Let This Be Our Prayer

Let this be our prayer, when we lose our way / Lead us to the place, guide us with your grace / To a place where we’ll be safe.

Doug was really the first to teach me about death and dying.  He was a young mental health worker, the same age as my eldest son, and we had lived in neighboring suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio at the time the boys were in high school and where they very possibly competed in athletics.  I grew to love Doug as a fourth son and was devastated when he was fatally injured in, of all things, a soft ball game.  His parents flew out from their home on the east coast and his friends and the people he worked with gathered around his comatose body in the hospital at different times, held his hands, talked to him, told him how we loved him, and prayed for his recovery.  He underwent three brain surgeries to decrease the pressure.  A strange thing happened to me then; strange for that time in my spiritual growth.  Doug appeared to me during the day; a third eye appearance if you will, and told me that he would not recover but would not be leaving us for another week or so as there was still work to do.  This sent me flying to see my spiritual counselor and I remember exactly my opening words as I walked into his office: “We need to talk about death.”  And so we did.  But what should I pray for?  Doug’s recovery?  He’d told me that he wouldn’t recover and he hadn’t responded to the surgeries in any visible way and yet I didn’t want to believe that he was going to die.  Still, I couldn’t deny that very real vision so I prayed for his mother and father, his sisters, his sweet fiancé, for his many friends, and for myself.  I spoke at his memorial service in Denver before his parents had the body shipped back home for burial.  That was twenty-seven years ago and I find myself in tears as I write this.

I’m not inclined to seek out  a psychic for communication with my loved ones on the other side but there are stories of those who’ve had that experience — incredible stories.  Dr. Mary Neal included one such story in her book, To Heaven and Back.  The wife of a former patient had driven miles to share her experience.  “She told me that in the time since her husband’s death, his spirit would occasionally visit their home and give her guidance.” 

“He told me that I (Mary) had been in a terrible accident and that he had asked the Heavenly Father if he could be one of those sent to save me.  As he described it to her; his request had been honored and he was so pleased to have been able to walk beside me and lift me up during that time.”  The wife had known nothing of Mary’s drowning in Chile and yet was “able to relate details of the scene that were only known to those present.”

I am learning about death and even more about the process of grieving.  I still have questions about prayer.  The one I probably use most is, “Thank you, God.”  I especially liked Mary’s inscription in my book and would have used it at the time of Doug’s transition, “May you always experience God’s constant and loving embrace.”  I know that he was held in the arms of the angels.  I don’t try to tell God what I want.  He/She knows.  Instead, I Will to Will Thy Will.  Let this be our prayer.

We ask that life be kind / and watch us from above / We hope each soul will find / another soul to love.    

                                                      The Prayer.  Carole Bayer Safer & David Foster