BREATHE

Part One: Heartbeat for Us

On Thursday, April 10, 2014 far west of the Deep South, the earth pulled the sun to set lengthening shadows of the east face of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Lights twinkled along the El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Long ago, Father "Junipero" Serra trod this coastal trail to establish missions, to spread hope and eternal life in his Lord, Jesus Christ.

Nowadays restaurants, malls, schools, and residences crowd the route between Missions San Francisco de Asîs and Santa Cruz to its south. Seekers of a golden life settle here, like my mother's family and my mother’s many siblings and their families.

My extended family gathered in an upper room of a medical complex along the King’s Highway. Auntie S. nudged her siblings to sing karaoke tunes with her. My uncles’ eyes glistened, rimmed with red.

They surrounded the bed of their 82-year young sibling. Her eyelashes curled above her high cheekbones like Sleeping Beauty. As in the previous ten days, unassisted, her lungs inhaled oxygen given her. She was hungry the first week and ate orally. Somehow without her daily dialysis, her renal system worked! For ten days her lungs evenly inhaled the oxygen provided her..despite a rupture from a cardiac arrest. With her complications, it was too dangerous to mend.

That evening one of sisters, a former nurse noted her breathe hasten and slow down, then hasten. "Cheyne-Stokes respiration," she called it over the phone, this the breath of one in heart failure.

When my aunt was a baby, my grandmother rushed her to the hospital before she was to be christened with the name "Violeta." In anguish she begged, “Dear Lord, please, please save my baby. If you save my daughter, I will name her Milagros; I will do so.” So it came that she was christened “miracles.”

Last time I visited Aunt M. we chatted in a nursing home north of the hospital. She pointed out at the left side of her body and wondered why it would not let her dance. Ten years or so after severe stroke, the Miracle Maker kept Auntie a jovial jokester. She let her daughter and others enhance her mature features with red nail polish and lipstick.

Friday morning I got the call that I knew would come. Just before busy Holy Week the Catholic priests and funeral directors couldn't arrange the wake and memorials until midweek after Easter Sunday.

In the tears of yet another farewell, I knew Fr. Serra's hope hugged me. Auntie Milagros' final miracle is to be alive and well in heaven. Her restored soul dances gorgeous on God's heavenly dance floor, which the Bible says is paved with gold. From there my Lord heartbeats forever joy, my Lord breathes forever health to all who by faith depend on Jesus as Savior and the Lord of perfect miracles.