The sun shone upon her, warming her under the crisp hospital sheets.  If she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could be almost anywhere.  Images washed over her like ocean waves, pulling the sands of time out from under her feet, moving her closer to the ebb and flow of eternity.  “They say your whole life flashes before your eyes,” she whispered to herself.   “They are wrong.”

She settled her head into the cool spot on the pillow.  She was thankful for the sun.  It pulled her mind back to an image of her grandfather, sitting on the enclosed porch of her childhood home.  He was sitting with his back to the brilliant late-May sunlight.  “The sun feels so good on my shoulders,” he told her.  She was young at the time and unfamiliar with the concept of sitting still long enough in one place to acknowledge the sun’s warmth, but she loved her grandfather and took note of his observation.

Calming images of moments past washed over her.  There was no apparent order to them as one flowed into the next, settling upon her heart, validating her life.  She was trying to give a name to what she was feeling inside the shell of her own aged body, but finite words fell short as they always did in such situations.  She settled on tranquil gratitude.  Images of the past danced gently around present thoughts.  She had begun her life in a guilt-ridden world of black and white.  She was ending that life in a peacefully illuminated, sun-warmed pool of swirling lightness.

She tried to think of the first time that the notion of right and wrong had become situational.  Was it when she had decided that loving her boyfriend with her whole body could not possibly be a sin? No, it had gone much farther back than that.  She remembered questioning the concepts of good and evil as early as seven years old.

In catechism class she had been taught that it was a sin if you did not go to church.  She remembered the drawings of the children who sinned in her catechism book.  One child had black speckles upon her heart.  Another child’s heart was as black as coal. A third child–the one with the pure, unblemished heart, smiled a sweet, angelic smile.  She knew she had no hope of ever having a heart as pure as that one, and it made her feel sad inside.

She remembered crying for her best friend who did not go to church.  She wanted her friend to go to Heaven, but she had been taught that one big mortal sin had the power to seal the fate of your soul, closing off the possibility of ever going to Heaven.   Surely, she concluded, God could not be so arbitrary and cruel.  Surely God loved His children more than that.

The irony of those childlike thoughts brought a smile to her lips.  She, herself, hadn’t gone to church in many years.  It took decades of searching, studying, thinking, and reflecting until she finally developed her own belief system.  Heaven awaited her the moment she took her last breath.

More images danced like fog in morning sunlight.  First Communion class each Sunday morning.  Fashioning tissue boxes into prayer cubes.  Stringing homemade rosaries out of plastic beads and knotted yarn.  Stumbling through an explanation of “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” to satisfy the curiosity of twenty-five eight-year-olds.  Reciting the updated version of the “Act of Contrition” in preparation for the sacrament of First Penance:

O My God, I am sorry for my sins.  In choosing to do wrong and in failing to do good, I have sinned against you and your church.  I firmly intend, with the help of  Your Son, to do penance and to sin no more. Amen.

The new version left her cold.

She taught Sunday school for nine years, until her mother’s illness and her own inability to accept  feeling like a fraud had both become too much to bear.

Her mother.

An image of her lying helplessly in bed.  A woman who could not eat, but enjoyed watching cooking shows on the television in her bedroom .  A woman who barely managed to speak in wispy strains, but craved engaging conversation.   A woman who endured constant pain, but refused to cry out.  Her mother had shown her a graceful way to die with strength, dignity, and gentle restraint.

Her mother’s last words to her echoed within her mind as she closed her own eyes—“I am sorry,” she had whispered.  She had spent the rest of her life wondering what her mother meant and what she was sorry for.  After many years of being haunted by them, she was finally able to let those words go once she realized that her mother was sorry for being sick and for putting her daughter through the agony of watching her die slowly, bit by bit.

Now it was her turn.  She worried about her own children. “This really isn’t so bad,” she had told them.  She meant the dying, but she wondered if they understood.

Her children.

Images of walking in the woods with them.  Picking berries and wild mint.  Carrying the bounty home in upturned shirts.   Tea parties afterward.  None of her children went to church either.  In her younger years she had felt like a failure.  She had obviously not instilled the faith in them and they had ultimately rejected it.  But so had she.

She had tried to fit into the comfortable folds of Catholicism until she was forty.  It began to squeeze her and she stopped going.  She studied the myths of Joseph Campbell, went to Buddhist workshops, read about Hinduism, accepted the flow of Chi through her chakras in jujitsu class until her knees gave out,  believed that the American Indians’ concept of the spirit world was closest to the Real Truth,  took great comfort in Tielhard de Chardin’s belief that all people go to Heaven, and curiously through it all, still retained a fierce love of the Blessed Mother, Mary.

She had finally discovered her authentic self.  It didn’t matter that it lay within an aged body under a crisp hospital sheet.  She was a timeless being, contained for a time, waiting for release. She imagined herself smiling.  Or was she really smiling?  The distinction didn’t matter.  As she settled into her final moments, she hoped it would be the last image her children would see.