Earth Angel

“Angels of highest light and love,
Angels that radiate beams of pure energy from the heavens above.
Please join us and be with us on this very night,
As the soul of our beloved joins you in flight.
We pray that you send this soul embraced in your lovely wings,
During his journey may he hear harps, and trumpets and strings.”
Molly Friedenfeld, The Book of Simple Human Truths

“No, I never saw an angel, but it is irrelevant whether I saw one or not. 

I feel their presence around me.”
Paulo Coelho

My first recognizable time occurred traveling downward in an elevator at the huge inpatient facility of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Thankfully, that time was not my last.

My mother-in-law, Doris, had asked me to escort her to an appointment for a medical examination with a heart specialist in Ohio, and I agreed. She, my wife, and I sat stuffed chock-a-block in a warm cattle-car holding room patiently waiting our turn.

A pretty young woman with her scalp shaved bald and marked by angry, red, fresh surgical scars suddenly tore a gaily printed green silk scarf from around her neck and wailed in full-throated terror; “no you can’t, no you can’t, no you can’t!” She then abruptly calmed, meekly looked around the room like she was seeing us all for the first time, and then lowered her face to weep embarrassed tears. No-one held her.

A few minutes later Doris gripped my arm, said, “oh, my,” and slipped bonelessly from her chair to the floor. Our visit dissolved into a whirling world of grabbing hands, white uniforms, and hurried gabbling voices.

When next we saw my wife’s mother, an eternity later, she was strapped into a hospital bed; festooned with wires and tubing, and cocooned in warbling machinery. Holes were cut in her swollen head and in her throat. Bright red stained the whites of both eyes. A respirator rhythmically inflated-then-deflated her. The world buzzed loudly in our ears. A doctor and two white jacketed hangers-on took me aside and blandly counseled me to prepare my darling wife for the very worst of news.

We silently rode an elevator downward, shared with a quite elderly negro woman dressed in the blues of a hospital housekeeper. My wife started to silently weep right after the doors slid closed, then her body heaved with the force of great loud sobs. The housekeeper took her by her shoulders, turned her, tenderly enveloped her… then cooed, “oh come here now, baby… there, there, there.” She petted my wife’s hair, she whispered sweet comforts in her ear. Grateful tears tracked down my cheeks. I briefly and guiltily thought of the frightened, bald young girl in the pretty green printed scarf.

We took Doris back to our home to die. She had likely died peacefully right there in Cleveland; but she officially died in a hissing and mechanical sleep in Michigan just a few short months later.

I have since seen that elderly housekeeper a few more times now over these many decades. She schooled me to watch for her. Of course, it was not actually her… but it was her; offering unselfish sweet succor; as patients, and friends, and family, and loved ones lay dying.

She shone from the eyes of a hospice nurse who tended my dying father; as she comforted, and smiled, and joked, and made his way easier. She radiated from the breaking heart of my older brother just a few short months after father died; as my brother held my dying mother in his arms, stroked her hair, and whispered magical sweet comforts in her ear.

Abraham Lincoln once exhorted all listeners to trust in their faith and inner strength with this famous counsel: “when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Were those angels there for him at his time of greatest need?

I don’t know if there are better angels, but I hope so. I pray that they have been with us unseen all along. I may have just recognized one for the first time, traveling downward in an elevator… at the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio.

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