You Will Be My First Embrace

A heartfelt response to the e-mail sent to me by a friend regarding the afternoon he spent with his daughter the day before she died from pancreatic cancer and the final conversation and prayer he had with his daughter on the day she died, Christmas Eve, December 24th, 2010. A friend of ours, Paula Rogers and her husband were staying over at our house for a choir festival in town and so I asked her to record the song, but we did not have much time to practice it. The words are: Take me to the shady garden To the spot so dear to me Let me feel the breeze See the flowers Hear the birds And hear the murmur of the breeze in the leaves of the trees Put me in the old gray hammock Hung between the pine trees Let me say goodbye like this I can barely feel the pain God is good! God's been good to me... By tonight I'll be asleep. Please remember, life goes on, I will wait for you that morning You will be my first embrace! Yes, YOU will be my first embrace. Excerpts from the email: By the middle on the third week, due to God's great goodness, we began to experience a marked change. In my own case, first, it was the memory of Sylvia's insistence, during the four months since she informed us, with astonishing bravery, the terminal nature of her ailment, that she wanted us to be strong and continue without her. "Dad and Mom," she said, "no matter what God decides to do with me, and although I may no longer be with you, I want you to remember that life goes on." A great consolation was represented by the experiences that we lived during the last 36 hours of our dear daughter's life. On Thursday, December 23, she awoke fairly well, to the point of asking us to take her to a shady garden we have on the side of our house. There she spent four hours lying in a hammock stretched between two trees, feeling the warm breeze, listening to the birds and the murmur of the breeze in the leaves of the trees. At one point I was mowing the lawn, and every few moments I would stop and ask her how she was feeling, and her response was always, "I am feeling well, Daddy, God is good." What I did not know was that this was her farewell to that spot so dear to her. That evening, when Dr. K came by to check on Sylvia, he indicated she would need hospitalization due to two things that were worsening—a worsening cough that had been plaguing Sylvia for several days, and the impossibility of channeling a vein. RPA Hospital is two blocks from our house, so the following morning, Gerardo, who watched over her with great tenderness and extraordinary affection, arranged for her admission, and at noon he bathed and dressed her and took her in a wheelchair to the hospital. He wanted to take her that way so she could see the trees and flowers and the deep blue sky. On that short walk Gerardo and Sylvia were accompanied by Sylvia's mom and Gerardo's sister. That day we all felt a certain finality to everything that was happening. Sylvia was admitted and settled in her room, and by mid-afternoon she had lost consciousness. Surrounded by three doctors who struggled to revive her, she quietly died at 7.40 p.m. Our tears flowed, but our sadness mingled with feelings of deep gratitude to God. Sylvia, in the words of her favorite hymn, lived that which she had sung so many times: "life is tiring here on this side, and my arms can no longer paddle; exhausted and wounded through many days, I need to find the harbor of rest." Where? Beyond the river there is a place for me, beyond the river there is peace. "Beyond the river I will have endless happiness; and with my Jesus I shall dwell in a beautiful land of dreams, a place where joy is complete. On that day, the encounter with the redeemed will show that it was worth fighting and winning for." On that Friday morning, in what was my last conversation with Sylvia, though I didn't know it, I said to her, "My sweet Sylvia, I want you to promise me something, that on the day of the resurrection you grant me the privilege of being the first to embrace you. Can you do that?" Her affirmative reply was very, very moving for me. With tears in my eyes, I took her hand and prayed what was going to be my last prayer with her.