Swing Low
The Matron of All Offerings went into the hospital this weekend for some tests. Nothing too scary, thanks, but her hospital roommate is dying - some kind of heart condition. She looks like an old woman about to die, like a leaf bag that’s lost half its leaves. I haven’t seen her move in two visits. This afternoon, I listened across the curtain: first, her grown granddaughter reading to her from the Bible in Pilipino and English, voice breaking as she made her way through the Lord’s Prayer, then the granddaughter and, near as I can tell, two daughters began to sing to her. Spirituals of a kind, though contemporary sounding. They had a book they referred to, the granddaughter’s soft, clear soprano was joined hesitantly by the daughters’ soft clear sopranos in a ragged but deeply felt alternation of solo and chorus. They managed to get some laughs out of their occasional false starts or wrong notes, laughs for which they must have been grateful. I wondered, not for the first time, what it feels like to invoke Heaven and mean it, to speak of God and be sure you’re referring to more than an overlapping set of ideas. But mostly I thought that, when it comes my time to lie in such a bed, if three such voices should willingly gather to sing me through the ordeal, that will surely have been a good life, and those singers will surely have singers of their own one day, stored up in heaven or karma.
