By Chelsea Ohlemiller 
It wasn’t the hospital. It was a room in my sister’s house. A room where you would spend your final days. It was a small room in the corner of the house. A place that would eventually hold your last breath and the shattered pieces of our hearts.
The room in the corner, the last place I would hold your hand, cuddle with you, and feel the warmth of your touch. It was the place that would hold our last moments, our last minutes, and our last goodbyes. It was a place that smelled like medicine and emptiness.
It was the place you died.
The room in the corner, a place with shower curtain drapes to shield the pain and harsh reality of death from your grandchildren. It was a room filled with a hospital bed and endless tears. It was the place we would say goodbye. The last place and room you’d ever see.
The room in the corner, the place we would hold your hand, administer medication, and ultimately, watch you leave on a stretcher, lifeless. It was the place people would enter to tell you how much you were loved and how deeply you’d be missed. It was the room that held our biggest heartbreak, our bottomless emptiness, and also the person who meant the most to us in this world, you.
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The room in the corner, a room that before held dinner tables and chairs for entertaining that now held your final days and the typical possessions of a hospital room. It was a room that would be forever changed, forever different, and forever filled with memories painfully ingrained in our hearts and minds.
The room in the corner, the place that would end your journey of dying. The place that held death. It’s a place you would leave in two drastic ways: one headed to your body’s final resting place, and the other where you would soar beautifully to embark on your soul’s new and final adventure.
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For two years, I pictured that room as the place where you died, the place where a piece of all of us died. A place that was dark and morbid and earth-shattering. Today, I woke up with a new vision in my heart.
You see, that room in the corner is the place you left to enter heaven.
A place you left free of pain and disease with a soul more beautiful than the life and love you blessed all of us with.
Realizing the miracle that occurred that day in that room, changes the way I see the “room in the corner”. You didn’t leave us that day in that room. You simply took a different seat at the table, one from above.
A new place, a new perspective, a new you. That room took your last breath, but it formed the perfect and beautiful soul that would grace heaven.
You left that room and entered eternity, and I had the blessing and heartbreak of watching it all.
Originally published on the author’s blog
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