Dying, death and holy ground

It’s been an odd but holy day. I had phone calls just a couple of hours apart from two adult women who wanted to share the last earthly moments of their older loved ones’ lives.  The first call was from the niece of a frail, elderly friend who had passed away in her sleep just two weeks ago. The second call was from the daughter of a 95 year-old woman in my community who had struggled with cancer throughout her late years.  Both of the older adult women were my dear friends.

I thought about the phone calls and the fact that the two callers had never met each other.  The two older women who died had never met each other either. Yet there were amazing similarities in the descriptions of their last moments. Each caller talked about the peace.  The holiness of the moment. The serenity of death.   

After I hung up the phone from the last call, I looked over at my To Do list written on the back of an envelope. Somehow in that moment, doing laundry and packing my suitcase for a business trip seemed ridiculously insignificant.  So I just sat there and reflected upon the lives and deaths of my sweet friends. I thought about how God sometimes reminds us to take off our shoes in the middle of the afternoon. Moments such as these are most assuredly holy ground.