Pushing from shore

Someone once compared the lucidity of the deathbed to a boat pushing off from shore. The farther from the city it gets, the fewer features one sees, until finally only the most prominent are visible.

Or maybe the comparison should be to a star-studded sky when the first fey light of dawn appears, before one even notices it happening. As the lightening takes over the firmament, it wipes out a layer of stars, and then another, until only the brightest can still be seen.

My mother is in that stage of life. It seems she will have a reprieve after all, but the past week in the hospital she told me she expected to leave "feet first," and I feared it too. She had that "boat" or "fading star" experience, and I had it right along with her. It is a zone one enters, one that normally only the dying are privileged to enter, an acute clarity about priorities.

My mother has always been efficient. Where her daughter thinks romantic thoughts before succumbing to sleep, she thinks about whether to roll over that CD that's not doing anything. These are the "smaller stars" that dropped out of her sky even as I watched. This week in the hospital only one thing was important-the assessment of her life, and eternity. It was the frame of mind I had been waiting for, and I moved into it with the gospel one more time. This time she let me in.

I remember that Puritan New England had degenerated into the "halfway covenant" days when people would pussyfoot for decades about their conversions, waiting on God for sufficient grace before taking such a major step. But many a deathbed panic sliced through that nonsense, and folks who had fussed over dainty or esoteric theology all their lives now saw it to be a stark and simple choice: Put your faith in Jesus, or not. Do not tarry till you conjure up a first-rate repentance; any old fifth-rate repentance will do for starters. It is important to step through the door.

My mother let me hold her hand and consented to pray after me. She permitted me to read the Bible to her in French and asked questions at the parts that sounded weird to her. By all accounts, she didn't feel much different afterward. Yesterday when I came to take her home, neither of us made mention of what had gone on between us. I wonder if it looked to her as if nothing at all had changed in the universe. Sometimes the rejoicing of angels over one lost soul that repents cannot be heard above the din of hospital beeps and bells unless you cock your ear and listen very closely.

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