Got to Have This Here

This is a post I wrote as a guest blogger on a friend's blog.  It's interesting that I have a friend who just lost her mom yesterday.  She and I have been talking back and forth.  She commented about a similar experience to one I had, and I referred her to this post but found that it wasn't even on my blog.  If I ever get this blog made into a book, this is a story I don't want to have forgotten....


On March 17, 1999, the most important person in my life left.  Before she left, my mom taught me some very important lessons.  She taught me to listen, and more importantly, she taught me to do something about what I heard.

I was born very late in my mom's life.  I was the daughter she's waited for after so many sons.  I have little doubt that one of my purposes in her life was to be her friend, and at the time of her death, I was to be her advocate when she could no longer advocate for herself.

Before she died, my mother, who'd been battling cancer for a year, lay in a coma for five days.  It was agonizing.  I sat at her bedside and administered the medication prescribed and followed the instructions given me by the hospice workers that dropped in from time to time.  I watched her stop eating and stop drinking and just lay there.  It was a very helpless time.

One morning, after about three days of this, I couldn't stand it any longer.

I went down to her room where she lay so completely unconscious of anything going on around her, and I knelt at her feet.  It was there that I begged and pleaded with God to teach me what I should do.  There HAD to be something--anything.  "Please!  Teach me!" were my words.

In my mind and heart, I suddenly knew.

I went and filled a cup with water and used a swab--tears running down my face--to give her some relief.  I continued and continued as I silently uttered a prayer of gratitude.  Within moments, I received a gift.  My mom opened her eyes and looked at me but somehow looked through me.  In her sweet voice that had been silent for days, she whispered something to me, but was it to me or to someone she could see but I couldn't?  I couldn't tell.  In her weakness, I couldn't hear what she said.  Ugh!  NO!  I asked her to repeat it.  She smiled and said it again and then slipped back off to sleep.  The next day, she was gone.

I will never know what my mother told me that day.  It was enough to see her smile one last time.  It was enough to know that God knew her and her needs, and it solidified in my heart that He knew me and mine also.  What a gift to be able to serve such a valiant woman.  What a blessing to be her daughter!


Two years ago, I received a surprise.

After so many boys, and in my old(er) age, I received a gift.  A little girl was born into my life.  At her ripe old age of two, I already experience the friend she is to me.

May I teach her to listen and to act on what she hears.  Again, I know God knows me, and He knows what I need.  May I teach her to understand this same principle.  We're not alone.  We're NEVER alone.