The Spiritual Lives of Dying People. Paul A. Scaglione
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how her will and God’s will were intertwined.
Following this dramatic spiritual insight, she endured more tests and chemotherapy, and then she received word: remission. Now her fighter instincts returned. She was in charge. “I’m going to beat this,” she told me. “I won.”
All the talk about God ended. I wondered where this was going. I had so many questions, but I didn’t discuss them with her.
The remission lasted more than a year and a half. But one day after Sunday Mass, she came to me in the foyer again—same place, same time, with the same prayer for discernment. The cancer had returned, and this time it was a very invasive form of cancer, affecting not only the lymph nodes but other parts of her body as well. The doctors recommended an aggressive course of chemotherapy. I prayed that God would grant her discernment to know the right path.
This time she decided to fight on her own and chose a program of alternative medicine. She went into it aggressively with vitamins and a new diet of herbs and health foods. She went full speed ahead into this attack on her disease. It was as if she was saying, “I beat this with surgery. Then I beat it with chemotherapy and radiation. Now I’m going to prove the doctors are wrong and beat it by myself.”
She convinced her family. “There’s no way in hell this will beat her,” they told me. “She’ll beat anything under the sun. She knows better than her doctors how to handle her disease.” To my surprise, she went into remission.
As her spiritual counselor, I noticed she stopped talking about God and God’s guidance to give her wisdom. I found this very disconcerting. I never said this to her, but I thought that if the cancer reappeared, the battle would be nastier than anything she had ever seen. It would be the end of her life.
During this period of alternative medicine, she would stop me after Sunday Mass. We talked about her cooking and other day-to-day matters. We did not meet regularly. Everything seemed satisfactory.
But then the cancer returned, and this time it was in the early stages of metastasis. She was completely and absolutely devastated. And so we had another prayer moment in the foyer of the church. I prayed that God would give her the courage and strength to listen to her doctor. She called me immediately after her consultation with the doctor, who had recommended treatment with a highly experimental drug currently in clinical trials. They spoke on Friday, and the doctor told her he had to know by Monday if she was interested.
We met on Sunday afternoon. Maria was totally miserable and very depressed. She was angry with God, with her husband, and with herself. She was all over the place. Her opening line to me was,“I can’t fight this anymore.”
At this point her husband emerged from his quietude and told Maria that he loved her very much and wanted her to know that he was her faithful companion for whatever might lie ahead. He would be with her no matter what. I was moved by his wisdom and love for her. His affirmation of her quelled the distress and depression in her heart and soul. The next day she called with her decision: no more treatment. “I wanted you to know,” she said. “Now is the time for me ‘to prepare myself to meet the One who loves me,’ and I am counting on your help.”
I was astounded. I feared that she believed God had abandoned her. Her affirmation of preparing to meet God face to face touched my soul. It was the first time anyone had told me this. I burst into tears.
A few days later, she said, “I need your help in this process. I want you to pray with me. I want you to be with me when I pray. I don’t want to do this alone.”
“What about your husband?” I asked.
“No, I don’t want to burden him with anything more.”
This was the beginning of my extraordinary prayer sessions with Maria. When I would arrive at her home, I would go to her bedroom. She was dressed and ready, sitting in one of two chairs placed side by side.
At the first session, I pressed her to explain what she actually wanted me to do. She declared, “I can’t do this unless someone else is listening to me. Things in my life are not settled. I need to go into a new territory. I need to say it out loud.” She said she wanted to be honest enough “so I can meet God. Otherwise, he’ll see right through me.” She continued, “I can do this if you will be here with me.”
We met weekly in the late afternoons or Saturday mornings. Sometimes she sent her husband away. We held hands.
Here’s what she did. She went methodically through every relationship with every person in her family—alive or dead—covering all kinds of unresolved issues. In many of these incidents, she had been mean or cruel. She started with her mother, then her father, then her siblings, other members of her family, and some friends. She described these events in unbelievable detail.
She led; I followed as her prayer companion. I never prayed aloud, but silently I asked God that she would trust me. And she did trust me. She told me about some painful things she had done. She had willed them and she knew it. That kind of exposure really surprised me. All I could do was listen. It was almost like watching Maria talk to someone on the other side. It was an actual conversation with God and the person she hurt. She did it all. She wanted reconciliation, and she knew it was up to her. It was as if she had decided, “Death is my last choice.”
As Maria weakened, she said her prayers from her bed. I sat on the bed, holding her hand. Sometimes her husband sat at the foot of the bed. The prayers began with silence, and then she would start to speak in a stream of consciousness. “What I feel in my heart is this,” she would say. “I can’t meet you until I make peace.” For example, she described her relationship with an older sister, who had died many years earlier. “We never really connected,” she said. “We competed for attention. There was a chasm between us. I never knew my sister.” And then she added, “I don’t want to meet her with all these barriers between us.”
This hardworking, resilient, Italian-American mother with no formal education beyond high school showed me her intuitive understanding of good mental health—born out of her spiritual life. I began to see that I represented the church—the presence of God in her life. I was not prepared for this at all. It wasn’t counseling. I did not probe. I did not process her feelings. It was her journey—a moral inventory. She was a prayer warrior.
During the last two months of her life, we met about six times for an hour. Each time the meeting was totally guided by her. Sometimes she would elaborate on her feelings; sometimes she would speak very simply. She never used any notes. She was never repetitive. She never asked for pardon. All she wanted from me was to be with her as she walked the road, owning and taking responsibility for her life.
Near the end of her life, I asked Maria to carry something to God for me. I told her, “I want my ministry to dying people to be the focus of all that I do.” She said she would tell God, and I trust that she did.
She died just before sunrise at about 8 a.m. on a Saturday. Her bedroom had windows above her bed; the sun broke in at the moment of her death. Her husband was there. There’s an old Italian proverb: “The person who goes quietly, goes with health and goes far.” So it was with Maria. Her death was very peaceful. She simply stopped breathing.
I learned an enormous amount from Maria. It was the most profound experience of my ministry. Nothing comes close to it.
I learned that even though I felt very close to Maria, the process of dying is so powerful and personal that someone else can’t feel the intimacy. The last journey was all hers, not mine. I could have run one hundred kilometers around her bed, but she had to run the race alone. Her moral inventory—her prayers of reconciliation—taught me that we sometimes think we have so much time, but in reality, all we have is now—each day, each hour—to live with God and others and find restoration.
Death is a sacred space. I really don’t know what dying is all about. I can’t know exactly what it is, and I don’t have a clue. I can have my head on a person’s chest—be that close—and still not know.
All I can do is help people fall into the mystery of faith. Death is falling backwards into the arms