The Unexplainable

A story that still leaves me stunned, sixteen years after my friend's mother died

I texted my friend Vickie this week to ask whether it was ok if I wrote about the day her mother died. Specifically, I wanted to write about The Thing That Seemed a Little Like a Miracle, a moment toward the end that I think about regularly, even though it’s been sixteen years.

Vick replied that it was fine.

“The worst day of my god damn life,” she added as we texted, and of course it was. They were best friends.

And also . . . that day had a moment, one I find unexplainable, and one that provided her some comfort.

So with all thanks to Vick, and with the hope I do her and her mother some justice in relaying this story, here it goes.

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It had been eight days since my friend’s mother had any food or water, and still she couldn’t die. Or wouldn’t.

It’s impossible to know which, and it doesn’t really matter now, sixteen years and a couple of days later.

What mattered then was that she had said she was ready. In the years before and in the days leading up to that week, she had said it repeatedly.

What mattered also was that she was far too young (58), far too loved, and that she had suffered far too much. Multiple sclerosis had taken her ability to walk, to talk, to eat . . . to live. She wasn’t Sue anymore. She was the shell of Sue.

The two hospice nurses were perplexed.

Have you given her permission? one of them asked my friend, Vickie.

No, Vick hadn’t given her mother permission to die. So Vick went into the bedroom and held her unconscious mother’s hand.

It’s ok, Ma, she told her. You can go. This body sucks; it’s time for a new one.

We’ll be fine, Vick lied.

“We” meant Vickie and her stepfather, John, who Vick never referred to as a stepfather. He was just Dad, sometimes John if Vick needed to clarify. He’d married Sue when Vickie was eight years old. John was always at Sue’s side, had been her caregiver for years. Now, John and Vickie were eight days into an excruciating death watch.

Early in the watch, Thanksgiving night, John had proposed one-hour shifts, military style: You stay with Ma for an hour, and then I’ll get up and stay with Ma for an hour.

Ridiculous, Vick thought, or something similar. She took the first shift and never tapped out. She knew John needed some sleep. He woke up the next morning.

Another week went by.

Sue’s breathing became labored and stayed that way for two straight days. As if the years of watching her mother struggle with a disease that decimated her body weren’t searing enough, here, at the end, Vickie had to watch her mother seem to suffer.

The house had seen a lot of visitors. A pastor had been by, a massage therapist from hospice, and volunteers who would sit with Sue while John went grocery shopping. One volunteer, a vegan, brought the meat-eating family some chicken noodle soup, sans actual chicken. Funny the things you remember.

The hospice nurse had a thought.

Should they bring in the reiki lady?

Sure, why not, Vick thought. Or something similar. Who even knew what that meant?

The woman arrived around 6:30 that night, November 29, 2007.

She walked into the bedroom where Vickie’s mom lay, unconscious.

“Suuue,” she crooned, “I brought some angels to show you around heaven.”

The woman touched Sue’s forehead.

In an instant, Sue’s breathing eased. The loud, laboring breaths were replaced with soft, shallow ones.

Over the next half hour or forty-five minutes, her breaths became shallower and shallower.

A little after 7 p.m., the reiki lady had news.

“She’s leaving us,” the woman said. “Hold her hand.”

John and Vickie held Sue’s hand as she took one last shallow breath.

The reiki lady would tell them afterward that she saw Sue ascend from the bed with an angel on either side of her. And she was tall.

That’s weird, John would say to Vickie later. How did she know Ma was tall?

I visited Vickie and John later that night, bearing Chinese food, some booze, and some hugs. I don’t remember much except Vickie being in a surprisingly upbeat mood and reporting, “We had angels!” Or something like that. I was glad she had that image.

We still don’t know what happened when the woman touched Sue’s forehead. Something about universal energy and chakras. Something about using one’s hands to guide a life force energy.

I’m open to a lot of woo-woo ideas, my default stance being that the universe is a lot more complex than we can ever understand. So who knows? Far be it from me to be so cocky as to think I know how the universe operates.

A questioner by nature, I lean toward thinking a lot of “woo” is a placebo effect . . . but who cares, if it works? If it works, then it’s real.

Except there’s no placebo effect on an unconscious woman. And they didn’t know what the reiki lady was going to do.

It also seemed a most unlikely event for Sue, a woman who went to a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania as a child, who enjoyed John Wayne movies, and who was glad to have been born on Flag Day.

Did the reiki woman actually guide the flow of a universal life energy with her hands and help Sue breathe easier and transition? I don’t know what happened in that room, but I think about it regularly, even sixteen years later. I’m grateful it brought my friend some peace.

Of course, us being who we are, we temper our awe.

“She killed her,” Vick texted this week, along with laughing emojis, when I asked if it was ok to write about the reiki lady. When we talked on the phone that day, Vick recalled the woman offering a free session, to which Vick’s immediate reaction was Nah, I’m good.

And Vick will laugh a little when she recreates the lilting, sing-song voice going, “Suuuuueeee, I brought some angels.” She’s also likely to cry a little. And of course she would—worst day of her god damn life.

Still. We know something happened. For the rest of my life, I’ll wonder what it was. On that night sixteen years ago, in a bedroom where a dying woman, her daughter, and her husband each needed some relief, it arrived. With a touch on a forehead, relief arrived.

Photos of Vickie and her mother, Sue.