The Last Thing You Said

I came across this quote today. “Speak to people in a way that if they died the next day you’d be satisfied with the last thing you said to them.” It brought to mind a memory from the 1990s, when I was a Girl Scout leader.

We met in the evening (which was a very unusual time for a scout meeting but met our schedules very well.) We met in a church in a very bad part of town, just past the very nice historic district where I lived. The church hired the custodian to stay and watch the cars (so they didn’t get broken into) and to make sure we were safe, coming and going from the building. It was very kind of them to do that for us.

From day one, I told parents, don’t be late picking up your child. If you can’t come, arrange with one of the other parents to pick up your child. If you come late and the windows are dark, and the doors are locked up, you can be assured your child is safe and with me…wherever it is I was going.

This was before cell phones, and you couldn’t call into the church at night (although we could make outgoing calls, it was tricky to do so; we had to make them from the emergency phone in the elevator.) So, I told parents, if you are late, your child will be safe, but you’ll need track me down. I may be at the grocery. I may be at the drug store. I may be at a restaurant eating my dinner. I worked really long hours and sitting waiting for half an hour or more was not something I was willing to do. I set a very firm boundary about this.

My troop parents were excellent about accepting my boundary. I didn’t want to be left alone with one child in an unsafe neighborhood at night. I had things I needed to do before bedtime. If I didn’t do them after the meeting, they didn’t get done.

One of the girls in my troop was being raised by her grandfather. After a meeting one night, he wasn’t there to pick her up. He was always the first one there. He didn’t send anyone to pick her up, and he didn’t ask any of the parents to drop her off at his house. I called the house, but no one answered. The answering machine came on, but I didn’t leave a message.

I was a bit worried, but I was more angry. I ended up doing what I promised I wasn’t going to do. The custodian was ready to leave, and I wasn’t willing to stay there by myself with one child, in a dark church in a very unsafe neighborhood.

I started to go to the emergency phone in the elevator and call and leave an angry message on his answering machine. “How dare you not show-up and leave me in such a predicament. Why didn’t you get another parent to pick up your child if you were going to be late?” I thought about it, but I didn’t leave that message.

Thank goodness, I didn’t make that call or leave that message.

I finally decided to drive the girl to her grandfather’s house, which was on the way to my house, just to see if his car was there. I decided if he wasn’t there, I was going to drop the girl off at my assistant leader’s house (she had two children in the same age group, and they were in the same group of friends. Because I was a single person living alone, taking a child to my home was just not a great idea.)

I drove to the grandfather’s house, and saw his car in the driveway. I pulled up behind it. There were lights on inside. At first, that made me angry, thinking he had just neglected to come get his granddaughter. How inconsiderate, I thought.

The girl started to get out to run up to the door, but I got the strangest feeling, and I told her to stay put. It was then I noticed the front door was slightly ajar. I told her to stay in the car and lock the doors.

I slowly and quietly crept up to the slightly open door and peeked in. Then I swung the door open as I realized the grandfather was laying on the floor just inside, gasping for air, and clutching at his chest. He had been on his way to the car when he had a heart attack!

Long story short, I called 9-1-1, he went to the hospital in an ambulance, while I followed with the granddaughter. A relative was called to get the girl from the hospital. The grandfather recovered, and, in the end, all was well.

But just imagine if I had left that angry message on his answering machine. I often wonder what stopped me from doing just that.

How awful I would have felt knowing my last words to him would have been angry accusatory ones. (Remember that back then, answering machines recorded the message aloud – everyone in the room could hear the message as it was left. He would have heard it, while laying there having a heart attack.) Those could have been the last words he ever heard.

Imagine if I hadn’t broken my cardinal rule of taking kids with me wherever I was going if the parent was late, and drove to his house instead. If I hadn’t, he probably would have died on that living room floor while I did my grocery shopping for the week or ran by the drugstore.

I sometimes think God and the universe whispers to us. Sometimes we hear words, but mostly, we feel a strange disquieting feeling. We just instinctively know there is something we are supposed to do, or something we are not supposed to do.

It often takes time for us to figure out what that something is. The hard part is following those whispers, even when we aren’t exactly sure what they are saying to us.

The part that is even harder yet, is never leaving harsh or angry words between us, because we never know when those words will be last that one or the other will ever speak.