The Romance between Prayer & Death
Since before I could remember, my parents taught my brothers and I to pray every night before bed. In our prayers, we would thank God for the day, ask Him to protect us during our sleep, and to bless us with another day. I didn’t think much of it at the time and simply understood that God was a higher being, whom we had to speak to through prayer. My dad used to tell me that every time I prayed, God stopped His day to listen.
When my mom got sick and started to undergo various surgeries, I remember my dad telling my brothers and I that we had to pray for her recovery. At that point, I learned that all I had to do for my mom to get better was to pray. I prayed for her to get through every surgery. I prayed for every surgery to be the last. As the years went by, I prayed with more urgency. I remember the urgency slowly turning into anxiety and tension in my body because I thought that if I didn’t pray enough or didn’t ask for the right things, it would lead to God not being able to save her. Every time she made it out of a surgery, I felt a sense of relief. I could finally breathe again. My prayers worked.
As the years went by I firmly believed that if I continued to pray enough, everything would be okay. It was as though it was my responsibility both physically and spiritually to keep my mom alive. I felt like I was able to get God’s attention through my prayers and He listened. Ask and you shall receive. That’s what my dad always told me. If I wanted something, all I had to do was ask God and He would provide me with it.
Prayer worked for me until it finally didn’t. Something went wrong on April 6, 2011, when my mom suddenly passed away. The anxiety and the urgency that I had felt all those years when I prayed for her wellbeing, came flooding through my body and even as she laid on the floor of our apartment, I thought I could still pray her out of this situation. I implored with God “Please don’t take her. Please just give her one more chance. Please don’t do this.” But everything was already done, and she wasn’t coming back.
Prayer had worked all these years. What changed? Why did God take my mom if I asked Him not to? I was 20 years old at the time of my mother’s death, but I had believed for years that in life you would get what you asked for as long as you prayed enough, with good intentions. I wasn’t asking for anything silly or for material things. I just wanted my mom back and yet she was gone.
Hours after my mom passed, there was a conversation in the kitchen going on, where people were talking about God and how He only wanted the best for His children. I took this statement and my current experience and grew enraged with the same being that I had built so much trust in. How could my mom’s death be the best thing for us?
I physically and spiritually took a step back from God because I felt that He had stopped listening to me. I had prayed for so long. I had begged Him for one thing and yet here I was alive in a world, where my mom no longer was in.
It took me many years to understand that life wasn’t only happening to me. Life was happening to all of us. It was in my own silence, stillness, anger, and pain that I realized that God was not a genie in a bottle. I grew up believing that all we had to do was ask for what we wanted, and He would automatically grant it to us. Prayer doesn’t work that way. This experience helped me take a step back and reflect on what prayer was and the purpose behind it. I thought that all I had to do was pray and my mom would be okay. I broke-off the romance that I had created in my head between prayer and death. Because prayer doesn’t block death or anything else from happening. To me, prayer is simply a conversation with yourself, and God present.
