Her breathing is steady, fragile, and yet it fills the room with a rhythm I cannot ignore. I think of how, sixty-five years ago, she leaned over my cot, listening with the same quiet attention, marveling at the life she and my father had made. The arc has curved, and now the roles are reversed: I sit sentinel at her bedside, watching her chest rise and fall, marvelling not at beginnings, but at the fullness of a life nearly a century long.
Her years hold multitudes. I picture the thousands of lives she touched, the newborns she delivered into light, the dying she accompanied with gentleness into the dark, the countless men and women who felt steadier after crossing her path. Nurse, midwife, hospice worker, companion, she walked quietly but left indelible marks. To that long tally of lives are added those who sought her out in community, in church, at Corrymeela, her gift was not spectacle but presence, and presence leaves its own kind of legacy.
Now her world has narrowed to a bed, four walls, the small circle of family and friends who come and go. Her voice, once carrying with confidence into hospital wards and meeting rooms, is hushed, barely reaching the foot of her bed. Yet the gravity of her life is not diminished, it feels condensed, distilled into its essence, as though the room cannot hold all that she has been and done.
Behind her closed eyes, I wonder what plays: perhaps the laughter of children she once held, the handclasps of the dying, the warm bustle of family kitchens, the quiet moments with my father when the world receded. Her silence is not empty, it is alive with memory. I sit, listening to her breath, trying to hear through it the stories that no longer find their way into words.
And in this quiet watching, I find myself humbled. My own life has meaning, yes, but it stands in the shadow of hers and my father’s, who gave so much of themselves to others. To bear witness now, to keep vigil as she once did for me, is both a sorrow and a privilege. It is love expressed in stillness, in presence, in the simple act of being here.