Mom's last chore....

It was 2006 and Mom had been sick for quite a while. 

My mother, Mary, was a very religious devout Catholic who went to church just about every day. When she couldn't go to church any longer the priest would come to the house and talk to her and give her communion. 

She was 82 years old and in constant pain. She would ask me, "Why doesn't God just take me?"  

I told her that God must still have something more for her to do before he takes her home.  

"What could I possibly still have to do and what could I do in this condition?", my mother would ask. 

On her last trip to the hospital, in the emergency room heading for intensive care, the social worker desperately looked for a priest to come visit my mother because she had asked to see a priest. 

He found a Catholic priest walking down the hall in quite a rush. He seemed agitated, said he was late, said that he didn't have time to go see my mother, he was supposed to be visiting someone else who wasn't even in his room!!  He was a bit angry, looking at his watch, but the social worker convinced him that he needed to go see my mother. He had a very bad attitude but he did go to see her. 

He entered her room and we could see him through a glass partition but we could not hear them talking. 

As we watched them we saw the priest's face change, as he sat and held her hand and he began to smile, even laugh a bit, his whole demeanor changed before our very eyes. 

The priest stayed for almost 45 minutes and when he came out of her room he walked over to us. He apologized for his behavior, he said that he had forgotten why he had become a priest and that this sweet woman had brought him back to his vows and had put him back on the right path. 

Not only had he helped and comforted my mother in her final hours, but she had shown him that he had wandered away from his vocation and he too had been comforted by my mother, sweet Mary. 

After he left I told my mother about the way the priest had acted before seeing her and how she had helped him, that this was the answer to her question.   God had kept her here with us because she needed to help this priest find his way back to his true reason for becoming a priest. 

She was comforted by this and she finally went home to Jesus.