Another Bedside Visit

Montgomery Duncan’s mother had died in her sleep. Slipped away without saying goodbye, unexpected and devastatingly final. Like any mother and son worthy of the names, much was left unsaid and unfinished. Their relationship had been strong and stable but their last conversation had been an argument. But he had no time to mourn properly because his father and the love of his mother’s life was now 87 and without her for the first time in 65 years. Edward Eugene Duncan had left Gladstone in 1943 on a Chesapeake and Ohio troop-train headed for San Francisco and then the South Pacific to fight the Japanese. His train chugged slowly past Blue Hill where a 13 year old Elizabeth Taylor sat on the steps and watched the billows of smoke rising from the engine disappearing into the morning mist, thinking about who might be on the train. She had a dream which had convinced her that she was going to meet and marry a man who rode past Blue Hill on that train one day. Three years later on the first day of her senior year in high school she discovered that a tall black haired older boy, back from the war, had been assigned the locker next to hers. They were both almost instantly smitten. Their decision to get married was a wildly unpopular one with practically everyone in the Taylor household. Edward was the son of share croppers and unworthy of a young girl from a family that possessed 700 acres of land. Despite their disapproval, Elizabeth and Edward were married at the Courthouse with only Elizabeth’s sister Rosemary representing the bride’s family. 

All of the Taylor family misgivings about Edward had eventually been forgotten when the couple started having children. By the time Montgomery had arrived, the fourth and last of the brood, all had been forgiven. The truth was that it was difficult to find fault with Edward. He was a pleasant man, strong and dependable, not afraid of hard work and a whiz with a rifle. He made Elizabeth happy. None of them could deny that. Eventually, Lizzy’s happiness and Edward’s quick smile won the day.

But when she passed away without warning, Montgomery simply couldn’t imagine how his father was going to manage without her. In sixty plus years of marriage they had spent not one single night apart. He would be lost without her, totally useless around the house, and impossibly lonely. As he had expected, things didn’t go well. His health rapidly declined and almost two years later to the day, Edward and Elizabeth were reunited in heaven. At least that’s what they both believed. Firmly and unequivocally. Montgomery’s parents were dead serious about their Christian faith, its teachings informing all aspects of their lives, guiding their decisions, commanding them to be better people, more loving and kind, more forgiving and generous than others thought they should be. “Lizzy,” friends would say, “You don’t have enough money to be giving it away to every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along. Be reasonable!!” Her answer had always been some version of, “Well, maybe Tom, Dick and Harry need it more than I do!”

Eighteen months after her death, Montgomery brought his father some doughnuts one morning for breakfast, hoping the sight of sweets would brighten his day. He found him reading the paper in his recliner, his face sagging under the weight of loss and loneliness. He managed a smile when he saw his son walk in but it was a weak effort, not the over the top exaggerated one he usually managed to conjure up when one of his children came for a visit.

“How you feeling this morning, Pop?”

“Fit as a fiddle,” he replied, his stock answer. Everyday of his life he had been fit as a fiddle to anyone who bothered to ask.

         But something was wrong. Montgomery had learned to read his father’s moods, could see through his superficial declarations that everything was wonderful. Edward Duncan lived in mortal fear of becoming a burden to his children, hated the thought that they might be worried about him. So, he declared himself fit as a fiddle and hoped for no follow up questions. But this morning after a couple doughnuts Montgomery persisted.

“Pop, you don’t look like your self today. You have a rough night?”

He folded up his paper and placed it on the table beside his chair, laid his head back and closed his eyes. “I don’t sleep well some nights.”

Montgomery knew enough to not interrupt his father on the rare occasions when he offered up any information about his condition, no matter how vague. He listened quietly, hoping for something more specific. 

“Most nights I fall right asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. But then I wake up a few hours later and can’t get back to sleep.”

Montgomery noticed for the first time that his father’s eyes were red and puffier than usual. Had he been crying?

“That what happened last night?” Montgomery, leading the witness.

Edward folded his hands together in his lap and kept his eyes shut, preferring not to look at his son as he talked. “But, last night was different...”

Montgomery had always had a hard time figuring out his father. He was a man of great contradictions. He was powerfully built but as gentle as a lamb. He could be frequently eloquent but opted for silence, preferring to listen to others talk. He loved hard physical labor and had the powerful, gnarled, vice grip hands to prove it, but was as well read as any man he had ever known. Suddenly he was in the mood to talk.

“You know how your mother was. Remember how she seemed to know about things before they happened, that confounding clairvoyance of hers?”

Montgomery smiled and nodded.

“I’m not sure I ever told you kids about the time...this was before you and Diane were born. Allen and Gail were little, not more than five or six. We lived over on the south side and we would travel a lot back and forth between there and Blue Hill. We must have made the trip at least a hundred times. Well, one Saturday morning we were headed up the country about twenty minutes outside of Midlothian when all of a sudden your mother said, ‘Edward! Edward! Stop the car, pull over!!’ Well, it scared me half to death. I thought maybe she was sick and needed to throw up or something. But no, she was pointing at this house up on a hill. There was a long driveway lined with magnolia trees and a nice brick two story house with a big fancy set of steps out front. ‘That house!! I’ve been in that house.’ Well, I started laughing out loud, ‘Lizzy,’ I said, ‘We have driven past this house a hundred times in the past three years. Unless you drove out here without me or visited it when you were a child, I can assure you that you have never been in that house. You know how I know that? First of all, before you married me you had never left Buckingham County, and second of all, you don’t drive!’ But she was insistent. ‘Edward, I had a dream last night that I was in that house. I can see it as plain as day. There’s a beautiful porcelain pitcher sitting on a half circle table underneath a gorgeous gold-framed mirror right when you come in the front door on the right. Then a huge library to the left with a fireplace and leather books all the way to the ceiling all around. Oh, and a piano in the corner.’ She went on and on describing the inside of the house. Finally I said, ‘Well, fine. But why did you want to pull off the highway?’ I knew I was in trouble when she answered, ‘because I need to see for myself. I am going to go up there and ask them if I can look at their house!’ You know your mother, there wasn’t a one in a million chance that I was going to talk her out of such a foolish idea, so the next thing I know, there we are standing on this stranger’s front porch ringing the doorbell. Luckily the woman who answered the door couldn’t have been nicer and invited us in straight away. Within five minutes, the two of them were as thick as thieves! Then I noticed the library and the leather books and the piano. I turned and saw the pitcher and the mirror. Son, it was exactly as your mother had described it! It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.”

As fascinating as his story was, Montgomery had a feeling that there was something else going on with his father, something that he was working up his nerve to share. Then he noticed the tears in his eyes.

“Mother was like that, of course. She had that strange relationship with the world around her. She saw things that nobody else saw, heard things, felt things that nobody else did.”

Montgomery nodded his head in agreement. None of this was a revelation. Everyone in the family knew that Elizabeth was...different. They had all preferred to describe it as her being, sensitive to the spiritual world, carefully avoiding any suggestion that this was anything other than a finely tuned and thoroughly Christian sensitivity. His father continued...

“Well, last night when I woke up, your mother was standing at the foot of my bed over by the window. At first she was staring out the window, but then she turned and smiled at me. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just laid there and smiled back. She didn’t say anything either.  She just glanced out the window then back at me. She was wearing a white nightgown and she looked just like she looked when we were first married...”

At this point, he couldn’t continue. Emotion overcame him and he cried openly, something that his son had never before seen. He got up and rushed to his side. “Oh Pop, why are you crying? It sounds like it was beautiful.”

“I’m crying because I miss her!” Edward seemed frustrated that his son would ask such a ridiculous question. Didn’t anyone understand the depths of his grief, the pain of his loneliness? “But I’m also crying because I don’t think it’s right, Montgomery. I’m a Christian man. I’m not supposed to believe in ghosts.”

Montgomery didn’t understand enough of the theological basis for such a statement and didn’t care to, and resisted the urge to say something snarky like, “What about the Holy Ghost?” Instead, in one of his finer moments as a son, managed to say, “Pop. Tell me something. When you saw Mom smiling at you from the window, how did it make you feel? Were you frightened? Afraid?”

“No. I was never once afraid. I felt warm all over. I was so happy to see her face again. She was so beautiful...”

“Well, how can that be a bad thing? How can that be from the devil? Seems to me that if you took comfort from her presence, maybe she was sent by God. Instead of thinking of her as a ghost, maybe you should think of her as an angel.”

It had been a invaluable gift that the son had given the father...permission to believe in the goodness of God, permission to believe that he hadn’t suddenly become a heretic, and permission to take comfort where he found it.

As Montgomery was driving home it occurred to him that when his mother had visited him bedside the night before his surgery, she had been wearing a white nightgown, and he hadn’t even recognized her at first, her hair had been so black and her face so alive with the light of youth.