Talking to the Near-Dead
By J. Grant Swank Jr. (06/14/07)
When my Christian mother-in-law had but a few weeks to live, we chatted in her Nova Scotian home.
I recall one afternoon when she, dealing with cancer, was seated in a comfortable living room chair. I was seated in another chair.
Our conversation wove about thither and yon. Then I felt myself wanting to share with her some secrets. They were not earthshaking. They would not pull down anyone’s character. They would not make a villain out of a saint. They were just tidbits that I had tucked away in my brain over time and, at moments, they cried to escape.
As I passed on these various idea blocks, she heard every word. She responded with interest and alertness. She took it all in. Nothing escaped her wisdom.
So I kept on mentioning some other thoughts about people and places, occasions and this-and-that. I noted that as I spoke in detail, she listened even more intently. She was into specifics. It was the color and the hue that mattered. It was the steadiness rather than the rush that intrigued her.
That is something rare today. Few are willing to listen to anybody. Everybody wants to talk. Few want to listen. And those who listen are short-timed. Even in that short time, there is an urge to escape to do something. Listening appears to be a waste of time. It’s a badge of laziness.
Not so with my mother-in-law. She spent many years as an American living in a Canadian province. She learned to listen, heed and then go forward with more thought rather than feeling. That made her an exceptional human being.
Therefore, as I spilled out some thoughts that had lain too long unexpressed, she picked right up on them, reacting to them with facial expression and verbiage.
Secrets.
Yes, some were secrets dealing with past injustices. There were some ragged edges having to do with mistreatment and meanness that I relayed to her. She did not shy away from any of the themes. Instead, she appeared to fall right in line with an exceptional understanding.
Near the close of our visit with one another, my wife entered the room. She caught hold of one of my last secrets. With that, she scolded me in front of her mother and myself.
She said, in short, that I should not be sharing such scrambled detail with my mother-in-law. In other words, I felt my wife considered the conversation to be none of my mother-in-law’s business. Her mother did not need to be privy to such topics. After all, she was near death.
With that, my mother-in-law and I realized that three makes a crowd. It was time to halt the in-depth converse. It was time to return to cliches and frivolous talk, something that both of us did not take to.
I can recall over the years when the trivial converse overloaded in an evening, she would leave the room. She was not disciplining those engaged in nonsense. That was not her style. She was just tired of listening to froth and so she reasoned she had the individual right to absent herself to her room for reading a book.
That’s what I liked especially about her.
But what I also appreciated was that near death, she would listen to what I had to say. After all, I knew that no matter what secrets I spilled out, she would soon be gone. Jesus would take her home. There would be absolutely no danger that she would tell anybody else one thing I had spoken.
It was a needed release for me. I have often thought how much I treasured that afternoon.
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