The Possibility of Heaven

A YEAR BEFORE her death from ovarian cancer, my 78-year-old mother finally started losing weight. She gave up fatty foods and sweets and went to herbalists who sold her pills that were supposed to regulate her digestion. In addition to all this, she was seeing her primary physician every three months.

The weight flying off seemed like a reward for her good behavior. The only downside was that my mother, who now weighed less than me, was burping all the time, as if there was thunder trapped inside her ever-shrinking body.

At Christmas time, I invited her to come spend the holidays with me and my family in Miami. At first she said no. Her birthday was three days after Christmas and she wanted to spend it at her home in New York.

She changed her mind right before Christmas, and she cooked us a wonderful Christmas dinner, and we took her to one of our favorite Haitian restaurants for her birthday. At her birthday dinner, my two daughters performed a birthday dance for her in the middle of the restaurant, and my usually reserved mother laughed and clapped with joy, a kind of joy we would rarely see again in the months that followed.

I took my mother to see my primary physician right after New Year’s. I could see an alarmed look on the doctor’s face as soon as she touched my mother’s stomach, which in spite of her weight loss was twice its usual size. The doctor, who is also a friend, asked me to touch my mother’s distended belly, and the spot where her fingers led me felt like a well-polished rock. She immediately started writing down a list of tests my mother would need.

Each test led to another, more-complicated test, and slowly both Mom and I realized that we were not on a quest to disprove something bad but on an expedition to identify how bad it was.

I would refer to it as a mass, not a tumor or cancer, until the doctor actually sat my mother down and explained the sizes and the staging and how cancer was not always a mass as we often thought, but how it was sometimes like a blanket over organs or chains that trapped them and how sometimes cancer can’t be cut out, but only minimally reduced.

I thought my mother would burst into tears—I did—but she did not. She listened attentively and nodded. Her face betrayed no trace of fright or panic. She was still.

My mother’s stillness remained throughout her entire journey through cancer. From her first chemo treatment to her last, she showed a depth of faith that I have never witnessed up close before. Her faith was not so much in the doctors or the medicine but in the belief that things would turn out exactly the way they were supposed to. “After all, hadn’t God led me here so you and I can deal with this together?” she’d say.

I have three wonderful and supportive brothers, but I am the oldest child and my mother’s only daughter. For the past 12 years, my mother and I have lived more than 1,000 miles apart. She was working in sweatshops in New York for eight of the first 12 years of my life, while I was living in Haiti with family members. Though she was there for the births of both of my daughters and for every other adult milestone in my life, my mother and I have spent more of our lives apart than together.

“It must be impossible,” one of my brothers said, after Mom’s round of chemo reduced her tumors then ballooned them, “knowing that you are soon going to die.”

My mother did not make it seem impossible. Once I stopped interrupting her mid-sentence after she’d say “When I die ...,” she was able to pick out a dress, a hat, and some gloves to wear in her chosen coffin. She also picked the hymns she wanted us to sing at her funeral service and even gifted my young daughters with white headbands to wear in their hair.

Mom also regularly quoted from scripture she loved. On her funeral prayer card, she wanted 2 Timothy 4:7-8: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day.” Those verses were to be her final witness, her last testimony.

But for the rest of us, for those she was leaving behind, she wanted us to know, and she had me read it out loud many times after the Lord’s Prayer during our evening devotions: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

As of this writing, my mother has only been dead for one month. It is much too early for me to feel comforted. But if I could, I would wrap these words around my body and have them surround me like a cocoon, or even blankets or chains, for the rest of my life.

THE NIGHT BEFORE my mother died, she was lying in a hospital bed in the room she called her own in my house. I hated the fact that the hospital bed had suddenly taken away our ability to lie in bed together and listen to the radio when she couldn’t sleep. So I lay on a sleeping bag on the floor as she tossed and turned all night.

The next morning, she told me to call the hospice nurse and ask for something to calm her down. Before the nurse could give her the pain medication she’d avoided throughout her entire illness, I said, “I love you, Mom.” And she replied in Haitian Creole, “I love you, too.” Mwen renmen w tou.

The nurse then asked if I wanted to call the minister friend who’d been counseling my mother through her illness. While I was on the phone with the minister, the nurse called me in and told me to talk to my mother.

“I love you,” I told her again. “You’re a wonderful mother.”

My mother smiled.

I thought I was imagining the smile, so I asked the nurse, my mother-in-law, the social worker, and the nurse’s assistant who’d all since arrived.

“Is she really smiling?” I asked them all.

“Yes, she’s smiling,” they all confirmed.

Then I asked my mother, “Mommy, can you see heaven?”

I don’t know why I said that, but I realize now that I really wanted an answer. I wanted to know that she was going to be okay, that after all this terrible suffering she was going to be comforted.

Then, while taking her final three deep breaths, my mother smiled her biggest smile since she learned that she was going to die.

That my mother could both hear my voice and see heaven—or the possibility of heaven—at the same time makes the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise seem not just attainable but ultimately possible: Blessed am I, as I mourn, for I shall be comforted.