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27. What reply I made unto her to these things I do not well
remember. However, scarcely five days after, or not much more, she
was prostrated by fever; and while she was sick, she one day sank into
a swoon, and was 'for a short time unconscious of visible things. We
hurried up to her; but she soon regained her senses, and gazing on me
and my brother as we stood by her, she said to us inquiringly,
"Where was I?" Then looking intently at us stupefied with grief,
"Here," saith she, "shall you bury your mother." I was silent,
and refrained from weeping; but my brother said something, wishing
her, as the happier lot, to die in her own country and not abroad.
She, when she heard this, with anxious countenance arrested him with
her eye, as savouring of such things, and then gazing at me,
"Behold," saith she, "what he saith;" and soon after to us both
she saith, "Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble
you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the
Lord's altar, wherever you be." And when she had given forth this
opinion in such words as she could, she was silent, being in pain with
her increasing sickness.
28. But, as I reflected on Thy gifts, O thou invisible God,
which Thou instillest into the hearts of Thy faithful ones, whence
such marvellous fruits do spring, I did rejoice and give thanks unto
Thee, calling to mind what I knew before, how she had ever burned
with anxiety respecting her burial-place, which she had provided and
prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For as they had lived
very peacefully together, her desire had also been (so little is the
human mind capable of grasping things divine) that this should be added
to that happiness, and be talked of among men, that after her
wandering beyond the sea, it had been granted her that they both, so
united on earth, should lie in the same grave. But when this
uselessness had, through the bounty of Thy goodness, begun to be no
longer in her heart, I knew not, and I was full of joy admiring what
she had thus disclosed to me; though indeed in that our conversation in
the window also, when she said, "What do I here any longer?" she
appeared not to desire to die in her own country. I heard afterwards,
too, that at the time we were at Ostia, with a maternal confidence
she one day, when I was absent, was speaking with certain of my
friends on the contemning of this life, and the blessing of death; and
when they amazed at the courage which Thou hadst given to her, a
woman asked her whether she did not dread leaving her body at such a
distance from her own city, she replied, "Nothing is far to God;
nor need I fear lest He should be ignorant at the end of the world of
the place whence He is to raise me up." On the ninth day, then, of
her sickness, the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the thirty-third
of mine, was that religious and devout soul set free from the body.
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