Years ago, I confided to my husband that I feared someday dying alone. No friends to hold my hand, no relatives to fluff up the pillow, no nurse to press a cold cloth to my brow. It was a pathetic vision of a person’s final days, but my vivid imagination at times churns out decidedly bleak images.
“Even if no one else is there, you’ll always have God with you,” my husband replied, quickly banishing whatever demons were whispering in my ear.
Still, his words were hard to fathom because sometimes God seemed uncomfortably far away — and my prayers felt like long-winded, one-sided conversations.
I didn’t know it then, but it would take a complete upheaval of my world for me to grasp the truth of my husband’s words.
He has been gone nearly 10 weeks —and if someone had told me, say a year ago, that I would survive so long in an empty house, I’d have turned away in disbelief.
But here I sit now in a still room, listening to crickets chirping and the steady heartbeat of the clock. Every so often, the hamster attacks a peanut in the shell, which adds a crunching sound to the room.
Admittedly, I’ve endured spells of heart-shattering loneliness and crying, but also times of peace — because, you see, my husband had it exactly right all those years ago.
There’s a stirring moment in the Byzantine Catholic liturgy when people turn toward each other and proclaim, “Christ is among us.” When I first heard that, I felt those mysterious up-and-down-the-back chills, heralding that something unearthly was happening.
He really is among us when we look into a friend’s eyes, help a child cross the street, embrace someone who is suffering. In a mystical way, he is among us even when we’re alone.
The psalm tells us that “although I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil.” We navigate many shadowy patches in everyday life — the darkness of worry, the bleakness of longing, the blackness of despair.
But we’re not battling the storms alone, even when it seems that way. In fact, God is “closer to you than you are aware,” writes Archbishop Anthony Bloom in a wonderful book, “Beginning to Pray.”
As he points out, envisioning God in some far-off place may lead to a growing sense of loneliness, but the more we seek him in prayers and Scripture, the more we realize he is in our hearts.
In one of my favorite movies, the rugged Australian hunter, Crocodile Dundee, says confidently, “Me and God, we’d be mates.” Taking that cue, I’m turning to God like a friend, begging him for help and thanking him for small showings of love — such as a friendly chipmunk’s visit.
When I turn out the lamp and climb into bed, I am deeply aware that my husband is gone — but still, in some mysterious sense, I am not alone, “for thou are with me.”
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