Finding Faith, part 2: The Prayer That Changed Everything
In 1963, she boarded a ship with a suitcase and her 7-year-old in tow and moved her life from Poland to America. I can barely get our two kids through airport security on my own, but that was Grandma for you – unstoppable. I could write an entire book about her life. She was a teenager when the Germans occupied Poland during World War II and then later grew up to be to a self-sufficient, single mom in Chicago.
My grandma loved nothing more on this Earth than her son, her only child, my dad. She would sit and tell you stories about him and how amazing he was as long as you would listen. She would tell you all the good grades he got in school and how good of a dad he was (and is) to his two daughters, my sister and me.
I think that Grandma wanted nothing more than to see her lineage continue in the form of a little baby boy so that she could relive her own son’s baby years. But poor Grandma…her own son gave her two granddaughters, and the two of us continued to pop out great-granddaughters for her. Three in a row, to be exact.
I was 29 when Grandma was nearing the end of her time here with us. Despite being diagnosed with diabetes later in life, she was in pretty good health and lived at home until she was 92. But as these things go, she was in and out of the hospital and various nursing facilities in the last months of her life.
Eventually, my dad made the call to let us know that Grandma was going into hospice, and it was time to say our goodbyes. I asked if anyone would be calling a priest to give my Grandma her last rites. I was far from religious at this point, so I even shocked myself with the question. Last rites are a Catholic ritual where final prayers are said over someone shortly before they die. It sounded like no one had planned to call a priest.
I had long considered myself a non-Catholic and had not abided in any of the church’s rituals, but my Grandma was a devoted Catholic who prayed to the late Pope John Paul II each night. (He was the only Pope in her opinion, given his Polish roots.) I still wasn’t sure what my own beliefs were about God or church, but I nevertheless respected hers. It felt wrong to not fulfill her last rites with her beliefs in mind.
Having long left the church, I surely didn’t have any Catholic priests on speed dial, nor did I feel it necessary to call one. I had seen last rites done once before, so in the words of the Little Red Hen, “I would just do it myself.”
In general, praying always seemed a little silly to me. How could one God listen to billions of prayers? The math just didn’t work out in my head. Not to mention, the things I would pray about seemed trivial compared to what other people were praying for. If there were people dying of cancer, or children starving in Africa, I had no room to pray for anything in my life. God should really focus on those people.
So I simply didn’t pray.
But this was for Grandma. Though I wouldn’t pray for myself, I could pray for her. So on Friday after work, my husband stayed home to watch our 3-year-old daughter, while I went on my own to say goodbye to my Grandma.
That evening, I pulled into the dark parking lot of my Grandma’s nursing facility. I walked into the building, rode the elevator up, and found my Grandma in her room. She was sleeping with her arms folded, wearing an oxygen mask, and breathing calmly. She wasn’t straining and she didn’t look in pain. She looked peaceful. Though she was non-responsive, I said hello and told her how her great-granddaughter was doing that day and how my work was.
And then I did what I had really came there to do.
I gently held her hand and told her “Grandma, I’m going to pray for you now,” and I solemnly prayed my Catholic childhood prayers out loud over her:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee
Blessed are thee among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners
Now and at the hour of our death
Amen
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hollowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven
Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
Amen
And then I made really dumb small talk, because I didn’t know what you were supposed to say to someone you were never going to see again.
I told her we all loved her and that we would see her again soon, and I walked out of her room.
I held my tears in as long as possible, willing the elevator to go faster. I let the first tear fall steps away from the front door and quickly made it to my car to let the rest of them free.
And then something happened that I hadn’t planned to do that night.
I sat in my car in the parking lot of the nursing facility and prayed like I had never prayed before. There were no memorized prayers. There was no “sign of the cross” that came before every prayer of my childhood. There were no fancy or holy words. There were just a lot of tears and a lot of crying out to God with my own words.
I told God everything he already knew about my Grandma. I told him that she’d been through enough in the war, that she’d skirted death on more than a handful of occasions, and that she put her heart and soul into raising her son who then raised me well. I told him that she fought diabetes and lived a healthy life despite it.
And then, I told him that he needed to take her now. No…I begged him to take her right now, and that she didn’t deserve to be lying in a hospital bed in the state that she was in. She had been through enough. It was time for her to go home and that he had to take her.
I had never talked so openly before to God. Never in my life. But I didn’t care. No one but me knew, and who knew if God even listened to prayers from spiritually confused people like me.
When I had no more tears or words left, I wiped my face and caught my breath. I drove back towards home but stopped first at the grocery store. Letting the weight of never seeing my Grandma again sink in, I shopped for our weekly groceries like a melancholy shell of myself and checked out without making direct eye contact with anyone.
As I shuffled my grocery cart towards the automatic doors, my phone rang. It was my Mom.
There was barely a hello… “Hey, did you go see Grandma tonight?” she asked. “Yeah, I was just there…I said goodbye to her. I’m at the grocery store now,” I responded.
“We just got here…” she trailed off, “Grandma died.”
“Seriously?” I responded.
I couldn’t help my response. I’m sure it came out as crass, but my Mom was oblivious to my shock and the tone of my voice.
“Yeah,” she answered. “We just got here, and she was already gone when we walked into her room. Even the nurses hadn’t checked on her in the last 30 minutes. We just found her. Was she alive when you saw her? Was she breathing when you were here?” she asked frantically.
Oh my gosh, yes, Mom, I know what an alive person looks like was what I thought, but I told her, “Yeah. She was breathing peacefully when I was there.”
“Okay, I have to go and talk to the nurses,” and she hung up.
I stood in the parking lot with one hand on my shopping cart and one hand on my phone in complete shock. I wasn’t shocked that my Grandma died. I was ready for that part. I was shocked that it had happened within minutes of me praying for her…shocked that maybe God was listening.
Did God hear me? Is that really a thing?
Of course, you could play the game that still goes through my head today. The one that goes like this: Well, she was going to die that night anyways. Those prayers didn’t matter. It’s just a coincidence that I went there that night. My prayer didn’t change anything about the situation.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I’m not going to tell you what to believe in this story. And Lord knows, I won’t judge you for whatever you do believe. That would be a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, wouldn’t it?
But she could have died the night before…or the next morning…or the afternoon before I got there. I also could have planned to visit her earlier in the week…or the day after she inevitably died. And I could have chosen not to pray for her whether it was in her room or in my car.
But that’s not how the story goes. How it worked out was that I visited my Grandma, I prayed that God would take her home, and then He did.
I wish I could say that was the night that God made perfect sense to me, but that didn’t happen either. I still didn’t understand my own beliefs, but after that night, God would never be the same for me.
WAIT! There’s more! Be sure you read the Epilogue to this post!
Finding Faith: Epilogue - The Prayer That Changed Everything
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Finding Faith, part 1: When Your Childhood Church Misses the Mark
Finding Faith, part 2: The Prayer That Changed Everything
Finding Faith: Epilogue - The Prayer That Changed Everything
