After Father Myles and Father Cooney left Sacred Heart to advance in their vocations, I was feeling somewhat bereft -orphaned, even. These feelings came as a surprise to me - I did not feel that these feelings were at all appropriate for someone in my position as an Elder of a Protestant church, so I pushed them down.
I also had a great deal of work to do with helping my husband and with bringing our family out of financial chaos, and between these two things, although I continued to serve Knox, and I continued to attend Mass every Sunday, I stopped developing any sort of personal friendships or attending any Bible studies or midweek activities,although I did continue the committee work that I had been doing at Knox, and I did not stop teaching Sunday School.
In addition to these stresses, my grandmother became ill and was being shuffled between hospitals, care centres, and finally to a nursing home, and causing us all great anxiety. So for the next few years I was occupied primarily with these problems.
In May of 2000, I was offered an excellent job that paid extremely well compared to what we had become used to living on. The peace of mind of knowing that our financial difficulties were coming to an end was like a gift from God. Although we will never be "wealthy", we will also not starve. We were able to pay off our debts, buy a car for me to use, adopt a second World Vision foster child, and put aside some money for savings.
My increased freedom of movement meant that I was able to help a friend of mine find a job, and do a number of other things that had been sitting on my concience for quite a while. I was even able to visit my grandmother more frequently.
We were very worried about her. She had lost the ability to walk, and was becoming delusional, even a little paranoid. In mid-August of 2000, she was hospitalized after taking a fall and fracturing her hip. She spent many weeks in the hospital, and was finally released on October 6.
Because of the procedures that had been done, combined with her advanced age, (she was 88 years old) she had lost the use of her voice, and was unable to eat any kind of solid food. In addition to these problems, she had no idea where she was most of the time - she was completely disoriented.
We thought that she was going to recover once she got to the nursing home, and was surrounded by her familiar things. However, once she was there, her condition immediately began to deteriorate, and it became clear within a very few days that she was not going to survive. She began to refuse both food and water, preferring simply to sleep.
She slept for nearly two weeks, and gave herself up to the Lord on Monday, October 23, 2000, at approximately 9:00 am, just as Beth, her personal nurse, was about to open the Bible and read to her from her daily readings.
The day before, we had had Lorraine, one of the ministers at Knox, come to pray with us and with Grandma. When I looked into her face, I knew that whatever we did or said meant nothing to her. I felt that she was afraid of meeting Jesus, and that nothing that we were doing was reassuring her or helping her.
I could not help thinking of a Catholic friend of mine who had died amid the chanting of Rosaries and the Prayers for the Sick, and felt a little jealous. The words of Oscar Wilde came to me at that moment - "It is better to die a Catholic." Looking back later, I also realized in a very profound way that what one's relatives think of one at the end of one's life is so completely unimportant, compared to what God thinks of one, and also, I suddenly realized that the reason I had been avoiding converting to the Catholic Church was because of what my parents and brother and husband would think of me
