Two days before my mother died, we expected a quiet evening.
She had congestive heart failure and a large mass pressing on her lungs. Breathing was hard. Talking for any length of time was harder. For weeks, we had been gathering around her in the living room, speaking in hushed tones, keeping the house quiet.
Then she smiled.
Not a faint smile. A bright one. And she started telling stories.
She was born in 1920. The Depression had shaped her childhood. The war had shaped her early adulthood. We knew this the way you know things about a parent without really knowing them. That night, she opened those years up.
She told us what it was like to be a girl during the Depression. Things she had never told us. She told us about the war years, what they felt like from inside her family’s home.
She told each of us the story of our own births. Where she was. What she worried about. What she felt when she first saw us.
She talked about playing the piano. About how she loved performing. About how her faith had carried her through the hardest seasons of her life.
Every story had a funny anecdote embedded in it. She couldn’t play the piano anymore but she still performed that night.
The house had been quiet for weeks.
That night, she gave us laughter.
At some point the laughter brought on tears. Not sad ones exactly. Not joyful ones either. Both at once. The way grief and gratitude sometimes arrive together when you understand what is happening in the room.
She died two days later.
I have thought about that evening for years. Not only with grief, though grief is there. With something closer to gratitude.
What she gave us that night was not something we could have planned for or asked for. It came from her. But it required us to be present to receive it.
That is what I want people to understand about the final season of life.
It is not only about what families bring to the person who is dying. Sometimes the dying person still has something to give. Stories no one has heard. Laughter held in reserve. A last act of love directed at the specific people gathered in the room.
Doctors call what happened that night an end-of-life rally. A brief return of clarity and energy in the days before death. It is real and it is documented.
Families who wait for death before they gather do not only lose the chance to say what they need to say. They lose the chance to receive what the dying person was still capable of giving.
My mother’s stories are ours now. Her Depression childhood. The war years. The story of my own birth, told by the person who lived it.
We almost missed them. Not because we were avoiding anything. Because the culture teaches families to wait.
The near-need season is not only where meaning is made before death. It is where gifts are received that cannot be received any other way.
Until next time,
John