i haven’t told you the most important thing about me yet. My mother is dying. I am writing this post from the hospital.

My father died last year, and God made it possible for me to be there as well. He had suffered for years with Parkinson’s, and when I arrived he could no longer speak or open his eyes. We had been estranged for some years because of events that had torn our relationship apart, but when I got to his room, all I could see was my father. I know now that my other father was there with me. He made it possible to stay, my heart open and filled with sorrow for the final walk of a broken life. I prayed a lot. I cried a lot.

Now I am here again, but this time the soul that I sense is about to depart is my mother. We have been together for a long time. There are times when I can’t discern any separation at all, even though I have spent most of my life pulling in the opposite direction of her depression. I still open the curtains and ask her if she can see the sparkles on the snow. I have been like that for as long as I can remember.

Once in a long while, she sees them.

I try to talk to her about God, but she sees someone else. Raised in a convent as a charity case from the age of four, she sees God as “just another one of those guys”. She tells me she prays to Mary, and a small, wooden carving of Mary is on the table near her bed. Her younger brother carved it. He spent his childhood in the seminary next to the convent. Before he died five years ago, he retreated into a silence so profound that no one could reach him.

My mother was never silent. She has been asking for her life to be over for as long as I can remember.

That’s not all she is, though. When I was galavanting (her word) around the world, she came to see me on a few very memorable trips. In Haiti, she climbed into the local form of transportation, rickety, colourful pick-ups called “tap-taps” We bounced around the countryside on day-trips while I did research on the environmental impacts of a nearby hydro-dam built with Canadian aid through the World Bank. I still believe she was the reason I was able to get a tour of the dam itself. A tiny, somewhat grey-haired companion can add a lot to the respectability of a twenty-something-year-old would-be researcher.

Years later, she came to join my family for a month in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and she even rode a camel. We still have the picture. It’s on a t-shirt that she has with her here at the hospital.

For my entire life, my mother has been a daunting mix of strength and weakness. She has done her best. I have loved her, and now I pray that God will grant her oft repeated request to finally rest, to be finished with this broken world.

Thy will be done, father, not mine.