This sacred ground is awful muddy

Many of the hospice workers we’ve talked to refer to this place as “sacred ground.” Not so much the physical reality of the St Thomas hospice ward, but the space in between the living and the dead, or the soon-to-be dead. It’s the place where the veil between heaven and earth is the thinnest it ever gets; where angels wait with their arms spread wide to receive the weary souls. Eternity waits just beyond the next breath; vistas of gold and light open out like the promised land upon that last beat of the heart.

I suppose it’s holy to people who are able to maintain a certain reverent distance from what’s actually happening: The slow and often excruciating departure from sight of a person we love and want to hold onto. To me, it’s scary, tedious, horrific, intimidating, maddening…. The list goes on, and if God is here, I’ve yet to see Him.

In the 8 or 12 or 300 days we’ve been at this vigil, we’ve seen more than 10 people die. We’ve watched patients take up residence in an empty room, accompanied by family groups that huddle and console each other in large, loud clumps in the common waiting area — and then we’ve shown up the next day to find the room vacant again, or filled with someone else’s dying.

Snatches of conversation — “We can’t tell much because of the burns” or “He loved drugs more than his own family” — remind us that we’re in no ordinary place. Chaplains of various stripe and flavor administer last rites, hold prayer sessions with grieving family members, offer shoulders on which anyone is welcome to weep.

One evening, a man in uniform asked me politely if he could close my mother’s hospital door; turns out he was accompanying a somber procession of a deceased patient on a gurney decorated with a colorful, homey quilt. Once he’d passed, we opened the door and life resumed — as normal as it ever could be in such a place.

After a week and a half, Mom has become an old-timer here.

As a pastor’s wife, I expect of myself a certain level of spiritual maturity and grace that, sadly, is lacking more often than not. So to me, when I hear all my mother’s friends and neighbors — and all my sister’s friends and in-laws and neighbors and casual acquaintances and people she just sort of recognizes but really doesn’t know at all  — talking about how her spirit is already in God’s hands and her body is just a bit behind, I first feel guilty, then hopeful, then guilty again. What kind of Christian am I that I’m skeptical first and then, only grudgingly, credulous? That I look at this process not as beautiful but as fraught, murky, infuriating?

If her spirit is indeed with Christ in heaven, I have to wonder why it’s taking her body so long to figure it out. Where is God in this slow tortuous journey toward eternity, passing up and down and around and under and then up again? Death waits in the room with us, smirking.

I sit at Mom’s bedside, coiled and poised on the brink of a great, steep fall, and the moment stretches so long and so tight that I feel myself ready to explode. If I’m in the presence of angels, surely they like me are becoming impatient and have left the room for some of that free coffee down the hall.

I am not a very spiritual person. I’m more practical, concrete, experiential. If there are angels here, I want to see them. I want to ask them, “Why isn’t she following the rules everyone tells us she’s supposed to follow? Why am I such a bad daughter that I’m not willing to camp out here for weeks, months if need be, and bask in the imminent presence of God?” I see nothing, I feel nothing, I understand nothing. I have hands over my eyes, ears, mouth, nose, heart…

I want to be caught up in the mystery and the majesty of this glorious transition from life to life. I cast visions for myself of my mother, pain-free and jubilant, standing in the radiance of Heaven with the light of forever in her eyes. I look at her gaunt face, the bruised-looking eyes closed tight on her institutional pillow and I force myself to picture a smile there, wide and guileless, eternal.

My doubts run deep. In the midst of this drawn-out, incomprehensible passing, I look for some indication of meaning or message and I can’t find it. I look for grace and dignity and see only my own fears reflected back at me.

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