Yesterday and tomorrow

Our neighbour was taken into hospital on Boxing Day and was found to have cancer.
Not knowing her very well and not knowing the best way to pray for her, I started reading the bible and stopped at Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’ when he was talking about not worrying about tomorrow, because today has enough troubles of its own.
It made me think that maybe the worst part of what she was suffering was not the pain, which was being well controlled while she was in hospital, but the worry about tomorrow – her own tomorrows or possibly the lack of them, and the family’s.
So when I wrote a card for her husband to take in to her, that’s what I ended up writing: rest and get well and don’t worry about tomorrow.
She didn’t have many tomorrows; she died the day before yesterday. Mercifully quick for her; a terrible shock for the family, who had had only a day or two to adjust to the probable outcome of her illness, so recently diagnosed.
One of her daughters said a friend of theirs has been watching his wife die, inch by inch, for six months and admits he wishes she would go because it’s so unbearable, for her and him watching and suffering with her.
Maybe for him too, it’s not today he can’t cope with but the thought of going through more of the same tomorrow.
Today does certainly have enough struggles of its own and God gives enough grace to cope with today but it’s hard to persuade him to worry with us about tomorrow.
The neighbour’s family, facing tomorrow without her, are spending much of their time talking and thinking about yesterday, remembering all the ‘todays’ they spent together.
Her younger daughter said, ‘I was trying to think what my last conversation with Mum was about. What was the last thing I said to her, or she said to me?’
She wanted it to be something meaningful, something she’d always treasure.
‘Then I remembered,’ she said. ‘It was about Johnny Depp!’
Just an ordinary conversation about films and celebrities and the kind of things you discuss in a leisurely way when today is all you face, not thinking that the todays will not be there forever.
Then suddenly the todays stop, there are no tomorrows to spend with her, and the family’s left thinking about things they want to tell her today, and she’s not here today. So they think about things they said yesterday, or wish they’d said yesterday.
And however hard that is, it’s still easier than thinking about tomorrow.
And really, it is enough just to get through today.