Mark Mossa, SJ, has a moving remembrance of a fellow Jesuit, whose own thoughts on his own dying are in the most recent issue of America, (not available online) – but Mark provides generous quotes.

Talking is more and more difficult, and this is confirmed by others’ having more and more difficulty understanding my guttural attempts at speech. God never closes one door without opening another, they say. So all this has been felt as numbness, not pain, though doctors warn that pain may come. Who would have thought that dying felt like midmorning and midday exhaustion? Well, perhaps one who has had more experience than I. But in any case, just to be left alone to sleep seems a great blessing. The doctor recommends that I speak with the oncologist. But even to speak with him requires paperwork that I can do only with difficulty—hence, I rely on the kindness of a Jesuit superior who will do it for me.

Such is the quality, or non-quality, of life these days that I am like the nun in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” crying out: “O Christ, Christ come quickly.”