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Finding meaning |
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 Night
Light
This essay describes how one woman, in learning to pray with her dying
grandmother, supported her grandmother and learned to cope with her
own loss.
 "Night
Light"
When I was a preschooler and afraid of the dark, my grandmother, in
whose house my family lived, would leave an M&M trail from my bed
to hers. I would set forth through the dark house for the night light
of her room. Once I'd eaten one M&M, I could find the courage to search
for all of them.
My presence in her room always woke her. She would say, "Hello,
doll. Dark getting to you?" Then she'd turn back the blankets to
make room for me. It was many years before I believed, as my grandmother
often said, that there was nothing in the dark that did not exist
in the light.
Thirty years later, when a doctor told my grandmother she had
widespread kidney cancer, we found ourselves in a different dark.
My mind played with the terrible anticipation of her absence, the
way your tongue cannot avoid exploring the pain of a fever sore.
I wanted to become some sort of light for Grandmom, to blaze a trail
from the dark room of her illness, fear, and pain to the light of
my love and the love of our family.
But as the days wore on and cancer took her life piecemeal, I
clung to what little we could still share. I held her hand and stroked
her head. In those last weeks, I sang for her: hymns, spirituals,
Irish drinking songs, sea chanteys, "Amazing Grace," and "Lord of
the Dance." When I tired of singing, I read aloud: trashy novels,
magazine articles, newspaper stories, reports I was writing. The
content was meaningless, but my voice calmed her.
During the last two weeks of her life, she taught me to pray the
rosary, a ritual I had somehow missed, despite years of Sunday school
and church. To her, the rosary was a daily obligation. To me, it
was an odd and time-consuming task from an archaic world. She could
no longer recite the entire litany aloud and could not keep count
of the prayers she had said. She wanted someone to pray it for her.
I volunteered. The rosary connected her to her faith and to the
past, her parents, her brothers and sisters.
Praying with her as she lay dying became a way to connect and
comfort us. I had to concentrate to say each of the prayers on each
of the beads, moving them through my grandmother's sore fingers.
I could think of nothing else. When we began to pray, it was usually
in the midst of her pain and my fear. But by the time we had come
full circle, she would be asleep and peaceful, and I would have
forgotten, for a while at least, how awful things were.
On the last day of my grandmother's life, she lay in pain in a
hospital bed. I could not see the world without her in it, yet I
could not bear the world that kept her now. I wanted to say something
to release her, and so began to whisper names. I named my sisters
and brother, my cousins, my grandmother's siblings; I named streets
we had lived on, countries where she had traveled. I whispered and
prayed that her tight grip on this life could be loosened by memories
of how much she had loved this life, and how well she was loved.
She began to grow calmer later that evening. A priest suggested
we play a tape of Gregorian chants for her, and the music stilled
her. I went home. My mother and sister were just falling to sleep
in her room when she stirred for a moment, sighed, and was gone.
As I drove back to the hospital that night, my loss was as overwhelming
as the darkness had been 30 years earlier, on my M&M trail to safety.
I made that late-night drive to the hospital because I so desperately
needed to see my grandmother at peace; it was her turn, again, to
guide me through the night, to teach me to walk without fear into
the hard moments of this life. I held her rosary beads in my hand
and let them rattle against the steering wheel.
-- Janice Lynch
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Adapted from The
Handbook for Mortals: Guidance for People Facing Serious Illness,
by Joanne Lynn and Joan Harrold, copyright by Joanne Lynn, used by
permission of Oxford University Press.
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