The Miracle Collectors

CHAPTER ONE

Terminal Course

What if you found out you had a week to live? One week. Think about that for a minute. Now, when you look at your calendar, your priorities change, probably drastically. No need to keep that dentist appointment, or make the board meeting, or even show up at work. It is time to call your mom or your best friend, be home for after-school games and snacks, make amends. Maybe it is time for a quick trip to paradise, wherever that may be for you, and maybe you want to write down some words of love, encouragement, and wisdom to leave behind for those you care about most. One thing is for certain: with one week left on earth, it should be easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. The clock is ticking.

What stays, what goes, and what gets added to the mix? For most of us, when facing death, connecting with friends and family will be paramount. The simple things in life that are taken for granted will gain new meaning: the sound of the front door opening, the voice of someone you love, the warmth of the sun on your face, the sound of the leaves rustling in the trees or crunching beneath your feet, and the birds as they call. Regrets might surface: the dreams never realized, the changes never made, or the time wasted being unfulfilled, unhappy, or less than who you are meant to be.

If you have a week to live, time becomes a precious and scarce commodity. The seconds tick by in precise rhythm, becoming hours past until your seven days are up. You are handed the gift of roughly sixteen hours every morning. The question is, what would you do with it today if you only had a total of 112 hours left? If you are like Joan, you will sleep deprive yourself to the grave and stretch those sixteen-hour days into twenty; if you are like Katie, you will get the recommended daily allotment of sleep and hope one of the mornings you will wake up from the nightmare: reality meets denial.

Besides an acute awareness of diminishing time and the commensurate imperative to focus on the only things that really matter, some would also take a spiritual inventory. The big questions floating around for years would finally need answers. Is there a God? Do we live on? Have we left the world a better place? Others would cling to their great faith and certainty that they’ll be with the Divine and in a better place.

There are some who identify with what John Lennon said: “I’m not afraid of death because I don’t believe in it. It’s just getting out of one car and into another.”¹ From earth to heaven in one easy ride. Some have no faith at all and think there will be nothingness when the bell tolls at midnight on the seventh day. Although they say there are no atheists in foxholes, if you are dying in a week, you are in one. Will you hedge your bets and pray anyway?

The seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal had a famous wager about believing in God. “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… if you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”² Well, perhaps you think you will look a fool, but you won’t really care when you are dead. This reminds us of a woman we met who told us of an experience she had after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Feeling at her lowest point in a long, scary ordeal, she was lying in bed staring at the ceiling, when all of a sudden she saw the face of Christ in the contours of the chandelier. Later, the same image appeared in the grain of her oak closet door. Although she was not religious, she decided she should pray. Ultimately, she fully recovered and never encountered the strange images again. Though we don’t know if she ever changed her mind about religion, she felt the encounter was important enough that years later she wanted to share the experience with us, as if for safekeeping.

A week might seem an eternity to live if you think you only have minutes. Take the gentleman who shared an elevator ride with Katie’s daughter Laura the day after the Miracle on the Hudson, when on January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River. Offering a pleasantry, Laura asked, “How are you?” to which he declared, “I’m great! I was on that airplane yesterday and I am so thankful to be alive; my life will never be the same again!”

Not all of us are so instantaneously receptive to reaching the same conclusion. We miracle collectors belong to this group, and so we understand the reticence involved before admitting a miracle. At one book club meeting where Joan had Skyped in, a woman shared a story about a day many years ago as she sat in a London airport. Her flight was boarding but she had the urge to go peruse the nearby bookstore, grab some coffee, and take her time. She approached the desk and asked when the next flight to New York City would be. Informed it was in less than an hour and she could switch to that flight, she made the arrangements and was off to the bookstore. The flight she changed was Pan Am flight 103, the one that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. It had never occurred to her to see this event as deliverance until years later, when she was transformed by the response of her fellow book group members. Overwhelmed by her admission, her friends were shocked that they had never heard this story and immediately challenged her to consider that her life had been touched—saved, in fact—by the Divine. Unlike the wise gentleman who survived the US Airways flight, it takes some of us a while to join the ranks of the forever appreciative and to keep our eye on what is most important.

Katie received an email that had been circulated among her college classmates from their friend Martha who had just been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. If you want to know what a death sentence feels like, Martha knows, and this is what she said:

Katie’s college friend may have a better sense of the timing of her death, and this must be terrifying. However, we are all going to die—most of us just have the luxury to put it out of our minds from day to day. A Buddhist teacher, Sangye Khadro, suggested we “imagine being on a train, which is always traveling at a steady speed—it never slows down or stops, and there is no way that you can get off. This train is continuously bringing you closer and closer to its destination: the end of your life.”³ A customized one-way ticket, arrival date unknown.

The good news is it does not have to take a serial killer or a terrorist bombing or a terminal diagnosis or even a practice exercise to remind us of our eventual demise. Becoming more aware of every miracle moment you are alive is about bridging the gap between the death sentence you have been handed and the reprieve you are going to get at the end of the week when you realize it was all a mistake. Turns out you are not going to die in a week after all. Relief! Gratitude! And now, you have a changed outlook, kind of like Scrooge on Christmas morning. Katie can picture Martha, a mother of seven, doing a jig, a somersault—anything—if someone told her it was all a mistake.

What might it look like to feel like Scrooge did on Christmas morning, every morning? His profound appreciation when he realizes he hasn’t missed Christmas; his enthusiasm as he imagines he could help Bob Cratchit and cure Tiny Tim; his exuberance as he delights in the faces of children whose very existence once annoyed him. Even the snow seems to sparkle. “Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious. Glorious.”⁴ The Ghost of Christmas past showed him missed opportunities for a different life, the Ghost of Christmas present showed him the error of his ways, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—well, that is when he stared into his own grave and got religion. He sees the world anew through the eyes of one completely transformed.

If you are lucky, like the new and reformed Scrooge, maybe you know exactly what to do with the moments of your life that you have left. Or at least you know what not to do. No more detritus like so much tumbleweed allowed in your door, worry and uncertainty and time wasted on the things that do not matter. Regardless, we all have an opportunity to consider how to be more deliberate and happier, to find a way to see the world through fresh eyes.

Joan has never forgotten the invasive breast cancer diagnosis she received twenty years ago and the potential death sentence it was.

“Trust me, you don’t have to remind me I could die tomorrow. The feeling has never left me. When I am overwhelmed by my responsibilities and commitments, I remember my cancer diagnosis acting as a free pass to rearrange my life. The busyness of my days should never mask the splendor in having them to live. It completely changed the way I think.”

Mahatma Gandhi, among others, said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow.” Why? Because it keeps us focused on what is important and all that matters right now, this minute. Hansa Bergwall and Ian Thomas agree. They founded WeCroak, an app designed to notify you five times a day, “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.” This is followed by a life-affirming, or death-affirming, quote, like “Your own positive future begins in this moment. All you have is right now” (Lao-tzu), or, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think” (Marcus Aurelius). The app is based on the Bhutanese philosophy that to be a happy person, we must contemplate death five times a day. At recent count, nearly thirty thousand people had paid ninety-nine cents for the privilege, average age thirty-five. Those of us meaningfully older than the average do not need to be reminded, though Katie signed up anyway.

No routine reminders are necessary for one Denver hospice nurse who told us about a patient she became especially close to before he died. She asked him to send her a sign from the other side to let her know he was okay. A few days after he passed away, she was strolling down a random downtown sidewalk when a beautiful dragonfly, its translucent greens and blues sparkling in the sun, began buzzing around her purse. She thought it was odd, a dragonfly in the city. She gently tried to shoo it away, but it seemed intent on sticking around until it landed on the sidewalk just in front of her, forcing her to stop for fear of stepping on it. And then, the dragonfly flew away, revealing something etched into the sidewalk. She leaned down for a closer look and recognized the initials of her patient who in life had been a cement contractor. Even though it was against the rules, he had told her he always signed and dated the last concrete square he poured on any major project.

This hospice nurse embodies her mission to minister to the dying and believes she was where she was meant to be that day. She believes death is a transition, not an ending, to something else that allows for leaving a mark, or a clue. Being a constant witness to death must change you. In her case, it softens the hard edge between life and death, making her a spiritual seeker and an explorer of the in-between and the mystery beyond it.

Death is the great equalizer. There is no way out for any of us. Once death has come for someone you love, and you have had a front-row preview to its difficult possibilities—the gasping for air, the unrelenting pain, the bodies and minds no longer recognizable—it is not difficult to remember that we are all mortal and our time is limited. After the seeming finality of death, it is a gift when those who have passed away reach us with a message, a sign, or even a hug.

Katie describes her own experience with her father’s untimely death at age fifty-four.

“At some point in the six short weeks after his cancer diagnosis, I remember my mother telling me that ‘nothing prepares you’ for the finality of it. She was right, of course. And, at the time, I was so black and white, dead and gone, which didn’t help. Fortunately, I have evolved since then. I used to scoff at ‘passing away’ or ‘lost,’ and I now embrace the euphemisms. I realized eventually that he gave us a gift at the moment he left.”

As Katie describes in The Miracle Chase, her father was in a coma, his eyes open and rolled back. For hours his breathing had not changed, a rhythmic, rattling gasp for air that made her want to run fast and far away.

“Each breath made me squirm and squeezed some hollow pit in my stomach into an ever-smaller space.”

Suddenly, and for no reason, for her father’s breathing had not changed, her mother leaned down to say a prayer over him, a traditional Catholic blessing for the dead. “May your soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.” As her mother spoke, his eyes came down to meet hers with recognition and peace.

Katie continued, “I braced myself for another breath, but it never came. His death was truly a passing, ‘out of one car and into another,’ lost around a corner to those of us left behind.”

Witnessing the untimely death of someone Katie loved had an effect much like suffocation. “The spirit of life was sucked out of me for a time. Years.

“I eventually came to see the gift in my father’s dying, of seeing him there for one last moment to say a proper and loving goodbye to those of us gathered around him. I remarked recently to a friend that until that day I walked around like many people do with the unconscious and irrational notion that death and destruction are always something out there. It happens to other people. And in spite of being so sure that it won’t happen to you, when it does, the effect can be profound.”

Death is a hard lesson, and yet, the seeds of awakening can be found in acceptance of its inevitability. Because we have only so much time, and we don’t know how much, we need to let those closest to us know how much we love them each day. Our best selves should start right now. The gift of the moment is often what we learn from the death of someone we love.

Cherishing the moment is all we have, yet each moment brings with it constant options. Kind of like multiple-choice test questions, some answers are sort of right, but one answer is the best fit. The whole exercise of living with the awareness that you are going to die is about choices.

Fred Rogers understood this: “You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”⁵ How do you spend your time? What is your job? Who are your friends? Who is your life partner? What do you have faith in? What are the choices that confront and define you every day? Not the mundane ones, like soup or salad, but the constant water-torture drip of the things you know you should be doing and are not. Sometimes choices involve things you shouldn’t be doing but are, because they fill time and keep you from making any choice at all, the nonchoice default position of most of us.

“Don’t forget, you’re going to die.” It has a ring to it.

Death is hard to contemplate, complete guesswork since none of us have experienced it, though there are plenty of accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) that offer up some heavenly possibilities and leave us with a picture of what it is like for our loved ones who have passed. We’ve heard over and over from people we’ve met about signs they received from those who have died. One young woman approached us after a presentation we gave to her college alumni group. She asked a question at the end of our talk: “Can dreams really be miracles in disguise?” We responded that we thought so, especially since we have had more than one such experience ourselves. She seemed satisfied and afterward pulled us aside to ask if she could share her dream story. (This is like asking a chocolate lover if she would like a Hershey’s Kiss.)

She shared that her beloved grandfather had died over the past summer of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease). She visited him frequently while she was home from school and felt she was a spiritual listener for him. They had many deep conversations as his health continued to fail until he could no longer move or communicate, and finally, he slipped into a coma. On her last visit before she returned to school, she told him how much he meant to her, even though she believed he could not hear her. To her shock, he reached out and touched her hand. Hours after she left, he took his last breath.

She worried that she would not remember him the way he once had been and felt a constant anxiety about where he had gone and if he was okay. Months after he died, she had a dream. She was in a large outdoor plaza crowded with people and suddenly recognized her grandfather in the crowd at the opposite end of the plaza. He looked healthy and happy and was engaged in a lively conversation with others. She knew he did not know she was there and felt such relief and love as she observed him. But then, as if he had known all along, he slowly turned, found her across the crowd, and looked at her with unconditional love. The encounter startled her awake.

She did not need our blessing to know her grandfather was in a good place. And this young woman had done everything in her power to make her last days with her grandfather count. She had taken advantage of the moments they had left.

The mother of Katie’s friend Andrea, the remarkable Mary Higgins, gave us another glimpse into life beyond. One evening just after finishing up her favorite meal, Mary suffered a stroke. Some fast action by Andrea and her husband, who had just come to town to help with a move, meant that Andrea’s mother was treated rapidly, and her stroke did not appear to be life-threatening or debilitating in the long term. In fact, after a few days in the hospital, Mrs. Higgins planned to go home. Andrea and her husband left the hospital feeling relieved and excited that Mom could be released in a matter of days. It was good news that Andrea could share with her four siblings spread across the country.

Andrea was shocked when the next morning she received a call from the doctor saying that her mom was suddenly much worse. The medical staff now told them Mrs. Higgins was unresponsive and not going to make it. The siblings were called to come quickly and began to gather, saying prayers together at her bedside. They kept telling her to hold on, the others were on their way. Prior to their arrival, Mrs. Higgins was pronounced dead by the doctor and nurses in attendance. They told Andrea they were sorry for her loss as she, her one sister, and their niece began to cry by the bedside. Suddenly, Mrs. Higgins sat upright, took an enormous breath, and said, “I have been to the most amazing place! You have no idea how beautiful, peaceful, and colorful it all is. The sounds were so comforting, and it was like nothing I have ever experienced.”

Mrs. Higgins explained that she asked the Lord if she could return because all her children were not there to say goodbye. She wanted to make sure they would be all right after her passing. The medical staff had no explanation for what had happened, and Mrs. Higgins was released from the hospital the next day. When she died after living for another year, all of her children were gathered around her.