Читать книгу A Gift of Love - Tony Cointreau - Страница 6

In 2002, after twelve years of volunteering in Mother Teresa’s homes, I was sitting on the porch of my country home in Vermont, looking out on six magnificent mountain ranges, and listening to the many hours of tapes I had recorded every day after work. It was then that I knew that the best way I could now be of service was to share with others whatever I, as a layperson, had learned—not only through my years of service with Mother Teresa, but also through the way I had handled caregiving and the deaths of those I loved in my own family.

After Mother Teresa’s death, I would sit in front of the computer and silently ask her to help me to write about caring for loved ones. I could immediately feel her presence over my right shoulder, and it felt as if I entered another dimension for the next several hours. When I “awoke,” I was astonished to read what I had written. It was then that I knew how much help I had been given from a higher source.

Mother Teresa had responded to me from the first day we met, because I always treated her as a human being. Most people, even her own nuns, treated her as a living saint, but she was so humble that such adulation made her uncomfortable. She used to sit and talk with me for long periods of time, “about everything and nothing.”

Back in Calcutta, whenever Mother Teresa had asked me to sing for her on her little terrace, I never said “No.” And when I asked her to help me write, she also never said “No.” What a blessing—thank you, Mother!

In 1979, when I saw a magazine photograph of one of Mother Teresa’s volunteers carrying a dying man in his arms, I knew in an instant that I had to become a part of this work. It was certainly not a religious calling, but a simple calling to give something of myself to others. I felt that if I could comfort one dying person, my life would have had purpose.

It took me ten years to enter the world that I had only seen a glimpse of in that magazine article. When I did, it was during the worst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, in a hospice called “Gift of Love” in New York City, which had been opened by Mother Teresa in 1985. It had room for fifteen dying men, most of them from a world I had never known—a world of drugs, poverty, and crime, a far cry from the privileged life of châteaus in Europe that I had been brought up in, and later on, the world of show business in which I had been able to fulfill some of my greatest dreams.

In the years to come, these men, who were dying of AIDS and had never been given much of a chance in life, taught me not only about the many ways to help others die in an atmosphere of peace and love, but also how to enjoy the richness of living our lives fully until the very end.

It made no difference whether I was in Calcutta or New York, the lessons I learned were the same. Even the language was no barrier in India. We communicated in a language all its own—a language of unconditional love, and what we gave to each other was truly a gift of love.