The Angel Wore a Black Mask

Excerpted from "The Journal of Pastoral Care," Fall 1999, Vol. 53, No. 2.

On that particular morning, I was jarred awake by the phone ringing. For 22 months I had been the volunteer lay chaplain, and the only chaplain, for our local hospice program.

"Things are bad at Mr. White's house. William is dying. The nurse and the family's volunteer have both been there all night and need to leave now. Are you available to stay with the family?" The request came from my friend, Betty, the volunteer coordinator.

A short while later, I find myself driving slowly and carefully along the twisting, turning roads in the hill country that is nestled in an area not far from the small town where I live. This is truly God's Country where the noise that invades the silence is the buzz of insects and the call of birds and animals; where one passes from the sun dappled road into the dancing shadows of overhanging tree limbs then out again, playing a game of hide-and-seek with the daystar that warms our earth.

William's family is exhausted. One daughter, Rita, who has been up most of the night, is trying to nap on the living room couch. The two younger daughters, Krista and Laurie, are talking quietly in the kitchen. Meg is at her father's bedside, and Catherine, William's wife, is nowhere to be seen, probably resting in her bedroom.

I soon learn that Meg is the one who has been her Dad's "boy"--the one who went fishing and hunting and learned to swing an ax in a masculine manner. This slim, attractive professional woman, wife, and mother of three, had promised her father that she would not leave him alone in his dying.

The hours drag by. I watch the sun as it journeys on its appointed path from a low rising point in the east past the noontime meridian. Meg and I discuss our shared belief that when a person dies, an angel or a family member will come to aid the newly deceased's soul on his or her journey to the light that is our God.

How aware is William of what is actually going on? I don't know. He hasn't uttered a sound since my arrival, but I know that the last sense to leave a person's physical body is that of hearing. And so we talk of the beauty of the day, of the birds at and below the feeders, and of the squirrel trying to shimmy up the pole to feast on seeds that were never intended for him.

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