Touching

On Saturday I sat with Mrs. S, who is 85, while her daughter was out. I suggested playing Scrabble but Mrs. S said, "After my coffee," so we talked instead. One thing led to another and her face suddenly clouded over and she confided that she was afraid to die. When I asked her what she was afraid of, she said, "I don't want to be alone. And it's all darkness."

I remembered a true story that Anne Lamott related in her book Operating Instructions, so I told Mrs. S and now I'm telling you:

"I have a friend named Anne . . . who took her 2-year-old son up to Tahoe during the summer. They were staying in a rented condominium by the lake. And of course, it's such a hotbed of gambling that all the rooms are equipped with these curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all morning. One afternoon she put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of these rooms, in the pitch-dark, and went to do some work.

"A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside the room, and she got up, knowing he'd crawled out of his playpen. She went to put him down again, but when she got to the door, she found he'd locked it. He had somehow managed to push in the little button on the doorknob. So he was calling to her: 'Mommy, Mommy,' and she was saying to him, 'Jiggle the doorknob, darling,' and of course he didn't speak much English---mostly he seemed to speak Urdu.

"After a moment, it became clear to him that he mother couldn't open the door, and the panic set in. He began sobbing. So my friend ran around like crazy trying everything possible, like trying to get the front door key to work, calling the rental agency where she left a message on the machine, calling the manager of the condominium where she left another message, and running back to check in with her son every minute or so.

"And there he was in the dark, this terrified little child. Finally she did the only thing she could, which was to slide her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. Finally somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark. He stopped crying. She kept wanting to go call the fire department or something, but she felt that contact was the most important thing. . . .

"I keep thinking about that story, how much it feels like I'm the 2-year-old in the dark and God is the mother and I don't speak the language. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, and ride off with me on her charger. But instead, via my friends and my church and my shabby faith, I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. It isn't enough, and it is."

Mrs. S listened attentively and said the story was interesting. And then she wanted to tell me other things about her life and to ask me questions, and finally she asked me to pray for her, which I did. And I was very glad afterward that she had not taken me up on the Scrabble idea.

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