A Waiting Witness

I visited Marcile shortly after she was settled in her new room and asked how she was experiencing this transition from independent living to the health center.  She said she felt like she was waiting. That seemed right. A few days later I prayed with her that the waiting wouldn’t be too long, and we both wept, though through her tears she was thanking Jesus.

It had been three weeks of waiting, something I computed while sitting at her bedside as she slept on a Saturday night. Sleep seemed a gift because it suggested she was comfortable enough given the givens of still occupying a body shutting down from a lifetime of living. 

Mark and I met Marcile nearly 40 years ago when she came to our house after we visited the Quaker church in Newberg, the rural town where Mark had taken his first teaching job, and one not far from where we both graduated from high school. Given the college was Quaker (called George Fox College back then) we decided to try out Newberg Friends Church, knowing Quaker ways of worship differed quite a bit from anything we had yet encountered. For one, from the beginning women had partnered with men in leadership roles and Marcile was a pastor at Newberg Friends Church. So she came to our home when we asked for a visit to learn more, and in our tentative way we asked how Quakers justified women in leadership given what seemed to be clear New Testament teachings to the contrary. Marcile answered graciously and non-defensively and I felt drawn to her humility and kindness, even though it took a year for us to reconcile this way of understanding God's invitation to ministry and return to Newberg Friends Church.

Marcile invited me to join a small group of women meeting in her apartment and that began a nearly 40-year friendship that blossomed as good friendships do over a lifespan. She modeled life 20 years ahead of me with grace, acceptance, forbearance, joy and curiosity. She’d use me as her confessor as I used her as mine. She brought her troubled questions to me as I brought mine to her as we shared ordinary and extraordinary moments of life together. Marcile refused to be my mentor when I asked because she wanted me to be a friend and in the asking matured me in ways she may (or may not) have anticipated.

I knew this day would come--this quiet night when I would (I hoped) be at her side. I helped caregivers as I could and stayed out of their way otherwise while she did the work of dying. Earlier on I read to her, from Brian Doyle’s prayers (she wanted humor and poignancy and who better to read than Brian?) and then, the last two nights, I sang and spoke gentle words of affirmation of a life well lived. Mostly she slept, though I refused to assume she didn’t know I was there, bearing witness to her journey from this life into the mystery of what comes next.

Saturday Bethany (a mutual friend of Marcile’s and mine) came and played her harp for an hour, offering us both a gift of presence accompanied by the gentle thrum of strings plucked slowly, mindfully, beautifully. I cannot imagine a better way to spend the twilight hour between 8:30-9:30 the last night of one's life in this form.

Marcile died the next afternoon, in the presence of LaNeal and Dana (her daughter and son-in-law). It seemed she was peaceful, they said, though we all knew she bore much discomfort and pain in the end. We were grateful that her waiting was over, though also aware of the hole that her presence leaves in the world.

The last day Marcile spoke, she said (seemingly randomly, though doubtfully random at all), “life goes on.” And so it does. I’m convinced that the best way for me to honor her investment in me and her love of me is to live as she did, with arms open to whatever God allows, with hope, curiosity, forbearance, grace and love.

Amen and amen.