The Comfort of Heaven

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

For a number of years, one of my closest friends was also my Visiting Teaching (the forerunner of Ministering) partner. She was short; I was tall. She had street smarts; I had a college degree. She had freckles on a face that was always laughing; I was solemn and far more reserved. Plus, she was feisty, funny, and had a gift for shrugging off the challenges in life she could do nothing about—a refreshing change from my anxiety-ridden younger self.

We took turns being pregnant. Before the days of casual ultrasounds, every new baby was a surprise. With her five little girls in a row at home, I will never forget the morning she called me from the delivery room at the hospital where she had just given birth to her sixth baby. “It’s a boy,” she announced. I laughed hysterically. She loved practical jokes, and it was April Fool’s Day. “No, really, it’s a boy!” She had to bring the baby home and take off his diaper before I believed her.

Somehow she managed to drag me into adventures I never expected–like the time we were traveling by the local cemetery. She jerked the wheel of her van to a curb next to a six-foot-high pile of dead potted flowers, which the maintenance crew had cleared from grave sites a couple of weeks after Memorial Day and were now stacked for a green waste collection. “Let’s take some,” she yelled over her shoulder as she climbed out of the van.

“We can’t do that. It’s theft.”

“They’re dead,” she pointed out and loaded a dozen pots behind the back seat. When we got home, she dug holes and stuck the dirt-covered roots in the ground of her front flower bed and then mine. Mums sprang up the next fall and bloomed for years thereafter.

So, the morning she called saying she was on her way to my house (“Leave the kids home with Leah–I’ll be there in five minutes”), I wasn’t surprised by the invitation. But I was shocked by the expression on her face when I climbed in the car.

“It’s Lucinda,” she said. “She needs us now!” She roared out of the neighborhood and down 56th West to the 7-11, which used to stand on the corner before Hunter High was built. Ahead, I could see an ambulance with sirens blaring as it pulled into the store parking lot. A couple of paramedics with medical cases jumped out of the truck. My friend yanked the wheel to a hard left and slammed on the brakes as we skidded across the asphalt and slid into a spot next to the ambulance. A fireman was already unloading a stretcher from the back of the truck. By then, paramedics were bent over our friend Lucinda, who had collapsed in the entryway of the store and was gasping for breath. Standing in the doorway were her two youngest children, sobbing.

My friend leaped from the car and rushed over to them. Pulling them close, she murmured, “We’re here. It’s going to be OK. Sh-sh-shush.” The children buried their heads in the safety of her arms, their sobs muffled by their relief at seeing a familiar face.

I headed for Lucinda, whose own face was now tinged a blue-gray; she was gasping for air. The store manager came out wringing his hands. “A bee,” he said. “She was stung by a bee; she’s allergic.” At the time, there were no cell phones to call for help or disposable EPI-PENS readily available. The paramedic nodded but didn’t look up from the oxygen mask he was applying to Lucinda’s face. His partner raced back to the truck for an epinephrine shot. After about five minutes, Lucinda’s struggled breathing eased, and the panic in her eyes receded.

“You know her?” The paramedic looked up at me.

I nodded, giving him her name and address. I leaned down to Lucinda, who was a single mom of four with very little extended family support. “Don’t worry about the kids,” I whispered. “We’ll pick up the other two and keep them all till you’re OK.” She raised a trembling arm and squeezed my hand. Then she was lifted onto the gurney, which was loaded through the truck’s double doors, and she disappeared from view. As the ambulance peeled out of the parking lot, its lights flashed, and the siren began screaming again.

“How did you know?” I asked my friend.

She tightened her grip around the children. Tears filled her eyes. “I heard a voice whisper, ‘Go now. Lucinda needs you.’ And I saw this place in my head.”  We loaded the children into her van, stopping only to buy them each a small treat. Then we headed home.

Lucinda spent a day or two in the hospital. For Christmas that year, she crocheted each of us a beautiful, multi-colored afghan, which I still use today, almost forty years later. Its warmth never fails to remind me that we all have dark and sometimes terrifying days. It’s infinitely comforting to be certain that Heaven knows not only our names, but our needs. We do not have to face the dark alone.