I sat up on that thin mattress in a nursing home. My earthly possessions were gone. The house I loved so much and worked so hard to buy, built in 1918, was no longer mine. I had taken a second job just to move out of the dilapidated trailer my husband had brought me to. I felt surrounded by poverty and hopelessness while he showed no ambition to leave. My dream house had disappeared. My two pups, always by my side, were gone.

All that remained was me in skeletal form, sitting on that thin mattress in a faraway nursing home. My children, my pride and joy, and my grandchildren, my tiny treasures, were nowhere in sight. My life circled around me like a cloud. I was 90 years old.

I wondered why I had never received true love from a man. Why my husband had been so unfaithful and had squeezed the joy out of so much of my life. Yet I remembered my giving nature toward those less fortunate, a lesson my daddy taught me when I was young. Daddy was a good man. He brought us love, kindness, and happiness. We lived comfortably as he climbed the executive ladder, though his functional alcoholism slowly became unmanageable.

The mother I never really had was distant and negligent. My husband left this earth early. Liver, pancreas, lung, and lymph node cancer spread violently through his body. I cared for him until the end, though part of me was grateful when that long journey of burden and sadness was finally over. My regrets lingered. I was never strong enough to leave him.

I thought of my long nursing years, working as many as sixty hours a week to provide for our three children. My ICU years surrounded by a work family I loved. Retirement filled with travel and many lunches with old friends. The precious times with my grandchildren.

And I knew my time had come. My life had been lived.

I still questioned spiritually. Was there really a God? And if so, why? Why so much suffering on this earth? Why cancer and the atrocities of war and death? Why so much anger and hatred between people? My triumphs and tragedies swirled around me.

I sat on that thin mattress, my breaths shallow. Around me were the sounds of old people moaning, yelling, and crying. The stale smell that seems to live inside nursing homes. I released my final breaths, suddenly feeling a lightness, a sense of clouds and eternal love I never believed I deserved.

A hand reached out and held my wrinkled one. A nurse with a gentle voice told me it was okay to let go. My pups, now spirited angels, greeted me with happiness and love.

My last breath escaped and I had reached thy kingdom come.

A long life, yet such a small, encapsulated one, gone like vapor. Gone in seconds.

Make it count.

The dream.

Debbie Moore-Black is a nurse who blogs at The Critical Care Nurse.