My mother received the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick last Sunday. I was away when she was anointed but her carers were there and they noticed that she tried, with a faltering hand, to make the Sign of the Cross … less successfully than Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, on his deathbed, and less symbolically, given that she’s never parted company with the Church.
The priest returned a day later to give her Communion. She couldn’t speak; indeed she couldn’t really focus her eyes properly, but at the end she raised her head a little to say goodbye to him and he gave her the thumbs up. She couldn’t take more than a fraction of the Host, suspended on thickened water, because of her difficulty swallowing. He lit a candle (“so she can focus”) and said the Lord’s Prayer and the Agnus Dei. It was all kindly and unthreatening.
