When the day I feared came

On that final day, when it was to be the last goodbye, I walked through those doors like I had done a million times. Down that hallway where we had walked arm in arm every single day we were together. I entered her room, that place of suffering and miracles, that place where heaven often collided with earth.

I could hear the music and the laughter hang in the air, almost as if it were its own person. I think it was. I think it was God letting me know he had been there, too.

But now there was no laughter.

There she lay in that hospital bed, as Alzheimer’s waged its final war and tore her from me, from the world that I could see.

But there was music. How could there not be? It was her.

Her husband had put on Abba, who she loved, all of their songs filling a room where we had wept and danced and experienced God where many think he could never be. God made people for each other, and I am convinced he made her for me. I was her caretaker, but really, she took care of me. Everyday.

There were many times Abba classics came on, and we danced in the midst of great suffering. And she hummed, my songbird, forever with perfect pitch. The disease was defeated in ever stealing that from her, even as it took so many things.

But one Abba song often made me think of her and the context in which I entered her world, and she entered mine. Already in the middle of a war with a disease that attempts to steal everything about you, God played the music, and I walked into the middle of her minor chord. She had been robbed of so much already, but her essence remained, and I knew it. Every day, I saw the woman before the disease fight to let everyone know she was still there. I made it my mission to let her know that I knew that she was still there. People often talk about those living with dementia as if they are not there, but they are. I could tell you countless stories about why this is true, especially with her, but then I would be writing a book. I would speak, and she would listen. I would tell her about how beautiful she was to me, and how she was one of the greatest gifts God had ever given me, and she would weep and kiss me on the cheek.

Yet, every day I knew time was against us. So, the Abba song would often come on:

The feeling that I'm losing her forever

And without really entering her world

I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter

That funny little girl

Slipping through my fingers all the time

I try to capture every minute

The feeling in it

Slipping through my fingers all the time

Do I really see what's in her mind?

Each time I think I'm close to knowing

She keeps on growing

Slipping through my fingers all the time

There I kneeled before her hospital bed, and time clutched my throat. The day I feared was here.

The hell of this disease stared right into my soul, and I wept at its finality of stealing my friend. I grieved at the reality that it had stolen her from her family at an early age, as it pulled the cords on memories made and memories yet to be made.

Her husband left briefly to grab something to eat, and it was just my friend and me. I got down on the floor and got eye level with her and began to tell her once again how much she meant to me. I thought about it then, as I often did, that she would never know how much I loved her or the gift she was to me, how much I needed her, and how she had healed so much in my heart. I wondered if that is how God feels about us. Had he pulled back the veil for me to see the ache of the Father’s heart for us to understand how much he loves us? The cross, often far removed from me by history, was with me in that room. And then I heard it come on:

The feeling that I'm losing her forever

And without really entering her world

I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter

That funny little girl…

No one could ever convince me that God does not understand human poetry. Some of it is written down, and other times it is lived. Rarely do people embody it completely. She was one of those. I needed a song of heaven, a reminder that He was very real and very good, so he sent me her. People seek Otherworldly Beauty in the glamorized, manufactured things and people of this world, but I found it in the love of a friend whose broken body and mind betrayed her. Isn’t that just like God, though? To show up in these spaces?  

Some learn theology in a church, a classroom, or a conference, but I learned it in the back bedroom of a memory care unit. It was here that I encountered the Man of Sorrows who knew the Hell of human pain. Yet also the miracle of her existence, that God made someone that beautiful for me to enjoy, presses into every fabric of my being that there is a God who loves us beyond what we can understand, beyond the pain that we can see.

Over a month later, her vacancy in my life is tangible. I will forever be homesick for her hugs, that smile that held a million symphonies, for her laughter, and the way music always moved her to weep. You can never get over a person so rich in everything the world is starved for.

She was one of the most beautiful stories God ever told.  

I think my heart will always be this marked up until we all get Home to Heaven. I think that’s how it’s supposed to be, though. When people and bonds are that special, God intends that we are never the same, both in goodness and in grief. It keeps us sober for The World to Come.

I love you forever, my dear friend. Every moment that I miss you is just God telling me I am not Home yet. I will be reminded of you in everything beautiful. I pray to reflect your life of love, beauty, and bravery with my own in whatever capacity God graces me.

To know you was to know that God really loves me.