"Helpless," by Lois Greene Stone.

How can I ask for a miracle?  Haven’t others posed the plea for loved ones, whispered prayers, silently sobbed for the air to transport to the Almighty?  And I’m too scared to have a request verbalized.

A product of my own experiences: when I was nineteen and a junior in college, I was home for a weekend noticing the quiet love my parents’ shared.  We had company in the house, but their eyes met across the room and without words reminded me how much they truly cherished one another.  Feeling emotional -I was nineteen- I actually sat on my bed with a box of stationery propped on my lap and penned a letter to the Almighty.  My comfortable communication was always in writing.  I was thankful, and requested no harm come to them so they may have long life with such unusual and deep feelings as I had begun to notice that few other couples had.  Life left my father’s body the next year.  

The letter had been saved with my personal things and the pain was acute when I came across it years later in a box with my growing-up art sketches, poems I’d composed.  With as much strength as my hands had, I crumpled it into a small ball not yet ready to throw it out but not wanting to ever read it again.

Yes, I’ve prayed during these many years on earth, but never ‘asked’ for what would be important.  Reciting a psalm isn’t really the same as requesting a miracle.

I don’t want to know that there’s a time to reap/sow/die “A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to ...”  (Ecclesiastes). But I can’t ask for a loved one to have more time; if, in writing, the totally opposite happened with my penned note to the Almighty, why would I think the outcome of a spoken word would be better?

True, the two grandmothers I actually knew buried little children from diseases that aren’t even a problem anymore in most countries.  Wasn’t that almost expected in the times they lived as they had large families?  I was too young to comprehend such loss.  My uncles went to war in the 1940's; they came back with limbs and eyesight, so didn’t all soldiers, to my girlhood innocence?

With my father’s death, I was too absorbed in my own grief to even attempt to understand my mother’s, or my paternal grandmother’s who buried a 41 year old husband when she was in her thirties, and now another son.

There is no ‘dealing’ such as ‘take me and not my daughter’ as people must have screamed to the silence for as long as we’ve recorded days.  I’ve still a purpose for my time left on the earth, but the ‘why’ is huge and overwhelms me and what about her ‘purpose’ – she has led a life of kindness, thoughtfulness, using her knowledge and formal education to better humanity, never ever being too tired or personally ill to help one in need, creating a ‘oneness’ with her husband, just for starters.

I sit in silence five hundred miles away waiting for news; my husband circles my fingers with his own.  Would ‘why’ be answered with ‘why not’?   ‘Incurable’ screams in my head and I’ve no resources for either of us except to share our fears and love.