UPSET & AWESTRUCK 09/07/00

Subj: Upset and awestruck
Date: Thu Sep 7 23:35:34 EDT 2000

When John & Elsa got home from their weekly communications coaching session, John headed up to his studio and Elsa settled down on the couch to talk with me. As we talked, she immediately noticed that I was on edge and that I had what she described as a frailness of speech. It had been an unusual, a not-exactly-distressing-but-sort-of-it-was evening.

This morning and this afternoon, my mind went time and again to a friend I have not hobnobbed with for many years. It was not that we avoided each other; our paths just did not cross as they once did. I found myself thinking about her so much, I actually called her daughter to hear how she is and left a message letting her know how much I wanted to get news of her mother.

This evening, after John and Elsa had left, the phone rang. It was a daughter-of-my-heart, Leslie Adams, asking for Elsa. I explained to her that she and John were out for the evening and would she like me to have Elsa call her back.

No, she replied, she was on duty (she is a nurse) and unreachable for in-coming calls. "Actually, it was you I wanted to talk to," she said. Then she asked if I knew a certain person.

It was the very friend I had called about that afternoon.

She was at the nursing home and, Leslie broke it to me, she was dying. I was in shock, over my friend's condition but even more over the entire turn of events. We talked for a bit, then she rang off.

It still has me feeling shaken. My behavior earlier today was unlike me, first to be so concerned and then to actually call and make a bother of myself. Then, to get a call from someone with no reason to think that I know her patient.

I am heading to bed in awe and wonder, with prayers for my friend and gratitude for the opportunity to think about her and hold her in my heart while she is still with us. A gift from the Lord is how it feels. This dear woman was so kind to me during some of my darkest days. I am grateful to be aware and to direct loving thoughts to her and her family as she moves through what Leslie described as "transition," toward the brightest and most beautiful Light.

Love to my dear friends from a less upset and still awed
~ Grammie Kay ~

reposted in sweet memory of its author, KATHARINE REYNOLDS LOCKHART, on by her scribe/daughter, Elsa Lockhart Murphy aka Deev, on the 05/14 centenary of Grammie Kay's birth