What To Pray

At first, Sally our pastoral assistant told me that Harriet wasn't going to be able to get to church anymore. Her Parkinson's had advanced to the point where she would now need two people to get her out of the house, and while we have some very obliging members of the congregation, there are few confident, and none trained, in moving around the dead weight of a human being, even one rendered lighter by long illness. So I dropped round a note saying I would be very happy to bring Harriet communion at home, and suggesting Friday after our Toddler Group. Then in the middle of the week I had another conversation with Sally who reported that Harriet was determined to get to church. I thought this would turn out to be unrealistic and let things stand as they were. After the toddlers were finished, then, I toddled round to Harriet's and was let in by Nadia the carer who told me Harriet was having a tough day. She was in her usual chair, but barely able to move or speak. The sign of the Cross was a vague movement of her hand across her chest. It was no surprise when her son called me later in the day to say she'd been taken to hospital, or that her daughter rang me this morning with the news that she'd succumbed to pneumonia and died in the early hours. Given how weak and ill Harriet was, the nine-hour wait for the ambulance probably didn't make any material difference, but it doesn't look good that her daughter was able to fly back from Spain and get there in less time than it took an ambulance to arrive from Guildford. At least receiving the Sacrament was virtually the last positive act of Harriet's life, as she would have wanted it to be.

As soon as I had the news that Harriet was in hospital I asked Giselle the lay reader to ask the prayer chain to keep her in mind. I stood in front of my little shrine at home and wondered what I should pray. Of course basically you hold the person before the Lord and pray that his will for their best interest be done, but you still have your own feelings. Harriet's has been a long and hard road and there have been times I have found her 'courage' - which has seemed occasionally to involve a refusal to accept that her illness brings limitations on what she can do - enfuriating. She began to lose track of time and would call late in the evening and spend ten minutes telling me - what? Usually I could only pick out a few words. Sometimes it was to apologise for not being present at a service I never expected her to attend. Didn't she realise it was virtually impossible, by that stage, to understand what she was saying over the phone? I tried to see it as an act of service in its own right, but I feared so much misunderstanding something that was actually important. What was that like, to have a functioning brain, except when pharmaceutical fog affected it, and not to be able to communicate? I couldn't pray, Friday and yesterday, that Harriet wouldn't make it, and I expect she would have wanted to. But it was part of what I felt. 

The last words of Harriet, our friend and sister, that I understood, repeated over and over until I could grasp at them before they fled away again, were 'Where am I?'