Laura Parker

Holding the hand of a woman who is literally dying is sobering. 

I just got back from North Carolina where I spent hours with my family sitting beside my grandmother’s bedside in a hospice facility.   And as we spoke about this 84-year-old’s body being in a coma, one of the nurses revealed an interesting fact.  She said that out of all five senses, the sense of hearing is the last to leave in the process of a natural death, such as we were witnessing.   The nurse explained that the body’s organs and senses slowly shut down, but that the ability to hear is typically still present up until the very final breaths are taken.

The ability to hear is the last to go.  And as I spent dragging hours in the quiet of the hospice facility, I kept pondering that physical fact and wondering what the spiritual reality of it was.  Hearing is a receiving sense.  It is the quality of being quiet and listening to what someone else is saying.  It speaks to dependence, to humility, to stillness.    The Bible challenges us to be, ”Quick to listen;  slow to speak and slow to become angry.” (James 1: 19)  God’s word says hearing should be our first priority, and our bodies naturally say its our last connection with earthly life.

And I am asking myself this week:  how well do I listen?  When meeting new people.  To the stories of my children.  To what God may be saying to my heart.  Is my default to listen, or is it to talk?  Is my natural habit to assume I have something humbly to  receive –from God and from others–or is it to assume I always have something to give?   Am I “quick to listen and slow to speak,” or is it typically the other way around?

Yes, I am grateful for my time in the hospice room beside my grandmother and with my family.  I’m thankful for the chance to say goodbye, and I am challenged by the reminder to shut my mouth and open up my ears more.  Because, like it or not, odds are I will be hearing longer than I will be doing anything else.

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