According to Betty White’s assistant who was with her when she passed away on New Year’s Eve less than a month before her 100th birthday, the last word she spoke was, “Allen!” Allen Ludden and Betty White were married in 1963 and remained happily married until his death in 1981. When she was asked if she would fall in love again and perhaps marry, she smartly replied “Once you have had the best, who needs the rest?”
As a priest, I have been present several times when someone I anointed passed away. I have had some of the most revealing and illuminating conversations with people in their last hours. When they have been able to speak, they often say out loud the names of persons who had died before them. I heard my own father on the day he died mention several of our deceased family members.
Some doctors suggest that people are sometimes delirious at death, their brains flooded with chemicals. I suppose this is true in some cases, but I have never witnessed it in almost 23 years of priesthood. The death of my best friend, Michael, in December 1993 was a cataclysmic event in my life and it would be many years before numbness and self-imposed denial would finally go away when I visited his grave last year.
I have come to believe God allowed me the privilege to witness the quiet and peaceful way I have seen most people die so that I could finally believe that Michael had a peaceful death and that he knew I would become a priest, even though I did not know it yet. This past year has helped me come to terms with the most difficult experience of my 66-year life.
Curiously, it was Betty White’s saying “Allen!” as she passed from this life that affirmed, if not confirmed, what I have been privileged to see. Heaven awaits us, and the people who matter to us the most are ready to greet us. None of us knows what this new year 2022 is going to bring us. We can choose to believe that whatever happens, Heaven and its indescribably glorious joys await us. May this new year be a blessing for all of us!
Fr. Gary
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