The death of one of the main characters in Suddenly Free, Rise of Evil. The episode is both deeply spiritual and extremely romantic.
As Arlene lay dying, Ives sat beside her bed. He was lost in regrets surrounding her impending death, when he realized that the room was growing brighter. He looked up and he saw angels around Arlene’s bed, comforting her, speaking words of peace and welcome to her. He stood and looked at them. The angel at the foot of her bed looked at Ives, but did not speak to him. He looked at Arlene. She was smiling at the angel.
“Arlene,” he said, “What’s going on? Are these angels? Are they here for you? “What’s happening?”
She smiled a beautiful smile. Or was her smile beautiful because she was on the cusp of her most important journey? “It is nothing you need to know, Ives, not right now.” She turned again to her angel.
Ives didn’t know what to say, so he just stood staring at Arlene with a kind of awe. In the midst of this peace, a cool wind blew through the room, and a dark figure attempted to push the angels aside to get to Arlene’s bedside. He was ill-formed and small. Even though he stood on the opposite side of the bed from Ives, Ives could not make out the dark thing’s physical attributes.
It croaked at Arlene very loudly, continuing to jostle and push at the angels gathered there. Oddly, none of the angels actually moved. It was as if all the jostling and loud ranting were just theater: all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Arlene paid no attention at first.
Her eyes were fixed on the angel at the foot of her bed, smiling that sweet, welcoming smile. When Arlene focused on the thing, she turned her head away. The thing withdrew silently. When it was gone, Arlene closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and said her last words on Earth, “Ives…Ives…Ives!” She exhaled and did not take another breath.
Alarms went off. No nurses came. Ives was numb with grief and could not move. The alarms were aggravating him, but he could not open his mouth to tell the computer to silence the alarms. He was paralyzed and he wondered why, until he realized that he was dreaming.
George was standing at the window looking out, rehearsing the recent events. This mental cataloguing helped him remove himself from his feelings. He couldn’t stop the emotions, but he could create distance. Every time he looked at Arlene, he felt the pain of impending loss, and Ives’ shared grief.
He did not want to approach her bedside. He wanted to give Ives his last moments with Arlene alone. But something caught his attention. He turned toward the bed and saw….he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. There seemed to be a bright aura around her bed, enveloping her and Ives. He was asleep in a chair near her head.
George was a realist and a rational man. He looked at the window and the door and the ceiling to see if the aura was being projected from somewhere. He couldn’t detect a transmission. He cautiously approached the bed. As he did, a feeling of peace crept into his consciousness. He stopped. The feeling of peace was welcome, but unexpected. It did not fit into the circumstances.
Despite the alarms in his brain, George followed the peace.
In the presence of the discordant emotions of loss, grief, and recent death, he let himself follow the most positive of the milieu. Always analyzing, George concluded that the peace he felt was emanating from the aura around Arlene’s bed. It was not an emotional feeling; the peace was a state that he was entering as he neared the hospital bed.
The death bed. In his experience, a place where a person was dying was not a place of peace. But it was today. It was so incongruent and so outside his experience, he was determined to not just experience it, but to enter it with enthusiasm, to learn from it. To enter into it and come out on the other side a smarter, better man.
He hesitated momentarily to ask himself “Why?” Why is that something he wants right now, to be better? But the peace won out. He neared the bed.
With every step, the ephemera that was the bedside aura solidified into a tableau that he would never forget. Arlene lay propped up on her pillow. The physician in him acknowledged that she should be lying flat to facilitate respirations; the awed human George understood her need to see the giant angel with massive wings standing at the foot of her bed.
He was not afraid. There were other angels nearby doing things he did not understand. The giant angel was beautiful beyond comprehension. It had perfect upper body musculature and washboard abs, but was clearly neither male nor female, as a human would classify it. He wanted to be close to it. He could not be. He wanted to touch it. He could not do that either.
He stood an arm’s length away from the bed and the angels and looked at Arlene. She had eyes only for the beautiful angel and he only had eyes for her. Their smiles were beatific. The moment was shattered by the loudest screeching noise he had ever heard. Neither Arlene nor any of the angels took note, even though George had to put his hands to his ears.
It didn’t mute the sound at all. George realized that the sound was coming from his spirit man. He was not hearing with flesh ears, but with spiritual ears. A cold thing touched him, so cold he shivered. Simultaneously, he saw a black blur pass him and coalesce at Arlene’s bedside, between her and the giant angel. Time seemed to have no meaning.
The ugly dark thing pushed at the angels and made noises to get Arlene’s attention. The angels did not give way, nor even acknowledge the thing’s presence. George saw Arlene turn her head away. She saw Ives, but turned back to the beautiful angel. The ugly darkness fled.
“Arlene?” George looked at the giant angel as he pressed past him to Arlene’s beside. The angel looked at him and let him pass. “What’s going on? Are these angels real? Are they here for you?”
“There is nothing you need to know, George, not right now.” Arlene closed her eyes. She took what George knew to be her last breath and said her last words, “Ives, Ives, Ives!”
The alarms went off. George told the computer to silence the alarms. When he looked up at the panel, he noticed that Ives was still sleeping. “Ives.” He still slept. George spoke louder, “Ives.” As he walked around the bed to shake his friend, he brushed by the giant angel and was almost stopped in his tracks by the wonderfulness of the presence he felt. He shook Ives awake.
“Computer turn off the alarms.” Ives spoke as he awoke. He looked at George briefly, and turned to Arlene. He knew she was gone. He took her hand and kissed it sweetly, gently. He touched her face. He sat on the side of her bed and pulled her into a final, warm embrace. He wept.
George was both drawn to, and embarrassed by the scene. He wanted to comfort his friend, but he also wanted to leave him alone with his goodbyes. He remembered the angels were also there, so he looked up to see what they were doing. All of the smaller angels were disappearing, some were cavorting, and others swiftly flying straight up and out of the ceiling of the room. Finally, the giant angel was the only one left.
He began to slowly move his great wings, so that a wind of pure peace swept the entire room. He looked at George and graced him with his beautiful smile and said, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”
He rose slowly over Arlene’s bed. As he passed through the ceiling, the feeling of peace receded, but did not disappear, as the angel went out of sight. The loss of the intense peace and the death of Arlene made George begin to sob. No one was more surprised than George that his tears were not tears of sadness. They were tears of triumph and of joy.
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