Season of Blessing (38 page)
The decision
to stop the chemotherapy and put Sylvia into hospice care was the hardest one of Harry's life, but her body was too weak to accept the ravages of any further chemo, and her pain was too great. After many meetings with the doctors, he agreed to shift their focus from healing to comforting her and keeping her free from pain.
They set her up in a hospital bed in their bedroom, and a hospice nurse came to set up the equipment they would need to keep Sylvia as comfortable as possible.
Sarah and Jeff dropped everything and came to be with her. To Sylvia's chagrin, Sarah left the baby with Gary and showed up alone, looking like a porcelain doll with a dozen cracks just beneath the surface, waiting to shatter if it was jarred.
When Sylvia fell asleep, Harry took the kids into the kitchen and sat across from them. Jeff looked like a lost little boy, struggling to hold back his tears, and Sarah couldn't look at him.
“Sit down, sweetie,” he told her as she gazed out the window toward the barn.
“I'm okay standing,” she said.
He sighed. “I need to talk to you, honey. I need for you to look at me.”
Slowly, she turned back around. Her face twisted with pain, and she covered her mouth. “Oh, Daddy, don't say it.”
He forced himself to go on. “I have to. Your mother is going to die.”
Sarah shook her head. “No, Dad! You're giving up! There are still things you can do! You can't just give in to this and let it have her!”
“I'm not giving up,” Harry said softly. “I've just had to come to terms with it. She's going to die. She's suffering, and it's hard to keep her free from pain. It won't do me any good to lie to you and give you false hope. We need to prepare ourselves.”
Jeff got up now, his hands hanging in fists at his sides. “How could he do this to her?” he asked. “How could God refuse to heal her after all she's done for him?”
Harry closed his eyes and swallowed back the tightness in his throat. “He will heal her, son.” The words came hard, but he managed to get them out. “He's going to heal her in his way. Maybe even the best way. When she dies, she'll be with him and she'll be healthy and sound again.”
“That's not healing!” Sarah said. “That's not what we prayed for. God knows what we're asking. He promised that if we delighted ourselves in him that he would give us the desires of our heart. Well, my desire is for her to live!”
Jeff turned his sister around and pulled her against him, and they held each other as they wept. Harry stepped around the table and put his arms around both of them. “She will live,” he whispered. “Just not here, with us.”
He knew it wasn't enough for them, not yet. They wept harder than he'd ever seen them weep before, and he wept with them, holding them and hugging them and reassuring them as the reality of their mother's life and death seeped into their spirits.
When Harry returned to her bed, he saw how still and lifeless she lay. The morphine had knocked out her pain, but in her drug-induced state, he wondered if she would be able to sit up and have a conversation. Would she be able to pray? Would she sing again?
The morphine didn't last long, and each time it wore off, he heard the groaning in her throat and saw the pain on her face. He squeezed her pump, issuing more drugs into her blood-stream, knocking her out again until the medicine wore off and she gritted her teeth in painâ¦
That night, as he lay in the bed he used to sleep in with her, he watched the sporadic, labored pattern of her breathing in the hospital bed, and wondered if she'd make it through the night.
He lay there, exhausted from the struggle to keep her drugged before the pain took hold, and realized that he'd come to the absolute end of his hope. It was time to start praying according to God's will, and according to Sylvia's needs.
“I can't stand her suffering, Lord,” he whispered into the darkness. “Go on and take her. It's okay with me. Just don't let this suffering go on.”
Sleep didn't come for him that night. He just lay there near her, listening for every breath, every groan, every beep of every monitor, while the children slept in their childhood rooms.
He had never felt more alone.
For the sake
of the children, Harry convinced the doctor to pull back on Sylvia's morphine, just long enough to get her coherent to give closure to the children. She would want it that way, he was sure. He could just hear her spirit sitting up in bed and shaking her finger at him.
Harry, don't you keep me so drugged that I can't say good-bye
.
The pain soaked her in sweat and made her body tremble, but she tried to smile as Sarah and Jeff came to her bedside.
They sat on either side of her, each holding one of her hands. Sarah leaned in, and pressed her forehead against Sylvia's face. “Mama, don't go,” she whispered. “Please don't go. I need you. I don't know how to be a mother without you.”
Sylvia let go of Jeff's hand and stroked Sarah's hair. “Yes, you do, sweetheart. You're doing a great job.”
“But that's because I can pick up the phone and call you. You can walk me through it.”
“But you have everything you need,” Sylvia whispered. She swallowed with great effort. Even her throat had begun to feel cancer ravaged. “I've taught you everything I know. And you'll still have your dad. And Gary is so precious. I have perfect peace about leaving you with him. He'll take care of you. He'll help you through this.” She turned Sarah's face up to hers, and made her look into it. She remembered when Sarah had wept inconsolably over a boyfriend who had broken her heart. She must have been sixteen then, Sylvia thought. Her face had looked like this, and Sylvia had wanted so much to be able to dry her tears and say the words that could heal her heart. But there hadn't been words then, and there weren't any now.
“Sweetheart, you're going to raise a houseful of godly children who serve the Lord and bear bushels and barrels of fruit. And when they ask about their grandmother, you're going to show them pictures of me and tell them that I'm in heaven, waiting for all of you to come and join me. Home, where we all belong.”
Sarah's weeping broke her heart, but Sylvia didn't have the energy to cry her own tears. She looked at her son. His face was red and wet. She hadn't seen him cry since he was ten years old. She wished he had a wife now, one who could help him through this time, comfort him and cry with him. But he looked so alone.
She touched his face with her cold, trembling hand. “Jeffâ¦my sweet Jeffâ¦you'll be okay, too.”
He could hardly speak. “I know, Mama.”
“I've prayed so hard for you. God's going to send you a wonderful, godly woman someday, and you'll be a precious husband to her. You'll be just like your father. And when you have children, they'll be the most blessed children in the world. There will be generations of blessings for your family. I know that without a doubt, because I've prayed it since you were born.”
A pain shot through her side, and she sucked in a breath, then started to cough. Sarah got up and tried to help her, but she turned on her side and kept trying to clear her lungs.
Jeff put the oxygen mask back on her face, and she was able to get some air into her lungs. She lay on her back, her eyes squeezed shut, as the nerves in her back seemed to break into attack mode, shooting bullets of pain through her body.
One of the children went to get Harry, and he came into the room. She saw him grabbing the morphine pump, squeezing it. She would slip into oblivion soon, she thought on a wave of panic. She hadn't finished saying good-bye.
When he leaned over her to kiss her, she grabbed his shirt. “Harry,” she whispered. “I want you to get me the tape recorder.”
“Why?” he asked. “What do you want to tape?”
She didn't have the energy to explain it to him. “Please. I'll rest for a minute, but don't pump the morphine again. Let it wear off so I can talk. Then bring me the tape player. I have some things to say to the people I love.”
Harry straightened, and she saw the pain pulling at his face. As painful as her decline had been, she knew that he suffered even more.
“I want it to be played at my funeral,” she whispered.
He looked so helpless. “Sylvia, I don't want you expending energy on that.”
The morphine was taking hold, pulling her under, dulling the pain, but also dulling her senses. “Honey⦔ She knew her speech was slurred. “I have no intention of letting my death be the end of my fruit-bearing. The Lord has been too good to me not to do this last thing for him. I want to minister in my death, just as I've ministered in my life. I want my death to glorify Jesus. And I want to say good-bye.”
She touched his face, felt the tired stubble. “Please, Harry. I have to do this.”
He sighed, the heaviest, saddest sigh she'd ever heard in all her life. “I'll get the tape player.”
When the morphine wore off, and the pain sank its teeth into her again, Harry sat her up, tried to make her comfortable, and pinned the microphone onto her gown. Then he turned the tape recorder on and left her alone to say her final good-bye to the people she was leaving behind.