Before I Knew How to Pray

 

One day, I received a call from the hospital. By the time I arrived, my mother was in the Intensive Care Unit. A few days later, the doctor told me that she had entered a vegetative state and was unlikely to recover.

For almost a year, life became a routine of doing whatever needed to be done. I worked two jobs, arranged care for my younger sister, paid the bills and visited them whenever I could. Most of it, I handled alone. I don't remember thinking much about whether I was coping. There wasn't really space for that. Things simply had to be done, so I did them.

Some days I felt strong enough to carry everything. On others, I was simply exhausted.

One afternoon, I sat beside my mother's bed and finally told her what I had been holding inside.

“Mama, I don't think I can hold on much longer. I'm tired.”

She lay quietly, staring towards the ceiling as she had done for so many months.

“If you can recover, please recover,” I said. “But if you can't, and you're worried about my younger sister, I promise I will take care of her for as long as she needs me.”

There was one more thing I needed to say.

“Mama, I forgive you.”

For the first time in almost a year, I saw a tear roll from the corner of her eye.

I still don't know whether she heard me. There are things from that day I will probably never be able to explain, and I have stopped needing to.

When I left the hospital, I should have walked towards the bus stop and gone home. Instead, for reasons I did not understand at the time, I walked into a Catholic church nearby.

I knew almost nothing about God then. I wasn't a Christian and I didn't know how people were supposed to pray. I had no familiar words to fall back on, no Scripture in my mind, and no understanding of what I was doing. I simply went inside and sat down.

In front of me was a statue of a mother holding her child.

Something in me gave way, and I began to cry.

“Please help me,” I whispered. “If my mother can recover, please let her recover. But if she cannot, please let her leave peacefully, without pain.”

That was my prayer.

There were no beautiful words. I didn't know whether I was saying the right thing, or even who exactly I was speaking to. I only knew that I had reached the end of what I could carry on my own.

I don't remember how long I stayed there. Perhaps less than an hour.

When I reached home and had barely settled down, the phone rang.

It was the hospital.

My mother had passed away.

For many years, I believed she had been waiting to hear two things before she could leave: that I had forgiven her, and that her younger daughter would be cared for. It was the only way I knew how to understand what had happened that day.

I still hold that moment tenderly, but over time I began to see something else in it.

Of all the places I could have gone after leaving the hospital that afternoon, I walked into a church. I did not know God. I did not know how to pray. I did not even understand why I had gone inside.

Yet I went.

Sometimes I think about the young woman sitting there, exhausted and frightened, trying to speak to a God she did not yet know. She thought she had walked into that church because she had nowhere else to go.

Today, I wonder if perhaps she was already being invited in.

I didn't know how to pray that day.

But somehow, my heart did.