I'll Fly Away

It was the first coherent words that I had heard her speak in 2 days. She was 93 years old and what the nurses call “pleasantly confused”. Her body was tired, her hearing was gone, and dementia had taken most of her mind and left her in a “happy place”.

I walked into her hospital room to find her reaching up with both crippled hands toward the ceiling. Because of her deafness, I was usually able to sneak in and out of her room without her ever noticing me. But this time as I tried to sneak past her bed to hang another IV antibiotic, she turned and looked at me.

“Please let me go” she cried. “They are all waiting for me”.

“Let you go where” I asked. (She may have suddenly become coherent, but she was still deaf)

“Please” she pleaded, “Just untie me and let me go with them”

I suddenly got the feeling that there was someone else in the room with us. I was almost afraid to look up to where she was reaching.

I know she didn’t hear me, but I patted her shoulder and said, “Its OK – They're in no hurry – They will wait for you - You will fly soon enough”.

She put her hands down and went back to her happy place.

There was an old David Crosby and Graham Nash (of Crosby Stills & Nash) song that I remembered from my Hippy days (the 70s) called “Carry Me”. The lyrics were about an old lady in a hospital bed waiting to die. The line that I remembered went something like this:

She lay in white sheets, just waiting to die.
She said “if you would just reach under this bed, and release these weights”
“I could surely fly” “I could surely fly”

Could there really be something to it?

Some glad morning,
When this life is over,
I’ll fly away.

Psalms 90:10 The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
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