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11
DEATHWATCH
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Her long, jet-blackhair, once a
thing of beauty, had become a matted mess. It had been months since she was
able to brush it herself, and weeks since she had been able to feel the brush
against her scalp when anyone else brushed it for her. She could not even
hold up her own head as the brush was applied.
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It was a dying moment for Nita as
she called for a hairdresser to cut her hair short. She had loved wearing it
past her shoulders - now it had become just one more victim of the paralysis.
With every snip of the scissors, Nita hurt again. As the disease progressed
even the lovely little niceties of life were being cut away.
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If anyone could lift her spirits
on such dark days, it was Michaele, Colton's youngest son. He was Nita's
favourite. The most affectionate of the bunch, he was fond of sitting on her
bed, fidgeting and pinching and tickling her, delightedly exploring her areas
of numbness. Nita would have been horrified if it had been anyone else, but
Michaele was too sweet to be anything but engaging.
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Tragically, it was Michaele who
discovered that Nita had lost all feeling in her face. Nita had known it for
some time - when the nurses washed her she felt nothing - and she was
especially discouraged by this, for it left her practically a hunk of
lifeless leather, with no sense of touch anywhere on her body. She was so
deflated by the discovery that she had not even reported this final lapse to
the doctors.
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Her vocal cords too fell into
disrepair, and her voice disintegrated
into a whisper. In a matter of days it vanished altogether. Colton
resolutely learned to read her lips, and he served as her interpreter when
others were in the room. Nita's Buddhist attendant had to learn lip-reading
also. Yet every turn for the worse seemed to strengthen the bond of love
between the preacher and the patient.
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It
became evident that Nita was dying - evident to everyone, including Nita.
She could see, as her mother and others kissed her good-bye at the end of
each visit, that they were not sure they would ever again see her alive. Mrs.
Edwards was asking more frequently and more frantically these days if there
was anyone Nita wanted to see - her brother Ted perhaps? Nita had always said
no, don't make Ted fly in all the way from England. But now she finally
relented. She wanted to see him at least once more.
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The Singapore relatives planned to
make their pilgrimage at Christmas time, and Nita's uncle from Zambia was
coming in then too. Mrs. Edwards hoped secretly they would not be too late.
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Heart
problems began as the paralysis progressed. Each attack
knocked Nita unconscious, and as she came to she could hear "Hail
Mary's" and groanings and smell the antiseptic odours and see the masks
and caps and ugly green gowns all shuffling about. One day she woke groggily
in the intensive care observation cell, completely alone, surrounded by walls
of shiny machines - one monitoring her pulse, another her blood pressure,
another her lung capacity. There was a single metal door with a tiny window.
In it she saw an open eye, someone whose job it was to see if she had died
yet.
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Nita pressed her eyes shut. It was
like a gruesome movie, "The Deathwatch," and she was its star.
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She had trusted the doctors. They
had failed. She had prayed for God to heal her. He had not. In her secret
moments, she had even prayed to die. That didn't work either. She had kept up
a cool facade, but all the while, inside, her heart was breaking.
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"Behold,
I have refined thee, but not with silver," she read in Isaiah 48:10.
"I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction."
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But why? What did God want of her?
What was He doing with her life?
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The physical problems accumulated,
the emotional struggles multiplied, and finally the spiritual question
consumed her. One day, alone with Colton, the wall began to crack, and Nita
let herself weep openly. It was the first time.
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Colton ached for her, and repeated
words of Scripture, and prayed with her, as he had done so often.
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"Oh, Colton," Nita
mouthed, "why don't you just stop praying for me?"
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"No," he replied,
adamant. "I'm not going to let go until God tells you what He intends to
do with your life."
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A subtle change occurred in Nita
that day. Her prayer life experienced a fundamental change.
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"I'm not asking for healing
any more," she told the Lord each day. "I'm not asking to be taken
home to heaven. Just tell me what you created me for, and do anything you
like with me."
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She doggedly repeated the prayer,
day after day, night after night.
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"If your plan is to let me
die, glory to God," she often added, her fear of death completely gone.
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"If your plan is to let me
lie here like a vegetable for fifty years, glory to God. I don't like it, but
I'll live for you right in this bed. Just tell me what you want me to do, why
you created me, what purpose you intended when you formed me in the womb.
What is your plan for me?"
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Almost by the hour, Nita picked up
spiritual momentum, even as she physically wasted away. She had renewed her
childhood covenant with the Lord - she would give her last drop of blood, her
last earthly breath, to her Heavenly Father.
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When she felt herself doubting
that God would ever answer her, she repeated the last verse of Isaiah 40 as a counter-argument:
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"But
they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up
with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk,
and not faint."
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And for Nita, that promise -
mounting up, running, and walking - made it worth the wait, even if it would
only be a figure of speech.
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It was a strange change, after so
many months of demanding a miracle of healing. Colton and Suzanne, her
mother, and hundreds of Christians all over the world, were demanding her
healing, and in the swirling midst of all this, she was asking only for a
word not action.
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And daily, Nita's spiritual
pipeline was being cleared. The earthly longings she had felt for so long
were being swept away. The obsessions of her teen years, the self-indulgent
prayers, the earmarks of immaturity began to be dissolved within her by a
divine touch. Every day, she could sense in her spirit that her spiritual
pipeline was coming a little closer to a total cleansing - a little closer to
the day when it could freely transport God's answer to her heart.
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The challenges continued, however,
on every level - physical, emotional, spiritual. As Nita read II Corinthians
4:8-10, she saw herself in the words:
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"We
are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in
despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;
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"Always bearing about in the
body the dying of the Lord Jesus."
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The advance of death indeed
appeared to continue in Nita's body. Her
eye muscles begun to be affected by the disease, and double vision soon
made it hard for her to keep her eyes open when the room filled with
visitors. The tear ducts failed, and the corners of her eyes leaked salty
tears continuously, stinging her eyelids. She was embarrassed. Her visitors
were bound to see her tears and sympathize more profusely than ever.
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With her vocal cords dead, she
could no longer create the lightweight atmosphere that she had always worked
for - cracking jokes and teasing her visitors, to make them laugh and feel at
ease. The constant discharge from her eyes made her nervous as well. She knew
her face was wet, but she couldn't feel the tears.
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And now her mirror was worthless.
She could no longer see as far as the parking lot. Even the ceiling slats and
bolts were beyond her visual reach. To
read the Bible she had to have the page held an inch from her eyeballs.
The strain was crushing.
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Her eyes would do her one final
disservice. She had not seen herself in a mirror for many weeks. One day, as
she was being unloaded off the cart, she caught a glimpse of herself. A
glimpse was all she needed. The picture instantly locked into her memory. She
was sickened. She knew she had been pretty - not gorgeous - but she had been
satisfied. The girl in the mirror was a wench. Her hair was cut short around
her puffy face, badly bloated by massive doses of cortisone. Under her eyes
hung great, sunken, dark bags. From her neck down, her skeleton was evident.
Her athletic muscle tone had given way to a distended abdomen after months of
artificial digestives and a liquid diet. Her hands were all knuckles, her
fingers so grossly deformed that they looked like bird claws.
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It was this awful creature that
Sandy Koelmeyer found in Ward 13.
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11 DEATHWATCH
