Soon after M. had left, during an interval of comparative ease, she fixed her eyes upon me with a most tender, loving expression, and in a sort of beseeching tone, said, “Darling, don’t you think you could ask the Lord to let me go?” Perceiving, no doubt, how the question affected me, she went on to give some reasons for wishing to go.  She spoke very slowly, in the most natural, simple way, and yet with an indescribable earnestness of look and voice, as if aware that she was uttering her dying words.  I can not recall all that she said, but its substance, and some of the exact expressions, are indelibly impressed upon my memory.  For my and the children’s sake she had been willing and even desired to live; and for several years had made extraordinary efforts to keep up, although much of the time the burden of ill-health, as I well knew, had been well-nigh insupportable.  So far as this world was concerned, few persons in it had such reasons for wishing to live, or so much to render life attractive.  But the feeling in her heart had become overpowering that no earthly happiness, no interest, no distraction, could any longer satisfy her, or give her content, away from Christ; and she longed to be with Him, where He is.  During the past three months especially, she had passed through very unusual exercises of mind with reference to this subject; and it seemed to her as if she had now reached a point beyond which she could not go.  She evidently had in view the dreadful sleeplessness, to which she had been so in bondage for a quarter of a century, whose grasp had become more and more relentless, and the effects of which upon her nervous system were such as words can hardly describe.  No human being but myself had any conception of her suffering, both physical and mental, from this cause.

To return to her conversation....  In answer to a question which I put to her later, about her view of heaven and of the relation of the saints in glory to their old friends there and here, she replied, in substance, that to her view heaven is being with Christ and to be with Christ is heaven.  By this she did not mean, I am sure, to imply any doubt respecting the immortality of Christian love and friendship, or that our individual human affections will survive the grave.  Often had she delighted herself in the thought of meeting her sainted father and mother in heaven, of meeting there Eddy and Bessie and other dear ones who had gone before; and certain I am, too, she believed that those who are gone before retain their peculiar interest in those who are toiling after, only her mind was so absorbed in the thought of the presence and beatific vision of Christ in His glory that, for the moment, it was lost to everything else.

She then said that, in the event of her death, she would like to be buried in Dorset, where we could easily visit her grave.  “But I do not expect to go now,” she added.  This meant, as I interpret it, that she regarded so speedy a departure to be with Christ as something too good to be true.  Repeatedly, when very ill, she had thought herself on the verge of heaven and had been called back to earth, and she feared it would be so now.