An edifying account of the illness and death of the wife of H. K.

What this letter is. The letter Brief 78 was waiting for. There, Tersteegen could not travel because a friend was dying; here she has died, and he sits down the same week to tell her circle how. It is a death-report of the kind these communities passed hand to hand — an edifying account, as the old heading calls it — and it is entrusted to one man in Solingen with instructions to pass it on: tell the members, so that thanks may be given "through you too." What makes it unusual is how little of it is edifying in the smoothing sense. He reports the impatience as carefully as the peace.

The hour. She died on the Sunday evening a little after nine, and the sentence that says so keeps going into the thing he cannot quite get over: it happened "just as we were laying down her soul in prayer, out of our hands into the faithful hand of her Redeemer." Half an hour earlier she had still followed a prayer and confirmed it; the last one, he thinks, she barely heard. He had seen it coming — days before, he had gathered the members she knew best to offer her up to the Lord "in a common frame of prayer," and meant to do it again on the Monday, "had not the Lord — contrary to our expectation, though not contrary to her hope — hastened her dissolution." Her hope had been running ahead of their timetable.

The fault in patience. Then the part a tidier report would have left out. Underneath, her ground held: childlike trust to the end, the inward will given over to every suffering. But "on the natural side it fell hard and long upon her," and in the night before that Sunday she let fall "over-hasty expressions which did not taste of patience." She was more distressed by that than by the pain. She prayed it away at once, and told her daughter: You must pray to God for me, that He may forgive me this sin. When he came in the morning she stretched out both hands to him across the room, lamented the fault, and asked for a brother's help — and every time he loosened his hold on her hand she called out again, Brother, brother!, which happened often that day. His answer is the pastoral centre of the letter and it is four seconds long: yes, you call me brother, and I am one and remain one, even though you have committed a fault in patience — so then God also remains your Father. The old print puts her words in heavy type, and his answer with them.

What she said. He asked whether her head hurt. I do not think about it — nor about all the other pains and the oppression either; I am only afraid that I might become impatient, offend God, and be a stumbling block to the members. Dying in front of the people she had taught was the last thing she was carrying. Then, about five in the evening, on being asked: it had seemed to her at times as though she had someone with her, whom she embraced and kissed — who might that be? He said: who else should it be but Jesus? She said something more that he could not make out, and closed with four words: I, a dead block of wood. That is her last recorded sentence, and it is not despair; it is what these letters call the honest sight of oneself, spoken by a woman with hours to live who had just described being held.

The going. He went home at six, when her hands were already growing cold — he thought fever, not death. Before eight they called him back, "because she much wished that I should accompany her at her departure." He got there. She died gently, under prayer, with him and several friends in the room; and the last thing she had asked of him that day was that the news go out to the circle at once, so that the thanks could begin. Then the report turns into something like a eulogy, and it is made of one verse: she who was "so busy in serving poor suffering people, more than one would believe," and who "many a time harboured the dear Saviour as a guest in His members," will find her own refreshing little resting place — although out of grace, he adds, refusing the arithmetic even while he draws it. "The Lord certainly does not forget the work of faith and the labour of love, even though His blessed ones forget it." In the parable they are the ones who ask when did we see thee hungry?

The close. Out of time, he stops — and cannot stop, and gives away in three sentences what he thinks the whole thing was for: let us make over to Him our whole self, so that the immeasurable eternal Good may fill our whole self, and adorn it, and make it blessed. "Ah, how beautiful and contenting it is to be alone with Him, outside place and time! Thither He kindly calls us in, and there we have it all in One." Then Selah, the psalm-word for a rest in the music. And then, after a dash, the plainest postscript in the part: he is ailing again, he barely slept, and every day brings its own work with it besides. "Ah, if only we content our Friend, what does it matter about us?" The last words of the letter are the ones the print emphasises: Pray for me!

A few words and echoes.

• the wretched prison of her body. And at the end of the same account, "the dungeon of the body" — two words for one thought, and both of them hers as much as his: what she was let out of.
• her ground. The Grund — the innermost ground of the soul, where these letters locate the real person. It "was preserved to the end," whatever the surface was doing.
• a common frame of prayer. Gebets-Fassung — not a service but a shared inward posture, a company composing itself to pray for one woman.
• the members best known to her. The circle called each other Kinder, children; the word here means brothers and sisters of the congregation, and it is the same word she uses when she fears being "a stumbling block to the members."
• did not taste of patience. His verdict on her outburst keeps her metaphor of taste — an odd, gentle way to record a lapse.
• prayed it away. Abbeten — to undo a thing by prayer, get it lifted. She did it "at once."
• brotherly help. Handreichung, literally a reaching-out of the hand: she stretches out both hands, asks for a hand, and he takes hers — the word and the gesture are the same thing here.
• oppression. Benautheit — the tightness and constriction of the dying chest, named plainly and then set aside.
• I, a dead block of wood. Ich todter Klotz — the self-accusation of a soul that feels unmoved, spoken minutes after describing an embrace she could not name.
• at her departure. Hingang, the going-hence; he uses the same word twice, for the dying and for the news of it.
• the eternal dwellings. The everlasting habitations of the parable — the place the poor she refreshed will receive her into.
• out of grace. Placed exactly where the reader expects the reward to be reckoned, and cancelling the reckoning without cancelling the praise.
• our whole self. Unser Ganzes — the totality: what we cede, and what gets filled. The same phrase twice in one sentence, deliberately.
• contenting. An old sense of vergnügt — not cheerful but satisfying, wanting nothing else.
• Selah. The Hebrew rest-mark from the Psalms, used as a full stop for something too full to continue.
• our Friend. Unser Freund — and contentiren, to satisfy him: if that is done, "what does it matter about us?"
• obliged weak brother. The subscription, and after this letter not a formula: he really is ill, and says so in the line above it.