My prayers and feelings of disbelief were broken by an emergency room attendant who offered us the precious gift of five minutes with Millie. From beneath a morphine fog, she said with a smile, "I guess this is part of my spiritual journey. My struggle has been to give up my need to control. I think somehow I'm learning that tonight ..." That was the last thing we heard from her for five and a half hours.
Millie was taken away to the heart catheterization lab. We knew little about what was happening, but after a couple of hours we were able to get a message to her through a nurse: "Please tell Millie that the whole community has gathered in our prayer room. They're all praying throughout the whole procedure." The nurse reported back that getting that message was the most hopeful point for Millie in a very rugged night.
At about 1:30 a.m. the cardiologist appeared and explained that a major artery leading to Millie's heart had a 90 percent blockage. A blood clot had become lodged there, resulting in the heart attack. He had managed to dissolve the clot, relieving some of the pressure and pain, but the 90 percent blockage remained. Our persistent question, "Is she out of danger yet?" wasn't to be answered affirmatively for a long time.
We were told by her doctors that Millie had been headed for a massive heart attack and that her quick arrival at the hospital had saved her life. We were learning to take things a day at a time. By Wednesday she was somewhat stabilized—though her heart monitor showed her pulse shot up 20 beats when we were allowed in to visit. By Thursday she was passing out copies of Sojourners to her nurses.
Saturday brought the opportunity to see just how awesome and intricate Millie's heart is. The cardiologist offered to show us the film of her heart taken during the Monday night procedure. When Jim and I started to go after chairs for the showing, Dr. Pearle said, "You can probably stand; this isn't exactly Gone With the Wind." Millie wanted to know who forgot the popcorn.
We watched the heart beating—seeing the healthy places and the damaged ones. We each shed a few tears at the moment when the injected dye shot through the artery and the clot was finally dissolved—the moment when the pain was relieved and the heart was receiving blood again through that artery.
I had brought to the hospital the day's pile of cards and notes, and among them was an invitation to the dedication of Timmy McLaughlin, born in our community seven months before. The front of the card quoted Ephesians 3:14-19: " ... that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love ... may be filled with all the fullness of God."
Millie wept as she read the invitation, and then explained, "This was the scripture that was with me last night. I couldn't sleep, and between midnight and 2 o'clock I just prayed. I prayed for the community, my family, and friends. And I wept to know how deeply I love and am loved. And how much this hurting world needs communities of faith, people who are taking the risk to love one another."
She then explained that the doctor had told her that a heart attack is actually the damage done to the heart, and that most of the pain that she had experienced came from heart cells that were dying. Millie said that she had prayed that night that the part of her heart that was dying might be the part that judges, the part that is not quite loving enough.
Her words were a reminder to me that we can often be intolerant of one another, or take each other for granted. We were getting a dramatic reminder of how precious life is and how we are called to love one another with the same care and devotion with which God loves each of us.
Nine days after her heart attack, Millie had double-bypass, open-heart surgery. Members of her Sojourners family and her extended Bender family crowded the waiting room outside the operating room, just as we had crowded into her hospital room the night before, hands clasped over her bed as we gathered around offering prayers and saying together the 23rd Psalm. The surgery lasted five hours.
In the recovery room, Millie's tired and bruised body was hooked up to a respirator, monitors, and IV tubes, which beeped and hissed and dripped and blinked. She looked so vulnerable, and there was a sense of her being totally out of our hands and in God's. She could only communicate with her eyes, which spoke of pain but also determination and love. Jim and I stroked her head, said prayers, and told her how much we loved her. And just before our five minutes were up, her hand slowly moved out from under the sheet that draped her and grasped ours. And we knew everything would be okay.
Her recovery progressed well, and for all of us it was like an experience of resurrection. Millie's heart attack was for our community a reminder of both the strength and fragility of human life. From Millie and the rest of us facing into the possibility of her death, we discovered renewed life and deeper bonds among us. Perhaps the deepest lesson we learned was to be more tolerant and loving of one another, to appreciate the gift that is community.
On the Sunday following Millie's surgery, Psalm 51 appeared on the daily lectionary. We opened our community worship with the words of the psalm, which seemed written as a prayer for Millie and for our life together: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me."
Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared as a Wayfarer column.
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