Her song eased the final trip

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Lyllian doesn't know what day it is or how old she is or if her daughter has been in to visit, even if her daughter has just left the room. She is in her 90s and lives in a world where time isn't linear and memories aren't sequential, but are like tracks on a CD programmed for random selection.

"Mama had seven of us," she said a few weeks ago. "There were the twins, Olive and Marina and then the four boys and then me. I was the baby of the family. I wasn't spoiled though. Mama wouldn't let them spoil me. 'You can't get everything you want just because you want it,' she'd say when I'd ask for a doll. How I loved dolls. I had so many. One day Papa said, 'Do you want to go to Boston with me?' and I said, 'Yes, Papa. I'd love to go.' 'Don't you go asking your Papa to buy you a doll,' Mama said. And I didn't ask. But in the window was this beautiful doll and Papa said, 'Do you like it?' And I said, 'Oh, yes, Papa. I love it,' and he said, 'Do you want it?' And I said, 'Oh, yes, Papa,' because I did want if very much. And Papa bought it for me."

"We had a happy home," she began another time. "There were seven of us, four boys and three girls. The twins, Olive and Marina were the oldest and I was the youngest. Marina died when she was 19. 'She went to Heaven.' That's what Mama said. Mama sang soprano and Papa sang baritone and they harmonized beautifully. I loved my family."

The bad times are not the times when Lyllian remembers. The bad times are the times when she gets stuck in the empty space that separates the different tracks of her life. In the silence of this emptiness she comes unhinged.

"Where am I? Why am I here? This isn't my home," she'll sob.

But an arm around her shoulder, a hug, a walk to the wall where pictures of her family hang, a nudge, and she's on track again.

Though what track is hard to tell.

One day last week as I sat holding the hand of her roommate, Ann, Lyllian walked over and asked me, not for the first time, "Are you related to her?"

"No, Lyllian. I'm just a friend," I said.

But this time instead of nodding and walking away, she let go of her walker and leaned down and placed her hands on my shoulders and whispered: "I know how important friends are. I know how much you can love a friend."

Then she returned to her chair on her side of the room.

She began to sing then. "Won't you come over to my house? Won't you come over to play? I've lots of play toys, a dolly or two and I live in the house cross the way."

The old song, the old voice, all trembly and small, the squeak of a rocking chair at the end of a day, the plaintive tune at the end of a life - one of these things, all these things combined to make the moment more than it was.

Lyllian sang this song every day for the long, long week that Ann lay dying. I asked her to sing because before when she'd asked, "What can I do?" I'd answered, "Nothing." But there was something Lyllian could do. "Sing, Lyllian, please." And there was joy in her singing and something holy.

So Lyllian sang and sometimes she knew all the words and sometimes she had trouble remembering even the song. "Is that it? Is that the song you want?"

"That's the one, Lyllian."

"Perhaps you don't know that not long ago these same toys that I'm giving to you belonged to my girl, yes, my own little girl with eyes just as blue as yours. But one day I found that the angels came down and took her way up to the sky. So don't stay away, but come over each day and don't make your new mama cry."

I don't know if Ann heard Lyllian singing but I like to think she did. I want to believe that Lyllian helped Ann on her long journey out of this life, because I know that in ways I don't understand, that she helped me.