First published in the Baptist Times 17 June 2011
My oldest friend just died - not the longest-known, but the oldest. Almost twice my age and half my size, she was a powerhouse in disguise.
She could make strong men quake, including the market trader who unwisely called her 'love' and offered her a free pegbag, and her former minister who tried to jolly her out of telling him where he'd gone wrong. He was the one who suggested I went to pray with her. Many had gone before, he warned. 'You might get a flea in your ear.' She was troubled and thought her faith was gone.
I expected a fearsome person and found a frightened one: I had a mental image of a small boat in a high storm. As she and her husband talked, there seemed to be conflict. Their post-First World War generation prescribed stoicism and suffering in silence, interpreted by Christians as casting your cares on the Lord but privately, stoically, silently. They were desperate to talk, but felt wrong. This was not going to be a quick prayer and all go home.
'Well?' she said, when she had briefly described their lives.
'You haven't lost your faith,' I said, 'but you've lost your nerve.'
'What makes you say that?' She had a laser-sharp gaze, like a kestrel, I thought.
'I do fear,' I explained. 'My speciality.'
'Well, what's to be done about it? People come in and pray and then go away again!'
'Could be you've chewed them up and spat them out?' I suggested.
The kestrel looked outraged. Her husband chuckled. Then she gave way to a sudden splutter of laughter and I thought, we're going to get on.
Sometimes she phoned and I would go round and pray and she would rest in the spirit, zapped out in the rocking chair. The first time, I had a moment's doubt and rang later to check she was all right.
'Of course! You didn't leave me alone; you left me to God.'
When her husband died, she was unwell. She phoned early one morning.
'I'm having trouble.'
'Is it your breathing?'
'No, it's my laptop. Why can't I send this email?'
She loathed inactivity but believed in waiting on the Lord. In a long lifetime of churchgoing, she withdrew from membership twice, both times after much agonising. The second time was in her last few months, for reasons that sounded trivial.
'So what's your real reason?' I asked.
She went silent and tears came to her eyes. 'They're not waiting on the Lord,' she said. 'They're forcing his hand. It's not a godly way of going about things.'
She came to us at Christmas. My husband, initially reluctant to share his Christmas Day, was won over by her relentless determination to coax a performance out of the cheap plastic yoyo from her cracker.
'It won't work,' he told her. 'It's rubbish.'
'It will,' she said and it did, by the end of the day.
When we drove her home, she said, 'This will be my last Christmas.'
At Easter, she said, 'I'm on the fast track now.'
One of her carers found her blue round the lips and called an ambulance.
In hospital, fighting for breath, she was fighting the doctors to let her go home to die. I thought it unlikely she'd last the night, and decided to stay. I was about to text my husband, when she lifted her oxygen mask and said very clearly, looking me in the eye. 'Thank you. Thank you. I want you to go home now.' Next morning she was home, in eternity.
She asked me once why Catholics prayed for people after they died. 'Shall you pray for me when I die? What for?'
I didn't know at the time, but that day I found myself asking that heaven for her might include a new dress (not Oxfam), fresh strawberries and lemon drizzle cake - or whatever their heavenly equivalent might be. Enjoy, Dora.
