On her way to the emergency room, Millie Davidson called me to come right away.

“I don’t know what happened,” she cried through the phone. “Al was fine at home this morning. He was in his recliner in the front room, lying in the sun. You know where I mean. Then I called from the kitchen and he didn’t answer. The ambulance is bringing him in now.”

I met her at the hospital, and we hugged in the hallway. The rescue squad brought her husband in and we stood back to let them by. As they passed, Millie said, “Al. Al? Oh God, he’s not waking up.”

We went in and stood at the bedside. After a year of accompanying them through Al’s cancer treatment, this time felt different. While the nurses worked, Millie and I took turns grasping the neck of a white plastic bag labeled PATIENT BELONGINGS, in which Al’s leisurewear and sneakers waited in opaque silence. I managed it while they took his blood and connected the monitors, so she could hold his hand. Millie carried it when he was taken for a CT scan. I held it again when she went to the restroom. She returned and took it back, muttering “Damn bag,” and we both laughed, a relief.

We were escorted to the Family Room and we sat down on a mauve couch. The damn bag slumped on the floor and exhaled. The doctor sat down across from us and asked me, “Are you the priest?” When I nodded, she leaned toward Millie in earnest.

“OK. The truth is, Mrs. Davidson, it doesn’t look good. I think it’s very likely your husband is going to die soon. I’m so sorry.”

At this, Millie sucked in air as if being pulled under water. The doctor took her hands and I put an arm around her shoulder to keep her from drowning in the news.

Al died the next day. After their adult children came to say goodbye, his breathing slowed down, got quieter, then stopped. That was it. No gasping, no great sighs, no struggle. The most peaceful death they could have hoped for, his wife said.

The exhausted family needed to go home. I told Millie that I would stay with Al’s body until the funeral home arrived; it would be a privilege.

After we prayed and they all left, I sat down and looked at Al. It was late afternoon. Outside the window beyond his bed, pine trees waved their needled boughs over his dead body like wailing women. He still wore his gray and blue hospital gown, with a sheet and blanket covering his body to mid chest. Released from the task of expression, his face settled and smoothed into its final stillness, which only amplified the movement of the trees outside.  A young nurse came in but then halted abruptly.

“I’m just waiting until the funeral home comes,” I said.

“Well, I need to do post-mortem care,” she said.

“Of course. I can step out while you take care of that.”

When I got the OK to return, Al had been tucked into a white plastic bag that zipped up in the front, all the way to the crown of his head. I could still make out his facial profile where his nose and chin pressed against the plastic.

“Sometimes they take a while to get here,” the nurse said. I sensed she wanted this woman in the black shirt and white collar to go away.

“I’m fine, thank you. I’ll just sit here,” I smiled at her, taking up my post again. “He was a retired priest, you know. I told his wife I would stay.”

“Suit yourself,” she said and swooshed out, shutting the door.

I looked back at the man who had ministered to people for decades, first in the parish, then as a hospital chaplain. In the short time I’d known him, Al had taught me a lot about the pastoring life. He was big on clergy self-care. In the midst of his illness, he counseled me that getting adequate rest and exercise was not a luxury for a priest. “Don’t feel guilty. It’s part of your job. How else can you take care of people?”

Dusk fell around us. I took up my soft white leather-bound Book of Common Prayer. Running my fingers along the satin ribbon marker, I spoke the words from a gilt-edged page:

Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,
we sing your praises, O God:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

I felt a contented companionship, sitting there with Al. As I gazed on his still form, my shoulders relaxed, and my breathing slowed. Someone pushed a cart past the room. Women’s laughter trailed off down the hall. The elevator bell dinged, the doors opened and closed. I drifted off in the chair.

When the nurse looked in on me, I had been asleep for more than an hour.

“Any word from the funeral home?” I straightened up, rubbing my face.

“Not yet,” she said.

They almost never took this long. I went out to the clerk at the nurses’ station to ask if she had heard anything. It turned out that no one had called the funeral home.

When the veteran undertaker and his young apprentice arrived twenty minutes later in their requisite dark suits, even they looked a little surprised by my presence. But they didn’t try to get rid of me. They let me help.

We moved the shrouded body onto the gurney. They covered the plastic-encased Al with a maroon velour blanket. The apprentice opened the door and craned his neck to look up and down the hall before he waved us on. We rolled our hidden load across the blue carpet to the supply elevators, and I told them about my experience with the nurse.

“They don’t like people to see dead bodies,” the older man said. “When we go to the nursing homes, they close all the doors on the hall before we can remove a body. And they always make us use the supply elevators.”

I imagined the click, click, click of latches closing one after the other along a long hallway, like prison cell doors in a lockdown.

We commiserated across the deceased’s abdomen about the death-phobic state of the nation. The elevator doors parted, and we wheeled Al down a dim basement corridor, past the laboratory where technicians checked someone else’s blood; past the laundry where industrial washers bleached sheets for the living; past central supply where stacks of bedpans and sterile IV kits stood ready for fluid duty.

Al sailed past all of that as we headed for the entrance marked Deliveries Only, where a gray minivan waited like a getaway car. The undertakers used the hydraulic lift to lower the gurney to the asphalt, then slid Al’s white-clad body onto rollers mounted in the shadowy interior of the vehicle. As they pulled away, I sent an air Cross of blessing soaring over the edge of the loading dock.

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