How can flying be like dying? How can the picture of flying serve as inspiration for one sister’s thoughts on the approaching death of her only sister. Here’s the story:

When we called hospice to help us walk Maggie home, the house grew quiet except for the sound in our heads punctuated by the whir of an oxygen tank in the hall outside her room. I felt the need to write something profound to share at the rapidly approaching service. After all, the past four years have been nothing if not profound. Life altering. The approach of eternity always is. My mind was frozen. Torn between a desire to share and the need to jealously guard the final days or hours. To memorize her face. Capture her breath. Hold her hand. While the page still glowed with ghosts of deleted first lines, my phone binged with a new text from Molly across the house. I read it. “I wrote this last night when I couldn’t sleep.” The right words. Molly gave us her blessing to share at the funeral, so we had this printed on the program. I’m sharing here for those who may have missed it.  Melissa 8/21/2018

I’m lying in bed, listening to the machine pumping oxygen from where it sits in the hallway through a tube and into Maggie’s room. It was set up last night (Saturday), and I’ll fall asleep to the sound of it pumping each night until she’s gone. When Maggie was diagnosed four and a half years ago, we didn’t know if or how quickly this time would come. This time where all we can do is sit and listen to an oxygen machine pumping until it isn’t needed anymore.

We’ve done anything but wait up until now. The first three years I was balancing finishing my degree with maintaining some semblance of order in the house, with a little help from Max and Meg, while Mom, Mags and sometimes Dad traveled for various treatments and appointments. All four of us traveled to New York to fulfill Maggie’s Make-A-Wish. We made multiple pilgrimages to Disney (World and Land). We watched JJ Watt and the rest of the Texans hit home-runs in the Astrodome at his Charity Classic and heard the 5 Browns play pieces written for entire orchestras on their concert grands. Plenty of adventures packed into four years we weren’t supposed to have.

During the snowstorm in December, while all of Hattiesburg was outside playing in the snow or curled up by the fire, I was driving through said snowstorm, Maggie and our cousin Jenna in the back seat praying that I would avoid skidding off the road (as many cars we passed had done) and make it to Nashville safely. Why would we be stupid enough to drive through all of that? We had concert tickets to see Jon McLaughlin play a special Christmas show that night. (If you’ve never heard Jon’s music before, listen to his recording of Angels We Have Heard on High. I promise, you’d drive through a blizzard to hear it live, too.)

Long story short, we made it safely to the concert in time. The opening act was Cody Fry, another incredibly talented musician whose music we love. He played several songs, all beautiful, but I was just waiting. There was one song on his last album that I couldn’t wait for him to play. He finally introduced it explaining, “This is a song I wrote about a guy who jumped off a cliff because he thought he heard God tell him to.” The song is called “Flying” and I highly recommend watching it below. Cody began to sing, and, one verse in, Maggie leaned over to me and said “This is what worship should be like all the time.”

I’ve thought about that night many times since, and I’ve come to realize Mags wasn’t talking about the style of the song, or how beautiful the music was or how incredible Cody’s voice was. Flying wasn’t even strictly a worship song. It was just the story of a guy who trusted God enough to jump when he heard God say jump. As he’s falling, he starts to question whether or not he really heard God speak, or if he had enough faith for God to catch him. But then he is overtaken by a sense of peace and the realization that the wind is flying past him in the opposite direction.

That’s what Maggie meant by worship. Sharing the story of where God has led you, and that He is faithful even when it feels like your faith is too small. Sharing that even if you have moments of doubt along the way, He will be faithful to not only catch you, but to lift you up to a place better than what you thought possible.

And that’s what Maggie has been doing the past four and a half years. Worshipping. And that’s what God has been doing. Catching her and lifting her up.

So while the time for medical appointments and special trips has come to an end, and we’ve entered this time of waiting, the time for worshiping hasn’t.

We’re just entering a different verse of the song. And right now that verse happens to sound like an oxygen machine.

Molly Hanberry – 7/30/2018

For links to the full funeral, read here

To listen to Cody Fry’s song Flying: