Sheila’s Last Painting

It was October 9, 1999.

It was Saturday.

It was to be a portentous day, I knew. . .

I was driving from Tioga that morning, my thoughts miles ahead of the car as the wind seemed to blow us to my childhood home where my sister, Sheila, was lying in my old room, bedridden with cancer.

The sky seemed so different that morning -high clouds – cumulus; though odd, they were high up - voluminous.

Sheila was now comatose, her body position unchanged from the night. Her moans of pain were now silenced since the morphine patch placed on her shoulder the night before.

We were taking turns sitting by her bed, my mother, my father, my six-year-old daughter, and I. It was a death watch.

In between watching her breathing, we would go outside for deep breaths of air and watch the sky turn unusual colors which seemed odd for so early in the afternoon. We all noticed it.

It wasn't quite 3:00. As some of us were sitting in the kitchen, trying to quiet our dread by drinking weak tasting coffee. I remember thinking, "Just let go, Sheila."

As if Sheila read my thoughts as she often did, my mom came out and summoned us to the bedroom. "I think she's breathing her last."

Dad took a chair by Sheila’s head and I sat at her feet with Mom at her side. It seemed the right time to ask Sheila to go to the light.

She left us; she took her last quiet, brave breath, eyes wide open to the end. I asked Dad to close her eyes and he gently did as he released a long-held sob.

We reverently left the room, honored at being a part in the last chapter of her long, long struggle.

Outside bright purples, hot pinks and iridescent magenta colors filled the sky in grand fashion unlike anything I had ever seen before. And then the double rainbow appeared.

Sheila had passed, I knew, all the way over the rainbow bridge.

Sharon Kreiger