Seeing Jesus

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Jesus looked at Philly like a father satisfied with his son. “I will be leaving, but not right away,” he said with a slightly ironic emphasis on the world “leaving.”

  Philly started the car, attempting only briefly to discern the source of that irony, but not asking about it. Instead, Philly focused on the prospect of waking Grandma from her coma.

  “You tried to get me to do this the last time we were there,” Philly said.

  “Yes,” Jesus said. “But you weren’t ready to do your part yet.”

  Philly nodded, stopping at a light and idly watching a woman pushing a stroller over the crosswalk in front of them.

  “Do you know her and the baby?” He nodded toward the pedestrians.

  Jesus smiled, watching the small, dark skinned woman maneuver the big blue stroller up the slight ramp on the other side of the street. “Yes, of course. But she doesn’t know me,” he said, his face clouding slightly at this last note.

  Philly watched this reaction on Jesus’s face and then heard a honk behind him. The light had changed. He pressed the accelerator and surged across the intersection apologetically.

  Returning to his question, Philly said, “You must go through that a lot, people that you know and don’t recognize you.” He tried to imagine the emotional weight of such persistent rejection.

  “I don’t suffer from the same pain of rejection that you do,” Jesus said, to both the spoken question and the unspoken thought. “For you, the question always arises, ‘am I being rejected because I am unlovable?’ And that is the source of the pain you feel at emotional or relational rejection. For me, however, the pain of her rejection is the pain of her loneliness, her fear and her sadness, not mine.” He looked over at Philly. “I feel genuine emotional anguish, but never for my own sake. I have all that I will ever need, but so many people have none of what they really need. I’m content, yet I grieve the profound lack of contentment of most of the people that I love.”

  Jesus looked out the windshield again. “You won’t fully understand these things, Philly. But it’s good for you to give it a try, now and then.”

  Philly accepted this reassurance and challenge, like a Christmas sweater from a dear relative. The discomfort of the fit did nothing to dampen the warmth of the love with which it was given.

  Within fifteen minutes, Philly pulled his car into the hospital parking lot. The westward trailing sun tinted the clear, spring day slightly orange, as evening approached. For a confused moment Philly considered whether it was a good idea to visit Grandma around supper, forgetting that her only nourishment came through plastic tubes.

  Jesus put his hand on Philly’s back briefly as he accompanied him toward the hospital entryway. He recognized the stream of panic that had passed through Philly’s head and tranquilized that panic into anticipation and expectation, with the gentle touch of his hand.

  Entering the shady garage for staff, Philly noticed a tall, slim nurse heading toward the automatic sliding doors ahead of him. In the wide marble lobby, the mix of artificial and natural light accentuated the curves of the nurse’s body, which captured Philly’s attention. He watched her walking ahead of him for a few seconds and then slowed suddenly, nearly stopping to smack himself in the forehead.

  “What am I doing?” he thought. “I’ll ruin everything, thinking like that.”

  Jesus looked at Philly sympathetically. Philly glanced at him and noted that the disappointment he expected made no appearance there on that loving face. Philly furrowed his brow.

  Jesus answered Philly’s questioning look with a question of his own. “Did you think that you were going to heal your grandma by your holiness?”

  There was that word, “holy,” again. Philly returned to his drive toward Grandma’s room, but more slowly and absent the feminine distraction.

  “Of course not,” he said internally. “I don’t even know what ‘holy’ really means.”

  “Holy means you’re sold out completely, all in.”

  This explanation baffled Philly for its incongruity with the way he perceived religious people using the word. Instead of solving that riddle, however, Philly returned to focusing on the mission at hand.

  In the elevator, Philly saw his reflection in each of the shiny metal walls and doors, alongside Jesus’s own multiple images. Philly marveled that he not only saw Jesus, but saw his reflection, oddly enamored with this phenomenon.

  Exiting the elevator on Grandma’s floor, Philly hesitated a second, when he saw his parents leaving her room. Jesus saw that hesitation and said, “Don’t worry, they’re not staying. We’ll have Grandma all to ourselves.”

  Once again, Philly surfed forward on the swell of Jesus’s encouragement. He smiled at his ma and dad as they approached. Dad looked happy to see him, Ma looked concerned. She noted how strangely Philly smiled at them, in a way that he never did before his hallucinations began. In contrast, Dad mirrored Philly’s unprecedented friendliness.

  “How ya doin’ Philly?” Dad said, taking his offered hand and patting his shoulder. Thus, unusual physical contact followed that new friendliness.

  Philly, so used to Jesus’s presence, felt a momentary discomfort that Ma and Dad didn’t greet his friend, though a percentage of his mind remained aware that they couldn’t see Jesus. Then he turned his thoughts to Grandma.

  Philly said, “Any change in her condition?”

  Ma shook her head, donning her mournful mask. “She’s the same, not really there, not even like she was sleeping.” She nearly moaned.

  Philly nodded, toying with the juxtaposition between Ma’s moroseness and his own hope that Grandma was going to wake up in a few minutes. He actually had to suppress a giggle. He congratulated himself for resisting that urge, avoiding the horror his ma would have hung on him had he surrendered. Once again Jesus put a hand on Philly’s back, to reconnect him to the real task ahead of them.

  Philly stiffly hugged his ma and said, “Okay, well, you two have a good evening. It was good to see you both.”

  One brief, awkward dance later, Philly had extricated himself from his ma, waved goodbye to his dad and headed for Grandma’s room. As he approached the door, a nurse brushed past him. Not until she had excused herself and made half a dozen paces from the room, did Philly recognize the nurse he had ogled in the lobby. Jesus’s touch on his back assuaged Philly’s need to return to his penitent posture, throwing his energy instead into pressing forward into Grandma’s hospital room.

  The bed next to her lay empty, the sheets stripped and the patient apparently checked out. Jesus was right; they would have the room to themselves. In spite of this empirical observation, Philly felt a presence in the room beyond his grandma’s, impressing him with a sense that he needed to push hard to reach his destination. He glanced at Jesus, but saw no indication that he felt any resistance. Still, Philly knew something leaned into him, attempting to dissuade his intentions.

  “Don’t worry. We can do this and no one can stop us,” Jesus said.

  Philly welcomed the confirmation that his sense of opposition didn’t originate in his imagination, but welcomed more the victorious confidence in Jesus’s voice. Even as his mind locked onto that confidence, his body drifted slightly beyond his control, like a boat given too much slack from its anchor. Jesus circled the bed and stood next to Grandma’s head, to her left. Philly edged into the space opposite him, to her right.

  As Jesus reached out, Philly followed, allowing the magnetic pull of Jesus’s desire to ease him forward. They stood there, across from each other, looking down at Grandma, silent, for a moment, hands gently on her forehead. Then Jesus instructed Philly.

  “You say, ‘Wake up, Grandma.’”

  Philly looked at Jesus and thanked God that no one was there to see him.

  Clearing his throat, in case verbal clarity mattered, Philly said, “Grandma, wake up.”

  For a second or two, nothing seemed to happen and then Grandma’s color visibly darkened, from pale paper to warm skin. A
chill ran down Philly’s spine, at the sight of this transformation. Yet she didn’t move.

  He looked at Jesus. “What now?”

  “Just wait.”

  Philly looked at Grandma and then back at Jesus. When he looked back at Grandma again, her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling and blinking. At first, Philly’s brain flailed about for an explanation. “Why did Grandma look so strange?” Then he realized that he wasn’t used to her opening her eyes in the hospital bed, nor was he used to seeing her without her glasses.

  Grandma turned and looked at Jesus and smiled. She turned and looked at Philly and smiled again. Then she started to laugh.

  Philly’s mind darted to whether Grandma could see Jesus. She seemed to look right at him and she did that before she looked at Philly. Then he started to laugh too, though his laughter carried a tint of hysteria that Grandma’s didn’t. Philly started to remove his hands from Grandma’s head, but Jesus nodded once, to indicate not to pull away yet. Philly returned his left hand to Grandma’s head and again he saw her color improve a shade. It occurred to him then that healing someone in a coma could be somewhat complicated. Not only did they have to deal with the original cause of the coma, but they also had to account for the effects of being incapacitated for a prolonged period. She hadn’t eaten anything for many days now, for starters.

  Grandma slowly latched onto Philly’s right hand with her own and then looked back at Jesus, trying to reach his hand as well. When she held both of their hands she closed her eyes and seemed to have completed some sort of power circuit, for she vibrated slightly there between them. Philly thought of Father Tim, but the vibrations for Grandma were less violent, apparently soothing her in some way.

  “Grandma?” Philly said, when the vibration stopped.

  She looked up at him, her smile turned more playful and vibrant. No longer the passive patient, she now looked the part of the spry little grandma that Philly had known all his life.

  “You’re awake,” was all Philly could manage to add.

  Grandma nodded. “Yes, I’m awake,” she said faintly, the tubes in her nose hindering her slightly. “How long was I asleep?”

  Philly looked at Jesus, who allowed him to answer.

  “You were in a coma for about a week,” Philly explained.

  “Oh,” she said, mildly surprised. “I knew it was something.”

  She looked around at the plain walls of the hospital room, none of the flowers and balloons one expects in the room of a wide awake patient. She looked at Jesus for a few moments. “How is it that you’re here like this?” she said.

  Again Jesus looked at Philly to answer the question.

  “The first time I visited you here, I talked to you. And I didn’t really know what to say, so I just said how much I missed you and then I asked you to pray for me while you’re away, so I wouldn’t miss you so much,” he said, his voice quaking slightly. “The next day, I met Jesus on the bus, on the way to work, and he told me that you did pray for me and he’s been with me while you were in the coma. But no one else could see him, until now.” Philly’s voice trailed at the end, as he approached that unanswered oddity.

  Grandma turned from Philly to Jesus again. She studied his face with a sunny smile in her eyes and on her lips. “I remember praying now,” she said. “It was so good of you to come to Philly like that. Thank you.”

  Jesus smiled warmly, enveloping Grandma with his open and loving countenance. “You asked for something that I just couldn’t refuse.”

  She knew that Jesus meant that he wanted to be with Philly and had welcomed the open gate for him to step through. She relished the revelation that Philly had joined her communion with her eternal lover and friend. No words rose high enough to support those feelings, so she just smiled at them both.

  When she grew tired of rolling her head left and right to look from one to the other, she decided to sit up. Releasing their hands she pushed against the sheets as Philly looked for the bed controls. He found no remote, but discovered buttons on the side of the bed. He managed to raise the head of the bed eventually, taking care to leave slack in all the tubes, as Jesus held Grandma up.

  Just as the bed stopped and they had arranged her pillows, that same tall, attractive nurse poked her head in the door. She hung there for a moment and then stepped into the room.

  “Mrs. Thompson? How are you feeling?” she said, trying to roll her professionalism up over the emotional shock of seeing Grandma awake.

  Philly turned and stared at the nurse as she entered the room, seeing her face for the first time. His disorientation doubled and tripled from the unfamiliar situation in which this visit had begun, to one compounded by the presence of this particular nurse. Add all that to the knowledge that the nurse was now the only person in the room who couldn’t see all of the others, and what to say totally eluded him.

  Grandma spoke up. “I’m feeling quite well, in fact. But I am really very hungry. Am I allowed to eat?”

  The nurse, whose name tag said, “Theresa,” nodded, looking from Grandma to Philly, with a question in her eyes, her mouth slightly open as if that question was stuck there.

  Philly, still dislocated from his own thoughts, said, “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  Jesus laughed.

  Theresa addressed Philly. “When did she wake up?”

  Glad for the clarity of a direct question, Philly said, “A couple of minutes before you looked in.”

  Theresa still looked at the pair, as if waiting for more of an explanation.

  Jesus said, “Why don’t you tell her?”

  “Well, what would you like to eat?” Theresa asked Grandma, oblivious to the remark by Jesus.

  Grandma looked at Jesus, then at Philly and then answered Theresa. “I could eat anything you’re willing to bring me. Soup and crackers would be nice.”

  “You mind instant soup?” Theresa said, relieved to have concrete actions to distract her from her bewilderment.

  “That would be fine. I’m so hungry, it will taste wonderful, I’m sure.”

  “Tell her,” Jesus said again.

  Grandma looked at him again and then over to Philly. This maneuver bothered Theresa who, of course, didn’t see Jesus.

  Philly cleared his throat. “Well, you might be wondering how Grandma suddenly woke up,” he said.

  Theresa stopped her busy little movements around the room and focused on Philly. “Yes, I’m really surprised to see her awake,” she said, letting at least one guard down.

  “Well, I sort of prayed for her to get well. I mean I sort of woke her up.” He hesitated, wondering how to say it without sounding like he was bragging. Philly looked at Jesus and then said simply, “Jesus did it.”

  An observant medical professional, Theresa noted that glance across the bed to the empty space on the other side and added it to Grandma’s similar motion. Along with Philly’s explanation, she considered the extraordinary situation and the odd behavior of the two people in the room that she could see. From all this, Theresa concluded, “That sounds like a miracle to me.”

  Philly smiled and looked at Grandma.

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Grandma said. “Jesus and my grandson came to wake me up. And it’s a miracle.” She laughed, and the sound of it evoked giggling children at play.

  Everyone else in the room laughed, as well.

  Theresa approached Grandma and took her hand, holding it for a moment as she looked into the older woman’s cheerful eyes. “That’s wonderful. Well, I’m glad to meet you, finally,” she said, looking also at Philly and very nearly glancing at Jesus.

  “She believes,” Jesus said.

  This time Grandma joined Philly in not knowing what to say, given the input from Jesus and Theresa’s isolation from it.

  Theresa ended the awkward moment by saying, “Well, I’ll see about that soup and some crackers, for starters, but first I’ll arrange to get the feeding tube out.”

  “Thanks,” said Philly.

 
; “Thank you,” said Grandma.

  “I love you, Theresa,” said Jesus.

  Chapter Eleven

  Philly held his cell phone away from his ear to diminish the blast from his father shouting on the other end.

  “Oh my,” said Grandma, with a laugh.

  Philly laughed at his dad and tried to resume the conversation. “Do you want to talk to her?” His question intersected with more shouts.

  “Talk to her?” Dad said, dropping his volume just a bit. “Of course I want to talk to her.”

  Just before he handed the phone to Grandma, Philly heard his ma say, “You don’t mean to tell me she’s really out of the coma?”

  “Yes, Marge. Listen for yourself,” Dad said.

  “Hello, Dale,” Grandma said to her only son.

  Philly heard his father’s voice, greeting and then breaking down into ecstatic tears and inarticulate blubbering. Philly looked at Jesus, raising his eyebrows at the sound of his dad coming loose from the brackets that had held his emotions in place for as long as Philly could remember.

  “Well, Dear, I’m so happy to hear you too. Though for me it just feels like a long sleep. I hardly remember the stroke at all,” Grandma said through the tumult.

  Ma’s voice crept out from the muffled background of the cell phone signal. “Can she speak? How can she speak? She had a stroke. How can she speak?”

  “She’s healed, Marge. She’s really healed!” Philly heard his dad though Grandma still held the phone to her ear. Her hearing had not been good the last few years, so the raucous voices didn’t bother her. She seemed to be enjoying the sound of her boy celebrating.

  Theresa returned with a tray and a doctor in tow. Philly took the phone back gently and said to Dad, “Okay, the doctor just arrived, so I’ll hang up for now. You guys could come over, of course.”

  Grandma beamed at the suggestion of a growing party, as well as the approaching food tray. She had not met the doctor yet, so he held no particular connection, as far as she was concerned.

  “Mrs. Thompson,” the doctor said “I couldn’t believe what the nurse was telling me, so I had to come and see for myself.”