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Focused on the Holy
May 19, 2006 - 11:06 p.m.

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CPE continues...I've now been present at my first deathbed, which was an experience. I've lost a number of important people in my life - my father, grandfather, grandmother, friends - but for varying reasons I was never present at the time of death or even shortly afterward. Either I was too young or to late or too far away. My only experience of death had been in the sanitized safety of the funeral home. I experienced the loss, but not the reality.

People talk about the deathbed as a very peaceful, holy place. It is, but the noise and bustle of the hospital also intruded on that holiness. A woman lay dead, a family mourned, and on the other side of the curtain another patient watched Jeopardy. Our Father, who art in heaven...."Who is Wilder Penfield?" It was surreal.

I suppose that's part of the reality. The whole hospital can't stop for one family. The place is full of people near death and it's that activity that's keeping them alive and bringing them back to health. Still, it was odd to have so much bustling underscore such a solemn situation.

There were moments, though, when that other world vanished...mostly when we prayed. It's interesting how people who call themselves "not religious" want prayer at the time of death. It's not because they want to buy their loved one a ticket to heaven, just in case. They want to pray because it marks the event as something beyond them, something more important than anything else they have encountered. They sense, even if they don't acknowledge, that they are standing on the threshold of some great transition.

Being invited to share in that event, and to help shut out the bustle and focus on the holy, is an enormous honour.

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