loss

Thank you for your prayers for James; please pray for his family now. He passed away this morning, but he was not alone. That's all I think about, haunted by the memory of the others who have died downstairs. He didn't collapse in the street or die curled up in a corner somewhere. He was in the best hospital in the country, given every possible medical chance; there was nothing more we could have done. He was cared for until the very end and he died surrounded by love and prayer. I wasn't there, but I have been before, and I know how it is here.

And still it seems so wrong. I think I say this every single time, but this is not what we all sign up for when we come to Mercy Ships. We think we're coming to watch cleft lips be stitched back together, to see crooked feet straightened and blind eyes given sight. Nowhere in the orientation packet does it say anything about how, sometimes, they die.

It's jarring, the disconnect. Last night I went down to D Ward to get the keys for the pharmacy, and a little girl with an as-yet-unrepaired cleft lip lifted up her hands to me. She wound her skinny arms around my neck and planted a series of sloppy wet kisses on my cheeks, and right behind her was the door to the ICU where James was dying and it just seemed so unreal.

So please keep praying for his family. It rained all night, and it's still raining this morning, so I don't know how the roads will be when they try to take him home. Strange, to have to think about that, too. At home it's all so simple; you call the funeral home, and they take care of it. Things are messier here. We're more involved, more a part of our patients' lives than is considered really proper in the 'real world.'

I think it's how Jesus would have wanted it. I look into the Gospels and I see Him weeping outside the tomb of a man He was about to raise from the dead, fully present in the moment, sharing in the grief of his friends. And I think of the ones who stood vigil around James' bed this morning, present in his last moments, and I know that this is the way it should be.

We're not on this earth to live our own lives, untouched by what goes on around us. If that's the example we were to follow, Jesus would have lived his thirty-some years out in a monastery. He didn't. He lived in community with the world; He got dirty and He got hurt. Some days it felt like too much, but always compassion moved Him to give more. He loved the unlovable, had parties with sinners and wept with those who mourned.

This is the way it should be.