June 6, 2010 THE UNFINISHED IMAGE
I didn’t know her by name, but someone called to have me celebrate with her the Anointing of the Sick. In the weeks that followed I came to know the stature of this woman. A person with multiple sclerosis, she resisted walking with a cane until she absolutely needed a walker. She resisted using a walker until she absolutely needed a wheel chair. She resisted using a wheel chair until she absolutely needed to be confined to a bed. Never was she heard to complain.
Falls were common. Three times she broke hips, twice her arms, then, her wrist. Once, her husband found her on the kitchen floor with a broken hip. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she calmly said. Once with a broken hip she left her bed at a local nursing home and called her husband at 2:00 a.m. No one knows to this day how she got to the phone, a good distance down the hall from her room. I suggest she may have flown. Angels fly, you know, because they take themselves so lightly! I suspect she flew for the same reason. She surely could not have walked there. Even on her way to Calvary, she had a spirit that wouldn’t break.
When she died, I spent some more time with her family. Her husband told a story about the wife to whom he had been devoted. A few years earlier they had attended a party at a local ballroom. By this time, ordered by her doctor to bed, she was in a wheelchair. They had always loved to dance, so, Bob picked Virginia up from her chair, held her in his arms like a Raggedy Ann doll, and they danced around the ballroom floor. It was a metaphor of the way they lived. Throughout their life together they held each other close, oblivious to any disability, in love and dancing to life’s music.
I get gooseflesh whenever I picture that dance in my mind. I’d love to know the piece of music they danced to, but it probably doesn’t matter; the music they listened to was playing in their hearts. It had no words, but they each knew the melody.
I had breakfast with Bob a few weeks ago. “I have a question for you,” he said. “People talk a lot about ‘spirituality.’ I wonder if I have any.”
I reminded him of the dance. Enough said!