That There Are Angels
That There Are Angels
for you
That there are angels
at all
should give us pause
in this never-ending dance of living and dying.
Surely you’ve guessed at their nearness,
trepidatious tip-toers of divine office—
messengers hinting at hopes half-seen,
fully realized
while treading upon cloud-form intangibilities
we fear would not bear our corporality.
Certainly their intent has not expired,
although we do.
And how we do hope
if there are angels
at all
that one of them at least—
perhaps not the shiniest,
but haloed nonetheless—
knows us by name,
speaks it reverently before the Ancient One,
savors it like a pearl on the tongue,
a single bead of petition that will hold
until the silver thread breaks
and we are face to face
with the One who knows our truest name,
who makes messengers of the wind,
the shy breeze enfolding you in its wings
even now,
causing you to wonder
that there are angels.
Ten days before my grandmother left, I sat wrapped in a blanket of pain, rigid in my yellow velvet arm chair that has not softened or settled into relaxed comfortability yet despite seven years’ worth of hard sitting and intentional trampling upon its resolutely fixed form. At the very least, the discomfort I feel when sitting in this disappointment of a chair keeps me awake enough to pray. The text from my Mom read,
Grammy has gone into the hospital. We don’t know what’s wrong. Please pray.
So I closed my eyes to pray, filled with the familiar grief-laced fear of losing her. The moment my eyes shut, I received a flash of a vision—brief, mere seconds long—of a hospital room crowded with row upon row of angels’ wings. The atmosphere was chock full of them, so much so that I could not even see my grandmother’s bed. The image comforted me and would sustain me in the week to come.
Two days after I prayed for her, my 90-year-old Grandmother was released from the hospital. I called her then, just to hear her voice. I have known for five years now that each time I call her could be the last, and I have loved her more dearly for it. Here were her final words to me, words that came as the final flourish of the final chapter of her spoken novels made up of “I love you’s” and “I miss you’s” and tales about trolls and gnomes told in the backseat of our minivan over long drives, entertaining me and my younger siblings for hours with her story-spun worlds:
“Beautiful grandchildren like you make it all better. Gosh, I have so many memories of you. Maybe next Christmas we can be together. I love you.”
How do you say goodbye to someone who has loved you into being? How do accept the never-acceptable farewell of the woman who held you in your arms as an infant and prayed for you beneath the holy blanket of a summer night’s sky? What can you do when the keeper of your memories takes them with her, back to the stars?
After that final conversation I began, of course, to look for homes in Kalispell, Montana large enough to hold our entire family for Christmas next year, wondering why we hadn’t thought of this before—hoping it wouldn’t be too late, suspecting that it would be. And that somehow, it would be okay. I would be okay.
The next day, this text came:
Grammy is back in the hospital. She is in immense pain. We are with her now. The doctor said she has 5-7 days.
Less than three hours later, I was at the airport, scrolling through my phone and reading my spam email—anything to keep my mind off of what was ahead. If you know the particular ache of anticipatory grief, then you know it can be worse than the actual grief of losing someone. The fear of loss can yield a fiercer sword than the loss itself, gentler in its wounding once the worst has happened.
If you have known the exquisite pain of accompanying someone you love as dearly as life itself up to the gates of death, then you know that the waiting for breath to expire is an agony deeper than the hollow-ribbed exhale and ragged inhale which mark the grief of those left behind in the realm of the living.
If you have known these things, then you know what a keen mercy unexpected kindness from a stranger can be. Because the deepest part of you has been opened to the rawness of grief, the deepest part of you is also opened to receive mercy as the true balm, the living water, that it is.
In the spam folder I perused at the airport amid the background noise of exasperating flight delays and final calls for boarding only because I did not wish to peruse the piercing sadness of my own thoughts, it was there waiting for me—a cup of mercy from a new friend in the form of a poem she’d written for me just a few days before my desperate angel vision prayer in the insufferable yellow armchair. Here are the words that met me mid-journey on the way to my grandmother’s hospital room:
…the realm of angels covering the entire world
with their wings as unperturbed blanket;
protecting us
so we might not fall through:
they close the sea of their wings.
The same sea of wings I saw filling every spare corner of my grandmother’s hospital room was there waiting for me, in a poem from someone I have only met in person once. What do you do with a Love like that, except to wonder at the marvel that there are, indeed, angels who do the bidding of the Holy One with such love and tenderness, with such careful attention, that it feels foolish to have ever thought you were alone on this earth, deep and wide?
After reading her perfectly-timed poem, I resolved to walk with greater awareness that I am indeed in the company of angels. In the company of angels, I walked into my grandmother’s hospital room that night and told her I loved her to the moon and back. In the company of angels, I thanked her for loving me into being, for showing me the stars, for being the reason why I love poetry and literature and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. In the company of angels, I sang “You Are My Lucky Star” to her, over and over. In the company of angels, I hugged my mother as we both cried to lose the one who’d mothered her. Amid the small halos of red and white blinking medical equipment lights and the dim glow of street lamps below, I knelt low and close, whispering, You are surrounded by angels as I watched my grandmother’s chest rise and fall while she slept her last sleep.
Each day for the next seventy-two hours as I kept watch with my family, hovered around my grandmother’s bed, these four words entered my mind with such force and clarity that they left me wonderstruck:
That there are angels.
That there are angels became a mantra, a poem unto itself, a prayer breathed between coursing tears and my best attempts to sing on key for the one I’ve danced with on her lakeside dock so many times, summoning my best and brightest trebled, troubled, tight-throated notes for the one who introduced me to Rodgers and Hammerstein thirty years ago.
That there are angels. What a wonder.
After she died, my mother sent me a photo of a blanket she found. It was a gift I’d sent my grandmother several Christmases ago—a blanket I thought had been lost, along with its bold-print message that read:
Angels are watching over you.
Their wings wrap gently around you,
Whispering, “You are loved and blessed.”
My dear Grammy, I have so many memories of you. Maybe next Christmas we can be together. I love you.
And to you, dear reader, I do not know what particular grief you carry today. I do not know the shape or length of it, the way it distorts your name or sweetens your memories. But to you, beloved of God, I simply offer this: