Final Journey

“I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.” ~Peggy Noonan, American journalist, author and political analyst ( b. 1950)

It was 1:15 am Wednesday morning and the phone was ringing in my sister’s bedroom…

We stared at each other across the width of the bed, both realizing what the ringing phone meant, but unwilling to acknowledge it to one another…

Less than forty eight hours earlier our mother, Marie, had suffered a stroke in her sleep and was unresponsive when the caregiver came to awaken her Monday morning. A rash of phone calls ensued and by late Tuesday morning I was on a flight out of LA connecting through Milwaukee to Pittsburgh. Amazingly I had booked a $310 round trip fare with less than 24 hours notice, two weeks before Christmas. “I think Mom’s waiting for you to get here,” Bonnie had said at the end of our last phone call.

Unbeknownst to me a major snow storm was pounding the Midwest. I reached Milwaukee on time only to find my connecting flight had never made it out of St. Louis. However, by some small miracle, a plane to Pittsburgh, connecting through Atlanta had been delayed by the snow and was still sitting at the gate. There was a seat available for me. The young man at the ticket booth jogged down the concourse with me to make sure I got to the correct gate on time. I didn’t get his name. I called and let Bonnie know I was coming. “I think she’s waiting for you to get home.”

My seat was next to an airline employee who assured me we would get there in time to catch my connecting flight. His phone had all the arrivals and departures directed to it so he updated me continually. We sat…time crept by…they de-iced the plane…more delay. Finally, we took off. It was then I realized there was a time change and I might miss the next flight. “No worries,” said the employee. The connecting gate number was on my ticket…it seemed to be in the next concourse from where we would deplane…I would run if I had to.

The plane landed with less than 15 minutes before my next flight departed from a gate which appeared to be in the next concourse. “I wonder where gate 15C is,” I said half out loud. There was a pilot in the seat in front of me. “Right there!” he said, pointing out the window. “We’re right next to it.” I dashed up the jet way, a U-turn and back down the other jet way I went. A quick call to my sister… “Fritz (our brother) will meet you at the airport.” “She’s waiting for you to get home.”

The plane landed at Pittsburgh International. It was late…I got confused and went to the wrong baggage carousel. Then realizing what I had done, I trotted across the baggage area to the correct carousel to be greeted by my brother and my nephew Marshal. We headed for home. Fritz and Marshal dropped me off at Bonnie’s house around 1:00 am…almost four hours later than expected. I took my luggage up to the spare room. A room I had come to know so well from previous visits. The bags still sitting unopened on the floor I walked across the hall to ask Bonnie, “what was the plan?”

It was 1:15 am Wednesday morning and the phone was ringing in my sister’s bedroom…

Bonnie picked up the phone and listened…mostly. I heard her say, “But my brother just got here.” She hung up. Mom had died without regaining consciousness from the stroke she suffered two days earlier. “I thought she was waiting for you to get home,” my sister said sadly. “She did,” I thought. She waited until I was safely with my brother and sister…safe in my sister’s home. My journey had ended…and so had Mom’s.

The media (whether it be movies, television or even news programs) has conditioned us to believe in, and hope for, the big event…that major, fortuitous, climactic moment which resolves everything and “sends ‘em home happy,” as one movie mogul once put it. In a well scripted climax, I would have arrived home in the nick of time. Mom would have regained consciousness at the appropriate moment and there would have been one last fond farewell. But as a good friend once shared with me, after experiencing her own mother’s death, “chances are you won’t be at your parent’s bedside when they die, but that doesn’t negate the previous 92 years” (or however many years of life it might have been).

Life is not a movie or a television show (reality or otherwise). Rather, as stewards of our world, we learn to recognize the many small, seemingly insignificant gifts which we encounter daily and to be grateful for them. They are those little miracles which occur constantly, often while we are waiting around for the big ones. I was blessed with many such miracles during that stressful 48 hours between my mother’s stroke and her final physical death. My list of God’s gifts began with finding a flight home on very short notice, during a holiday season, and at an affordable fare. The snow storm, which could have stranded me in Milwaukee, miraculously provided other opportunities, which assured my safe arrival home.

Along the way God sent any number of guardian angels, which, by the way, are not always fitted with wings or equipped with harps. The young ticket counter employee who jogged shoulder to shoulder with me down the concourse to assure I got to exactly the right gate. The airline employee who sat beside me, updating me, giving me peace of mind and the Air Trans pilot who pointed out my gate and any number of other people working in the background, out of sight, who got me home safely. Then there were my brother and nephew who came for me, in the middle of the night, in a snow storm and waited patiently at an empty baggage carousel until I found my way there.

My sister was right. “Mom was waiting for me to get home.” I didn’t need to be physically at her bedside when she died, but I was home and safely with my family. Her passing within 15 minutes of my arrival was therefore, not a disappointment, but a confirmation.

As faithful stewards we are not called to expect the miraculous or the spectacular rather, we are called to be witnesses to and grateful for the many gifts of daily life…the little miracles which occur right under our noses, all day, every day.

Dear God: Help me to see that my every day is filled with your miracles.

“The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” ~Willa Sibert Cather, American author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1873-1947).

© 2010 James E. Carper. All rights reserved.

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