The Last Lullaby on Maple Street

Margaret Chen sang to her husband David every night of his final three months. Not hymns — though she knew hundreds — but the same lullaby her mother had sung in their tiny apartment above the laundromat in San Francisco's Chinatown. David's pancreatic cancer had stolen forty pounds, his appetite, and eventually his voice. But when Margaret sang, his eyes would find hers, and for a moment the hospital bed in their living room on Maple Street disappeared.

The night David died, Margaret finished the lullaby, kissed his forehead, and whispered, "No more needles. No more nausea. No more trying to be brave."

Three words kept surfacing in the weeks that followed, words she underlined so many times in her Bible that the ink bled through to Revelation 22: "No more tears."

Not "fewer tears." Not "tears that build character." No more. Gone. The Greek word John uses is apaleipho — to wipe away completely, the way a mother wipes a child's face after a long cry. God Himself, the Almighty, kneeling close enough to touch skin.

Revelation 21 is not a poem about escape. It is a promise that the same God who watched every midnight lullaby on Maple Street is preparing a place where death and mourning and crying and pain belong to a former order of things — things finally, fully, and forever made new.