The receptionist couldn’t hear the tenant, nor the smoke alarm (unit alarm was cross tied on purpose) so off I ran to her room. The door was still locked, but this is why they used a master key and using mine I entered.
“Lacey? Lacey?!” I kept calling her name as I entered and found her somewhat limp, naked, form sitting on the floor beside her bed. She looked at me, fear filling her face, a terror that told me so much as I had seen that expression many times before. The emergency system was still active, I told the receptionist to call an ambulance stat, and I sat down on the floor beside Lacey.
“What happened?”
“I tried to get out of bed and slid down again. Maura, can you hold me? I’m scared.”
I put my arm around her shoulders.
“Maura, I mean really hold me? I know what’s happening, and I know I’m going to Hell because I can already smell it, and I see a red ring around everything.”
I knew by the look on her face, the sounds in her voice, that yes she was near the end. I lifted her into my lap, and held her close.
“Lacey, I don’t think you are going to Hell.”
Lacey proceeded through gasping breaths to divulge her sins, things she had probably kept inside her for decades came haltingly pouring out. I let her talk and I saw our administrator enter the room with a gasp that Lacey never heard.
“Lacey, be free of your sins, pass on to the lands beyond free of fear and shame, I hold no sin against you.”
She smiled, looked at me, gripped my arm then relaxed as her breathing ceased. I glanced at her clock, 08:47. A few minutes passed and the paramedics arrived. They lifted her from my lap, started to prepare for CPR until I told them she was DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). They laid her on her bed, marked paperwork DOA (Dead On Arrival).
“Maura, did you notice when she passed?”
I gave them the time of death, explained everything except her list of sins, and went through the same questions again with the county police. I ended up spending most of my morning with Lacey as the police can’t leave without a coroner’s release number, and being the person who found her I had chain of custody for her mortal shell. Once the coroner’s release was issued, her funeral home of record was called, and twenty minutes later they arrived. I walked with her to the pick up van, and said my good bye to a dear friend I had known for ten years.
Later that afternoon her family came to gather and secure a few things from her unit, and met me in the administrator’s office. They were overjoyed that I was the one who was there as she always lit up when she talked about me so they knew she was not alone and with a friend. I let them know that in the end she passed peacefully, and relaxed. I didn’t tell them about her terror. Didn’t tell them of her sins. All they needed to know was in the end she passed peacefully.
A few days later I was talking to my Priest and explained what happened. How I heard her sins, and what I told her.
“Maura, you did just fine. You were there, you let her speak, and you passed final unction as should have been. There was no priest there, and your actions are covered in Cannon Law, rest, let her sins pass from your mind and know she is now with God”
That memory will always haunt me even 20 years out, it is just as vivid, and if I smell her perfume the memory returns as if it happened just this morning.
Maura out
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