Caring for an Angel II

I read Eve Ensler to you as you drift in and out of conscious awareness, your burgeoning mind eager to sleep.  You nodded yes.  Your awareness drifts from present and then moves swiftly to a place of peace, of newness, of rebirth.

I adjust pillows; I rub your hands and feet, still perfectly manicured bright red.  Your skin is clear and bright, almost glowing, lips still pink and full.  You open your eyes as I sing Amazing Grace along to the CD playing in the corner.

I wish you could go outside to your garden.  I know that is where I would want to be.  In the garden that I created from nothing.  As you have.  This creation that will go on and on.  Life is funny like that in the garden.  Plants fruit, set seed, die and surprise us next spring as they grace us with their beauty once again.

My grandmother’s garden flourished years after she had stopped planting and moved on from her frail body.  I saw tomatoes bursting forth through years of weeds, along with petunias and her favorite snapdragons of my childhood, reseeding each year as if she secretly came in the night while I was sleeping and snuck her favorite flowers into the empty spaces of her once prized garden.

Grandma, I see you stooped over in your housedress, your largess that I always loved to snuggle up to in the summer cottage’s feather beds of my youth.  They now make cardboard cutouts of that same pose and sell them in garden centers.  Your wide, bent over fanny displaying the garden’s name, Carol’s Garden or the Garden of Eden.

Memories are held tightly in the garden, of grandma teaching me how to plant and water, and the picture of my small son squatting between tomato plants, almost hidden, snacking on a ripe fruit he snatched off the plant, juice dripping down his chin.

I know you have these memories, too, my friend and I wish you could spend your last hours in the sun drenched fall garden.  To breathe in the scent of autumn, the leaves browning, the last tomato being harvested off of yellowing plants.  This is my own selfish wish for you.

I hope you feel my presence as you drift.  I rub your feet, place socks on them as they are now chilled.  It’s all I can do and I hope it is enough.  The gift of presence of spirit communing with another spirit.

I am grateful for these last hours.  The details of the hours jump out, normally hidden from our unnoticing healthy world, which we overlook.  The quiet knowing of the dogs, usually hyped up, barking, jumping on everyone, now laying nearby, protecting you as you make your way through this passageway only you can maneuver.  But they guard that invisible pathway.  They know.

A blue, clay cross lays beneath your right hand.  And you dream, asleep like a newborn.  Growth is happening during this slumber and I must believe that your sleep is the food needed as you travel to your next destination, manifesting out of this world into the next.  This requires great energy and so you need rest, my dear angel.  Even angels need rest.  You have much to do very soon.  Everything not possible in this life is all the more possible in the next.  And so I watch you, taking in the unknown energies and wisdom of these hours, which will guide my next moves.  And I am grateful, feeling a sweet peace washing over me, full of love and full of hope.