She Asked to Go Home to Die

She asked in September, at the kitchen table, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.

She said she wants to go home. She was very specific about the word and she used it in the way she has always used it, which does not mean this house and never has, in forty-one years.

You said what anybody would say. You said the flight, the insurance, the fact that there is nobody there any more except a cousin in her seventies, the fact that the care here is better and the hospital is eight minutes away.

She let you finish. She always lets you finish. And then she said it again, in the same words, and then she said: do not argue with me about this one.

That was September. It is now the second week of March and you are in a car park at Terminal Two with a small case and a wheelchair you had to book, and she is sitting up straight with her handbag on her lap the way she has sat in every waiting room of your entire life.

She will not come back. Everybody in this family knows it and nobody has said it, and she has said it twice, plainly, and been told both times not to talk like that.

You cannot go with her. Not for a fortnight, not for a month; you have three weeks of leave in the entire year and you have already worked out what it costs to be there at the end and you have not told anybody the number.

A dying man asked to be carried home

Sit on that bench for a minute. She will not mind and the gate does not open for forty minutes. I am not going to tell you that you should have argued harder.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit is not going to be sentimental at a man in an airport: this costs you something enormous and I am not going to describe it as a beautiful gesture. You are honoring a request that will very likely mean you are not in the room, and there is no arrangement in which that is comfortable. Nobody in this family is on trial for it. Not the ones who told her not to talk like that, who were frightened. Not the cousin. Not you.

Now come and look at the same request, made by another old person a long way from where they started.

But I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their buryingplace. And he said, I will do as thou hast said.Genesis 47:30

Jacob. Seventeen years in Egypt, well looked after, honored, with his son in a position of enormous power and everything a man could need available to him.

And what he asks for at the end is to be taken home. Not because Egypt failed him. Because home is where his people are and that is where he intends to lie.

And look at what Joseph says. He does not explain the logistics. He does not point out that Egypt has better arrangements, which it demonstrably did. He does not tell his father not to talk like that.

He says: I will do as thou hast said.

That is the whole of the son's part, and Scripture records it as an honorable thing and not as a failure to fight for the better option.

A request like your mother's is not a symptom to be managed and Scripture records a son honoring one without argument. That is not me making a hard drive easier. That is what is written, and what Joseph said, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a bench in Terminal Two.

Here is what nobody explains at a gate like this one. When you speak a blessing over her, you are not sending yourself with her and you are not making up for not being there. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a woman He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He is already at the other end and He did not need a seat on the flight.

A blessing said at that gate arrives before the plane does. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, finished, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word from heaven to a house in a village nine hours away without a booking.

What you have been carrying since September

Now let me name the thing precisely, because it is not grief yet and it deserves its own name.

What is written never asked you to do that sum, and the Spirit has not been standing over it. You have been carrying an arithmetic since September. Three weeks of leave. A number for the flights. A calculation about how much warning you would get, and whether it would be enough, and what happens if it comes in a week you cannot leave.

And underneath the arithmetic is the sentence you have not said to one living person, and what is written knows it already and the Spirit has heard it: I am probably not going to be there.

That is not selfishness. It is a man with a job and a family and a finite amount of money doing the only honest sum available to him, and doing it privately so that nobody has to reassure him about it.

But here is what the arithmetic cannot weigh, and it is the reason it has been so unbearable to hold: it is calculating your presence in a room as though your presence were the thing that carries her.

God has not asked you to be in that room, and He has never once made a son's attendance the thing an old woman's last weeks rest on. It is written that the eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27), and underneath is a position no flight has ever been booked to, and the same Spirit who breathed that is on this bench with you.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you that you will get there in time. I have no authority to promise you that and I will not, and you would know instantly that I had. And I am not telling you that a blessing said at a gate is the same as being at a bedside. It is not, and pretending otherwise would insult both of you.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said over her at that gate that is in that village before she lands. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and twenty words at Terminal Two is not a substitute for being there and it is also not nothing, and both of those are true.