A time to be born and a time to die

The following below is what I wrote for my parish's monthly newsletter, and shares my experience in caring for my mother in her last days with us. 

     As I and my siblings were taking care of my mother in her last days, I was reminded of the concept of time that I learned about several years ago. In our lives there are two kinds of time we experience: chronos and kairos. Chronos is the one we are most familiar with, the measure of time using chronometers and clocks. It is the basis of regulation, organization, and recording of events in our lives. Kairos is less familiar and is a qualitative measure of time as the opportune, or right moment. In religious life, I have heard it referred to as spiritual time, when we wait and then just know when the time is right to act on God’s call, or when we have patience waiting for God to act in God’s time.

     My mother had appointments defined by days and hours, but the progression of her cancer was qualitative, and the effects of her treatment happened in their own time. Her medication was to be given to her in defined intervals of time, and we sat at her bedside when we needed to, or she wanted us to. When she was bedridden, we fell into a flowing kairos, where things were done when the need arose, interrupted by scheduled doses of medication. We fell into a rhythm set by the regular ticking of chronos with kairos in between. The days flowed into nights and sleep, and sleep flowed into days of caring for my mother, only interrupted by gathering at the table for dinner.

     This rhythm began to feel like our Eucharist worship service, where prayers and readings came in chronological order with the Holy Spirit moving us when the time was right in the service. Our conversations were like scripture readings, and our interactions with my mother like prayers. We gave her water and medication to soothe her soul as if they were the sacraments of the Body and Blood of Christ. Our care for our mother felt like worship itself, not that we were worshiping her or each other, but instead expressing love, fellowship, and reflection on what was happening, just like during the Eucharist.

    In the end, her death was a mystery like the sacramental “holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your Son,” that we recite in the post-communion prayer. We can pinpoint her death with a day and an hour, but the grief and mourning we experience will come and go when the time is right. They are not measured, nor is our time grieving a defined period. The mystery of life, death, and resurrection is found in kairos, and we must experience and deal with them in God’s kairos time, not in our own chronos time.