Somewhere Towards the End

It must be well over a year since I last saw Jill. That was at her previous care home, an unsatisfactory encounter in a stuffy and hot visiting room, unsure what she was taking in: she’s quite hard of hearing. A stay in hospital has meant a move to a more nursing-focused home and she is now ‘holding on’, as they say. But, half-expecting as I was to find her completely unconscious, in fact she was able to take communion – a sip of watered-down wine with a fragment of the Host in it – and ask me for some water. She said something about ‘church’, but I couldn’t catch what it was. She was probably apologising for not being able to come.

Jill has been a member of the congregation for many years so our meeting – surely our last – was able to follow a set form, the set form for the Last Rites, of confession, absolution, anointing and communion. Later in the day I went to a different care home (the one Jill used to live in, in fact) to see Celia, and Celia not being a believer meant there was nothing to shape the encounter. Celia has no family and has outlived all her friends apart from Andrea, a member of the church who along with a solicitor has been looking after Celia’s interests in recent years - and according to Andrea the solicitor doesn’t actually do much. Andrea came to my door in some agitation to tell me Celia was almost certainly dying and desperately wanted someone to talk to who wasn’t just the carers, who don’t really want to talk much about death in any case. Happily I had some time in the evening so after Evening Prayer I was able to go over, show my covid test strip from the morning, don a mask and gloves and visit Celia in her room. We ended up talking for about an hour. This stage in her life is turning out to be a struggle – ‘I never thought this would happen to me’ – but the things I would normally say to a Christian in the same circumstances would have been no help, so we spoke about the mysteries of life and death in a more general way, about her life and feelings. Celia’s bookshelf included Shelley, Keats, and Shakespeare, and, perhaps more unusually, Alice in wonderland and wG Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape, that pioneering work of local history, so we could discuss those things too. She told me how beautiful growing up by the sea in Lancashire had been. I don’t know whether Celia’s path out of this life was made any smoother or more bearable by our talk, but I think I would have welcomed it had I been her. I hope I did it right.

This felt like proper vicar-ing compared to a lot of the things I do, so I was grateful for the encounters, quite apart from what my parishioners may have felt. If we are able to in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, a final gathering-together of our lives before we let them go is a wonderful thing, and just as wonderful to take part in it.