I sat in the comfortable chair next to my mother’s bed as she lay in a coma, dying, in the room she so loved at the Mathilda Brown Women’s Residence in Oakland. I was sad. I was not thinking about anything in particular. A friend – a woman who had been an intern with me in the congregation in Oakland – had left the room a few minutes earlier, and so I sat in the silence with Mom.
The end of the day had already come; the hall outside Mom’s room was quiet, except for the soft sounds of one of the nurses or care aides as they passed, or a few mumbled words from somewhere else in the building. I would go home soon, to sleep in my own bed; Jeff and I had decided that he would spend the night in the chair next to Mom’s bed, so that I could get a good night’s rest at home.
I looked across Mom at the window of her room that looked out over the playing field at Oakland Tech. Mom’s breathing was even, quiet.
As I sat there, the words to a song from so many I knew from so many years past seemed to drop from nowhere into my head. When I tell the story, I always say: “the words dropped into my head, whole.” I repeated the words, singing to myself:
“How can I hope to make you understand, why I do, what I do? Why I must travel to a distant land, far from the home I love? Who could see that a man would come, who would change the shape of my dreams? Helpless now, I run to him, watching other dreams grow dim… Oh what a melancholy choice this is – wanting home, wanting him – Closing my heart to every hope but his, Leaving the home I love…” —Bock, Harnick – writers
In the morning, several minutes after I arrived in her room and said: “I’m here now,” she passed.
TheWisdomYears.org 