I have been going to the hospice facility every day now for about ten days to see D from my congregation. She has a grown daughter and son, and they are both by her side, taking turns patting her forehead, holding her hand, giving her rootbeer flavored ice chips (D adores rootbeer), asking the nurse's aides to check her tailbone for the redness that would indicate the beginning of a compression sore, and holding tissues over her mouth when she coughs, to catch the fluids that are drowning her.

Her body, once strong and capable, is reduced to a pile of bones surrounded by skin. I used to think that super-models were "skin and bones". I don't think I'll ever make that mistake again. Arm flesh that used to demand plus sized sleeves now drips from bones so fragile they look as if they might snap if I touched them.

But touch is the only reliable sense that D has left. The others have failed her. She cannot see--only percieve light and dark. She can recognize the voices of those she loves, but cannot really participate in the conversations going on in the room. The only thing she can taste is rootbeer. Thank goodness she cannot smell the catheter bag hanging at her bedside--that would make her ballistic!

I've watched her body change dramatically over the past ten days. I've felt the bones in her hand getting sharper, as what little flesh there was on them was used by her own body to keep her vital organs functioning.

At first, the changes in her body were fascinating, then frightening. Now I am trying to understand them as part of the process she must go through in these final hours on earth. She has requested that her children not schedule a traditional casket viewing. She does not want her friends to remember her this way.

When I left today to come home, after I prayed and kissed her on the forehead, I asked her to do whatever she needed to do. Then her daughter gave D permission to "go home to her new house."

This afternoon I am waiting by the phone...