This is a story I heard today. I won’t get the details exactly right, but even so, this is a true story.

A young woman went to visit her friend, afflicted with cancer. When she entered the sickroom, she knew immediately that the end was pretty close.

–Would you like to go outside for a bit?

–Yes. I’d like that.

So the visitor wheeled her friend out to the garden where there would be sunlight and warmth and a little breeze.

There would be flowers.

There were two dragonflies flitting about the flowers. The visitor pointed them out, but her friend, Dawn, had seen them first.

She knew who they were. Her father and grandmother had come to be with her, she announced with confidence from her wheelchair.

I think that death confers on people who’ve lived good and unselfish and courageous lives—all of these describe the Dawn’s life, the young woman in the wheelchair— a wisdom near the end that we cannot understand. It gives them a clarity of vision that allows them to see what we cannot see.

It wasn’t long until death came. The visitor—a real friend, the friend of this person, now dying—Dawn had always drawn people to her the way flowers draw dragonflies—-came to visit on the last day. It would be presumptuous to call it the “final” day, because I believe that all of us will embrace each other again someday, and it will be a long time before we let go and step back, smiling, to regard each other in perfect wonder.

But when that day was over, when Dawn summoned the courage to give up her struggle, the visitor left the sickroom and walked into the sunlit garden.

Just above her shoulder, there was a dragonfly.

“Hello, sister,” the visitor whispered.

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This is Hozier, and he’s singing an old Irish song of farewell, “The Parting Glass.”