Everything becomes relative when someone you know well is in hospice.
Your view becomes smaller. It is no longer about the coming month, but about this week. Sometimes even about this day.
She is in hospice.
Not my mother. My husband’s mother. That makes a difference, I think. Sometimes I feel like a bystander. And that is okay.
Between her and me, it is good now. For a long time, it was not. And exactly now, things are happening that I did not expect, but that I did pray for. For thirty years. It does not need to be explained in my blog.
I only want to say: this is where we are.
Waiting while someone slowly grows quieter. Eating less. Drinking less. Sleeping more. Becoming more fragile.
And in that waiting, my word for this year keeps coming back to me: patience. Not as a nice idea, but as something very concrete. Waiting with what I cannot hurry. Watching what I cannot change.
Waiting for the last goodbye here
Tomas SjΓΆdin writes that life does not end when we turn out the light and say good night. After sleep, we wake to a new day. He connects this to the rhythm of Sabbath: evening first, then rest, then morning light. Dying is not the destruction of the light, he says. It is turning out the light because morning is coming.
That thought stays with me now.
I never expected that, at the end of someone’s life, there could still be so many glimmers of grace.
I write this as an encouragement for someone who has waited for many years, like me. We cannot change people. But God can. What is impossible with man is possible with God.
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Photo credits: Olenchic
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