The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos
Published by Ballantine Books
Years ago, when my sweet grandmother lay on her deathbed in a room in a house her husband and brothers had built after the war, in rare moments of lucidity, she wondered aloud about the man sitting in the kitchen, waiting for her. He had simply shown up and was biding his time. No one else, of course, could see him, yet that made little difference. My grandmother was straddling two worlds, and in that moment, she could engage with both.
In her book, The In-Between, Hadley Vlahos makes this observation, practically speaking, with each patient she serves. She is, after all, a hospice nurse who has borne witness to the passing from this life to the next more times than most anyone of us. Her patients, she writes, are visited by long-gone members of their family: spouses, parents, siblings, children, even friends. They stand at the foot of the bed, by the bedroom door. One patient even played hide and seek with a daughter who had drowned when she was two. The encounters are all matter-of-fact. No fear. No surprise. The loved one has merely returned. What cause is there for shock?
The careful observer understands that the stories of our lives are populated by the individuals who come in and out of our orbit. We are imprinted by them and they by us, and as we get older, we begin to realize that the population of those who have gone on before us is remarkably large. Select a distant memory and ask yourself who is still with us. Recall a lesson learned. Does the sun still shine on the one who imparted it? The answers to these questions will vary, of course, according to each one of us. Our backgrounds are as unique as our fingerprints, but even so, we can all understand loss, and time is ultimately inescapable. The clock ticks. There is a final chapter to each of our stories.
Or so the world would have us believe.
Vlahos does well enough in approaching these visitation phenomena objectively, which is to say absent a Christian worldview. She is a professional and does not foist her beliefs on others. What’s more, she recognizes her inability to make an irreproachable conclusion. Her answer? To simply allow others to come to their own determination. Fair enough. But do these visitations suggest more, even demand more in terms of what we should accept about the ultimate trajectory of our story? Across the board, this seems to be the case. With almost all of her patients, the story continues albeit out of sight of those still wrapped in a mortal coil. This is true for both nonbelievers and believers – a universal experience, to be sure.
Jesus says in John 5:24 that “whoever hears my words and believes him who sent me has eternal life.” The operative words here is “has” -- present tense, now, right at this moment. I cannot speak to the experiences had by nonbelievers upon their deaths. I know the grace of God is boundless and that His love pours forth to everybody. I can only offer a thought about the death of believers and the ones God permits to lovingly escort them to the great beyond. Our death is meant to be holy, and because holiness and love go hand-in-hand, it makes sense to me that those standing in the in-between would have a familiar face to greet them, making the passing seamless, peaceful – the hard, scary work already done on a cross. If we abide in faith, therefore, forever begins in an instant, which means that our story goes on and on. My grandmother knew this to be true. She mentioned something about seeing butterflies then died as the sun was coming up over York Hill. The pasture was radiant, my mother tells me. I wish I had been there with her but know she nor my grandmother were not alone.
https://www.amazon.com/Between-Unforgettable-Encounters-During-Moments/dp/059349993X
