The Anniversary Prayer | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: The Anniversary Prayer | Previous Challenge Entry
By LeslieJean Anderson
02/03/16
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The nurse was taking my father’s pulse when I ran back to his bedside after making a quick phone call. He’d been in a coma for days after an accident, and he was failing fast.

“His heart is fluttering,” she said to me.

“What does that mean?” I asked as I took my place in a chair by his bedside. But she didn’t answer. She just shook her head and started to leave the room.

“Wait,” I said, jumping to my feet, my gaze fixed on his face. “He’s changing color! What…”

But she left me standing there holding my eighty-five year old father’s unresponsive hand, transfixed by the sudden change in his complexion. Then I realized his breathing was no more.

“Dad!” I wailed.

The nurse reappeared with a doctor. My vision blurred and I could not see what they were doing. I think I saw a stethoscope. I heard the doctor mutter something to the nurse. She scurried out, scribbling on a chart.

“He’s gone,” said the doctor as he placed a hand on my shoulder. “Call your husband.”

Fifteen minutes later my husband and I were clinging to each other by my father’s bedside, weeping like abandoned children. We were both orphans now. An hour went by. Then another hour. I couldn’t stop crying. The floor was littered with tissues. My husband made me drink some bottled water.

Finally the doctor returned and spoke to my husband. We couldn’t stay any longer. Arrangements had to be made.

“His journey is almost over,” whispered my husband as he gently pulled me up from my chair. “He has just a few more miles to travel.” So we signed some papers and left.

A week later, my father’s earthly journey ended for good as we gently placed him next to my mother at the cemetery. Then, all that was left of them was their incredible legacy of world-wide travel. Their life together had taken them to exotic places all over the globe, and I had shared some of it. When they weren’t traveling, they were playing golf.

But I worried about the destination of Dad’s soul. We had insisted that he be given the last rites, even though he was unconscious in the hospital. I felt some comfort as the priest put the sign of the cross on his forehead. My husband and I claimed him for Christ, and prayed for his salvation. Heaven was our goal and we wanted him with us when we got there.

Somehow an entire year crawled by after that terrible time. As the anniversary of my father’s death approached, I began to pray that God would allow something to happen to reassure me that he was ok. Just something that would ease our sense of loss and worry about his soul’s journey after death. Some kind of sign that he was with God. I didn’t expect anything to actually happen, but it did.

Dad had lived on a golf course. One year to the day of his death, a wild golf ball drove a hole through one of his windows, rolling to a stop in the middle of the Chinese rug in the living room. When my husband and I arrived later that day with packing boxes, that golf ball was waiting for us like some kind of messenger. Later it seemed just like Dad, making a grand entrance.

A note from the guilty golfer was taped to the broken window. It was signed by one of my father’s old golfing buddies.

“I am so sorry,” he stammered when we called him. “I don’t know what happened! I’ve hit that shot dozens of times, but this time the ball just flew off my driver like it had a mind of its own!”

When we told him what day it was, he muttered something about Dad’s mischievous streak. “He’s probably getting even with me for beating him the last time we played.”

We didn’t give him his ball back. We saved that golf ball like it was a postcard from across the Universe.

After that, my heart was at ease. I was satisfied that my prayer had in fact been answered. Dad was a traveler in Heaven now, his sense of humor intact. And when we are all together again someday, we’ll have a good laugh about that anniversary golf ball with a mind of its own.

732 words This is a true story.

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