Angel of Mercy

I am the oldest of three children. In 1983, my brother, who was sixteen at the time, was in a really horrible automobile accident. He had to be revived several times on the way to the hospital. Once there, he fell into a coma, and had to be put on life support. It is one of those tragedies in life when young people are seriously injured. You can pray for recovery, but not much else.

I was a waitress while I was in college. He was there in the hospital, of that same, small town. I would go after work to the ICU area where he had he was hooked up on life support systems. I would stay and try to talk to him. It got to where I was there a lot. I knew just about everybody on that floor. After a few days, the nurses started to talk to me. They began to tell me how severe his injuries were. They said that there was really no point in his living because he would never have a normal life again. It was hard because he had always been the baby of the family. My parents were clinging to every hope that he was somehow awake from his coma.

This had gone on over on for over a month. He never revived, or came to, or even acted like he would ever come out of it. Something new came to me. I don’t know what it was, but somehow, I knew what day he was going to die. I knew that it was going to be March 3, 1983, which was creepy, 3–3–83. I also knew that it was going to be around 9 o’clock in the morning. It was actually the first time that I ever had a sense of peace about this whole ordeal. At the age of 22, I had never known anyone to die my entire life. I still have my grandparents living at that time.

I got up that morning and talked to a girlfriend. She thought I had lost my mind. I said, no, I think that this is important, because God knows that somebody has to be able to handle it. I went up to ICU where all my family, and all these people were. His nurse came out and kneeled beside me. She said, “Kim?”

I asked, “What?”

She replied, “What do you want me to do when it happens?”

I said, “Come and get me and my mother.”

About 9 o’clock, it was about 9:03, she came and got us. We went back to his room and we basically watched him have the last few moments of his life. Later on, when we were making all the arrangements, I started looking for this nurse. I could remember her face perfectly, but nobody knew who she was. I said that she was a black woman and I described what she looked like. They said, “At this time we don’t have any black nurses in ICU on this floor.”

I described her to several other people, and nobody knew who she was. I remember she knelt down beside me and she stroked my back and it was really weird. There were probably 50 people in the waiting room and nobody remembered her doing that to me. It was just one of those events that sort of hit me after the burial and all the horrible things were over. I just thought, that’s really weird. I just wonder if that was an angel.

I didn’t tell anybody for a really long time. As the wounds healed, my mother and I were talking about it, and she said that something similar had happened to her. She said that she was overcome with grief before the funeral, that she knelt down beside her bed and tried to pray, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even pray. She felt this hand begin to stroke her back. This went on for probably 20 minutes. She just knew it was an angel. She never turned around. She just kneeled there with her arms on the bed, and this thing, whatever force it was, just comforted her. We have come to think of her as an angel of comfort.

Billye Jones

Excerpt from Angel Power, Angel Love. Other books by Billye are The Essence of Loving and Women Pioneers in 12 Step Recovery.