In sending these selections of Scripture with their brief reflections, I was informed by the practice in many religions of reading sacred texts to a person on their deathbed as a guide through the process of dying. What mattered most to me was to offer something genuinely needed and desired. I knew that my sister built her life on Scripture and had asked me to read Scripture to her, and I knew that she had asked me about my own near-death experience. There I had the two requests that she had made of me. I simply trusted that the verses that came to me each morning were the right ones to send that day, and I trusted that, as I stilled myself in the presence of those verses and thought of what had helped me, the words I wrote would be the right words.

__ Michael Wyatt

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The Rev. Dr. Michael Wyatt, Episcopal priest, was Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral. He died of liver cancer at the age of 57.