This is something I wrote a few months ago, remembering back to a critical time in my cancer journey:

Few of us ever have the experience of hanging between life and death. We don’t want to. We want to feel as if we will live forever and never have to see death. And yet, for some of us, there is a moment, an instance, where we hoover, not knowing if we will make it.

It had been a hard ten days since I had arrived at the Moffit Transplant Center in Tampa, two hours from our home. And, although they tried to make the hospital room as cozy as possible, there was no way to get away from the sterile setting, the smells of disinfectant, the hard hospital bed, or the continual beeping in the hallway.

At the beginning of the process, all this didn’t bother me. The adrenaline was flowing. I had been in the pre-transplant class, so I knew what to expect. But now, as I hovered between death and life, where I was, and the condition I was in became very real.

You see, I contracted pneumonia while in the most vulnerable stage of a transplant when the immune system is destroyed by the chemo, but the new cells have not begun to grow. And I knew enough about my cancer to know that you don’t die from cancer of the bones but from pneumonia or kidney failure.

Is this what it is like to die? raced through my mind during the moments when I was more conscious yet not enough to be able to speak. Should I be looking for a light, or maybe I’ll see Jesus coming down a staircase to take me to heaven? Do I see him? I searched through my mind, not able to open my eyes. Is he there?

And then, totally out of my control, I drifted back into nothingness.

Fading back into consciousness, I could tell the television was on in the room as my son was taking his turn being in the room with me. I thought I recognized the music as Twilight Zone, but I couldn’t be sure. There were parts of me that wanted to call out to him, to let him know what I was going through, to ask for him to get a nurse or someone who could help. But I could not.

My thoughts went back to Jesus, looking for that bright light on the inside of my eyelids I could not open. I wanted to fix something I couldn’t fix. I wanted to live but didn’t know if I would. Was there a prayer I could pray? Was there a verse I could remember?

And then, I drifted away again, totally beyond my control, going back and forth in consciousness.

And then it came to me, a moment of peace, a memory from 58 years earlier, a childish prayer:

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Never before did that little, simple prayer have such deep meaning. My desire, more than life itself, was for the Lord to keep me, and if I truly were to die, he would take my soul to be eternally with him.

A peace flowed in like a gentle wave over the shore, covering my frantic, searching thoughts. It was simple as I melted into that prayer. As I drifted in and out, anxiety melted away. I found a rest, a peace, like I had never known before.

I woke to the bustling nurse the next morning, asking me questions as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t answer them. I had no sense of how much time had passed or what day it was. James was gone; my husband had taken his place; Gunsmoke had taken the place of the Twilight Zone. The crisis had passed, and I was alive.

It was a slow return to health, and I never did get to remission, but God continued to give me grace and years. But as I look back, I never want to lose the impact of that moment, that experience, when my whole life and strength was dissolved down to a pinpoint in time and the truth of a childhood prayer. Nothing else mattered, nothing else gave peace, except the simplicity of a child’s prayer as she trusted her Savior:

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”