell me stories of a long-ago church that’s only a fantasy to me. We’ll never share communion together. Grace died on Friday and I’m burying her today. That’s how our story ends, and the only sad thing about it is that it’s over. She is at peace, and I will get there.
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