Endings Are So Much Better Than Beginnings
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by Tilden Edwards
While the nursing home attendant was taking a blood sample from her at five o'clock in the morning, Nettie Dillon told him that the day before had been the happiest day of her life. Her five grown children had gathered from various parts of the country to have a last celebration with her. She was dying of pancreatic cancer. Her decision not to have chemotherapy had left Nettie with a great sense of acceptance of her death to this life.The attendant challenged her: "What would your deceased husband say about that time being your happiest?" Nettie thought about that for a few days. When he came around to take some blood again, she told him, "Endings are so much better than beginnings: better than my wedding day, holding my first baby in my arms, or anything else, wonderful as they were. There is just so much more wonder and glory ahead of us than we can possibly imagine."
Hearing of this exchange, I was reminded of Teilhard de Chardin's insight that "Death is our deepest communion." Here was a woman who understood that from the bottom of her heart. She was on her way to a larger life. She was celebrating the gift of this life and her utterly confident expectation that God was drawing her into the more, not less. She loved her family and friends and prayed for her last days to be filled with energy and a freedom from "careless words" that weren't of the Spirit. At the same time, she had become marvelously carefree about all the things she had been attached to or worried about.
I commented to her that she seemed to have a lot of trust in God. She responded, "There's too much 'I' in saying that 'I' trust God. It's more than trust. It's a realization that God holds me so tight and that's just the way it is." She had what the tradition would probably call the surety of a real "faith-knowledge." One of her daughters, Susan, said that she was becoming more and more transparent; any remaining hardness in her personality was melting away. Her personal radiance and exuberance blossomed, which deeply touched the hearts of each of those people who had the privilege of being with her in those last weeks.
I was one of those privileged people. The last time I saw her she gave me an ancient, unpublished booklet of hymns written by Amy Carmichael, a courageous missionary who lived among poor children in India early in this century. Nettie turned to the verses of one of the hymns and said, "This is the intercession that I prayed again and again while I was raising my five children." The end of it goes like this:
"Read the language of our longing, Read the wordless pleadings thronging, Holy Father, for our children. And wherever they may abide, Lead them Home at eventide."
Nettie was led Home on August 5th. In the minutes before her death, her other daughter, Lynne, noticed flock after flock of geese flying by the window, honking loudly. They seemed to be participating in the communion of her ending, calling her mother ever more urgently. Lynne exclaimed, "Mama, the geese are calling to you. It's all right to go with them ... We'll all miss you so much. But it's all right for you to go." Very soon after that, Nettie took her last breath.
It was such a blessing for me to be with this amazing woman briefly toward the end of her life and to hear from others about the many ways God's Spirit shone through her spirit. She has given me a fresh perspective on endings. I don't think I ever again will value beginnings over endings. We can't have a new beginning without first having an ending. Endings are part of the mysterious economy of divine creation. God seems to be present in the endings in a special way, not only for ourselves but for others. In her last graced days, Nettie was a powerful witness to the wondrous presence of the Spirit within and around us, a witness to the mystery of holy endings that draw us deeper into communion with the Beloved.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.