Christmas Memories

Bonnie’s Christmas Angel moves her and sings her to her heavenly home

By Mary Jean Wethington (Special to The Criterion)

It was a snowy white Christmas day, and my elderly mother was slowly returning from the effects of yet another mini-stroke. The week before, both Momma and I had selected names from the Giving Tree of a nearby retirement center, promising to bring our gifts to the residents on Christmas.

Keeping this commitment, I communicated to Momma that I would deliver her selected name’s gift and mine for the both of us. Because of the cold and snow, I had donned my full-length, white, hooded winter coat and white boots. Momma said I looked like her angel.

As I approached the retirement center’s entrance, I received a strange look from the receptionist as I asked for the room number for my resident’s name—Bonnie B.

I delivered Momma’s gift first and received a grateful response from the dear, elderly woman, Ruth. Then I went to drop off Bonnie’s gift. As I entered the darkened room, the gaily wrapped gift fell away from my hands in total dismay as I encountered Bonnie. There, lying upon a thin mattress on the floor, like a throw-away doll, was a young woman, frail and comatose.

Her dull blue eyes pulled me down beside her, and my massive white coat surrounded her small frame. No wrapped gift would be received by this young woman. Thrown into a deep compassion, unknown ever before by me in this manner, all I could do was begin to pray beside Bonnie on that floor. Then slowly and softly, I began to sing to her the beautiful “Silent Night”—“sleep in heavenly peace.”

For one brief moment, she turned her dull blue eyes toward me, and a light flickered within their depths. Bonnie was the one who gifted me, blessed me and expanded my faith, creating a sacred space that only sung prayer can enter and touch.

One word breathed forth from her lips—“angel.”

Promising Bonnie I would return to visit her the next day, I left her side, more deeply moved by this Christmas encounter than ever before. When I came the next day to try to see her, I was told that Bonnie had died exactly one hour after our Christmas visit. Stunned, I again simply turned to prayer and asked God what this all meant.

Three years later at this same retirement center, I became spiritual care coordinator there for 12 years—all because of a beautiful soul named Bonnie B. That Christmas, our newborn king allowed me, as my gift to both the Christ Child and Bonnie, to be the angel who sang her home.
 

(Mary Jean Wethington is a member of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Parish in Bright.) †